toy piano and fixed electronics
Composer: Timothy Roy
“Wunderkind” is a well-known German term historically applied to a person who possesses an extraordinary talent or brilliance (particularly musical) at an early age. The creative impetus for this work was the desire to explore the intellectual workings of a developing child prodigy, the electronic component used to expand the palette of such a restricted instrument while representing the mind’s ear of the child. The opening cadenza begins clumsily as the “child” seemingly explores the instrument for the first time. Musical ideas begin to mature, congeal, and find meaning. The fixed media playback begins after two minutes of solo, and a complex and harmonically-saturated sound world emerges from and interacts with performed gestures, meant to be perceived as imagined musical structures, astonishingly advanced for a mere child. All of the sounds in the fixed media were created by recording and processing my own toy piano.
Wunderkind was awarded First Prize in the 2013 Prix Destellos competition, mixed media category.