Tricia Dawn Williams is presenting the second concert in her ToyPiano+ series at the Malta Society of Arts in Valletta on January 25 at 7pm.
The Illusionist’s Magic Box will see the premiere of three new works that have been commissioned to combine the classical sound of the piano with the vintage tones of the toy piano.
Furthermore, Williams commissioned three video artists to create a visual narrative to accompany the live performance of the music, creating an interdisciplinary dialogue between music and visual arts.
The concert takes its name from the title of the first piece on the programme, The Illusionist’s Magic Box, by British composer Paul Max Edlin. As the composer explains, the sound of the toy piano “evokes childhood, magic, illusion and sheer fantasy. It arouses thoughts of an unreal or lost world”.
Besides the sound of the piano and the toy piano, Edlin also creates an electronic soundscape that acts as a cohesive bond between the two keyboards.
The video accompanying the live performance of this composition will portray a sand art animation by Italian artist Gabriella Compagnone. Sand art conjures a sense of illusion and magic on a ‘lightbox’ that is most fitting for the ‘box of tricks’ described by the composer.
The second commission premiered by Williams is Four Toy Toccatas by American composer Scott McAllister. Like many toccatas, this work is meant to show off the various skills of the performer.
McAllister explains how “one of the goals for this composition was to combine the two instruments (piano and toy piano) to make it sound like one extended keyboard instrument”.
The piece will be accompanied by a monochromatic video by Jim Aitchison, who is a visual artist as well as a composer. Aitchison’s video for this project is based on an abstract sculpture of a piano that his daughter made when she was a child and footage of a musical box mechanism that his daughter brought back as a gift from Paris.
The final premiere and commission on the programme is A Story Left Untold by Ruben Zahra, who has composed the music and created the video for this project.
A Story Left Untold is Zahra’s first experimentation with AI. The music was created by processing original music excerpts through AI platforms and allowing the algorithm to “extend” the music. The video animation was also generated using a variety of AI tools, mainly applying text to image and image to video algorithms.
Besides the three commissions by Edlin, McAllister and Zahra, the concert will also include music by Regis Campo, John Psathas, Olivia Kieffer, Stephen Montague and Atau Tanaka.
The event is supported by Arts Council Malta. Tickets can be obtained from www.triciadawnwilliams.com/concerts.