Premiere of new work Piano and work (dominos), with pianist Heloisa Amaral

For Only Connect, Rosenfeld collaborated with pianist Heloisa Amaral on the realization of a new work written specifically for Skippergata 22, Oslo’s "House of Innovation,” which she learned was a “co-working” site dedicated to entrepreneurs, investors and startups. 

The work follows a series of recent works where an acoustic instrument appears as an element within a dense acoustical environment—in this case, comprised of archival recordings from the composers’ prolific history producing acetate test-pressing records, or dub plates, since the late 1990s, originally as an element for live turntablism and more recently, for broader use as compositional material. Like the work GREATEST HITS: A Reproduction (2016), Piano and work (dominos) (2018) reanimates selections from Rosenfeld’s 20-year archive of delicately degraded and destroyed LP recordings, requiring the pianist to excavate and reproduce instances of scalar motion, fragments of melody, recurring textures of noise, and some of the dense network of blurred resonances and sonic trails caused by the loss of signal to noise in the archival recordings. The pianist is also tasked with inserting a fragmentary account of several keyboard pieces by Francois Couperin (this is the ‘dominos’ reference in the title) into the mix; these fragments represent a kind of coded commentary on workplace politics, although the workplace in question in Couperin’s case was the court of Louis the XIV at Versaille. Like its baroque model, the resulting music mediates between explicit and implicit registers, highlighting unexpected correlations between the “work” of the instrument, the “work” of the recording, and the “work" of the performer.