Toe by Toe

Programme note

Toe by Toe sets a prose text written by the composer in 2020, whose strict narrative is carried by the vividness and compression of its images. A bare-footed consciousness inches along a tightrope laid across snow, moving past branchless trees and thin, dry air towards a factory where snowflakes—and thoughts—are manufactured. The scene is tactile before it is explanatory: cold skin, suspended balance, white glare and cosmic distance make the journey feel bodily yet disembodied.

The prose obeys a Symbolist physics in which one image can change substance without losing its identity. Snow becomes thought; thought becomes a vehicle; the rope becomes path, neural filament and threat. The factory, empty of workers yet filled with translucent machinery, produces objects labelled ‘sui generis’: uniqueness manufactured in series. It is simultaneously an industrial apparatus, an interior of the mind and a theatre of self-recognition. When the traveller arrives at the imagined source, the source appears already to be waiting.

The choral writing makes this unstable interior audible. Conceived in response to hearing The Marian Consort in an empty church, its chordal crescendos, overlapping lines and quiet pulses draw upon the ensemble’s sensitivity at extreme dynamics and registers. Text passes between solitary and collective bodies: syllables of ‘I inch closer’ are assembled across the choir, while portamenti, breathy attacks, speech, loud whispers, echoes, free repetition and fully pitched resonance continually exchange roles. In unconducted tempo fluido passages, a narrator determines the temporal field and the singers gather around that voice, so narrative agency can migrate or dissolve into the group.

As the factory opens, the score thickens into sensory overload. Echoes of ‘purpose’ are interrupted by spoken narrative; random fragments drift like debris; ‘snow’ and ‘flake’ acquire pitch inside a reverberant auditory blizzard. Streaks of string then return ‘connected to every neuron’, and independent dynamic pulsations make the choir expand and contract like one unstable nervous system. Walls crack, machinery becomes bubbles in a room without mirrors, and excess imagery empties itself into the paradoxical phrase ‘aleatoric aphantasia’. After an explosion of erasure, the opening motion returns from the ‘void-residing side’. ‘I inch closer’ repeats until language is compressed into raw vowel and force; the final solo ‘Not quite’ withholds arrival, leaving the body forever poised between the rope, the fall and the oncoming night.