Iyer, Vijay: Torque

At the piano, I listen for how the contortions of the hand can suggest the surges of a body in motion. In my trio music, I’m often evolving rhythmic shapes, shaping gestural patterns with an embodied resonance, and striving to evoke specific qualities of movement with our performed rhythms. Someone once compared us to the Flying Karamazov Brothers, with their coordinated, cyclical,antiphonal actions. I see the work of the rhythm section as a ritual of collective synchrony, aiming above all to generate a dance impulse for everybody in the room. Torque, a twisting force on a body, seems to appear for the listener at music’s formal boundaries, when one movement type gives way to another. This piece, written for S? Percussion, invites the percussion quartet to perform transformations that twist the music’s temporal flow, bringing the micro-relational art of the rhythm section into this ensemble format.– Vijay Iyer