This work, dating back to 2009, is even older than Shale Sea that I posted earlier. It still has its own place in my heart, though—not because I think it’s better than my other works, far from it, but because it was the first time I successfully wrote a piece intended for concert performance without any live performers. This might seem like a trivial matter to many of you, but up to that point I had been a purely instrumental composer, and my work always involved performers.

The piece was inspired by a comment about my friend’s work. Back then, we were in our summer music camp–hopping phase. It must have been either June in Buffalo or Music98 where this happened. One of the guest composers commented that my friend’s work didn’t have a natural flow to it, making it “artistically awkward.” “You have to be able to dance with your music,” metaphorically speaking, of course.

Being as nice as he was, my friend didn’t argue with the composer, but he certainly let loose once we were out of the workshop. “Dancing? Oh, I can dance! But I don’t dance like her. My dance is like this!” He then proceeded to demonstrate. And it did look awkward—jerky, angular, with no rhythm to it at all. After a while, though, it looked strangely energetic, charming in its choppy syncopation. We all duly commiserated with him, as we would with a fallen comrade, and I filed away this dance scene, never suspecting that I’d come back to it more than a decade later.

Once I knew the piece would be about dancing, it was actually a relief because, even without live musicians, I could still have a dancer! I recorded myself playing a classical guitar. The title of the piece was then easy enough. I know it was considered a sin at one time to love disco, but I do like ABBA’s music—their lush sound is always optimistic.

Here’s where Prinda got involved. By then, the dance I had in mind had exceeded anything humanly possible. So she created a character who could dance as no one girl had before. I asked for a kid’s drawing. Adults often say they can draw like kids, but that’s not true. You can usually tell which is an actual child’s drawing and which is an adult’s imitation. Not with Prinda’s. I think you’ll agree that she captured the spirit of children’s drawings perfectly here.

My big mistake was using the now-obsolete language of Flash’s ActionScript. Who knew back then that Flash would eventually be discontinued? If it were still viable today, I would embed the .swf file and let you enjoy the variations each time you played it, instead of giving you just this static video capture of one Flash rendition. Oh well. . . .

But the essence of the composition—the challenging interplay between sounds and silences (sometimes very long silences)—is what I learned most from working on this piece. It taught me to be patient with silence, that waiting and expectation could, in many ways, be more important than the sound itself. And I spent a long time polishing the drama of those two elements competing against each other.

A cautionary tale for those who love to tinker unnecessarily with things: for no obvious reason, I added a small instruction at the beginning of Dancing Queen. This little script decided whether to trigger the first sound immediately or wait for a while. The waiting period was weighted so that the music was very likely to begin immediately and very unlikely to wait, say, 30 seconds. Now, why did I do that? It didn’t add anything at all to the piece except to make it more error-prone! In one performance, after pressing “q” to start the piece (hey, it’s called Dancing Queen, after all), we waited for five seconds—nothing. Five more—still nothing. We waited for a minute before I silently walked to the computer, shut it down, restarted it, opened the program, and then pressed the damn “q” key again. . . .