fitful machinery ii

Written as a response to Gyorgy Ligeti's piano etudes, I was interested in the way that Ligeti populates his work with musical machines, a sort of perpetual motion that jerks forward and backward, and plays with our expectations that machinery should be sleek and uncompromising, creating instead something that is unpredictable and ever-prone to error. fitful machinery ii was commissioned by pianist Han Chen on the centennial of Ligeti's birth.