Overview

Four grand pianos, their lids removed, are placed nose to nose, like the leaves of a flower, under sharp spotlights in the concourse of a railway station. Each of the four musicians plays from a double-width score that is half as wide as the piano itself. Every now and again, one of the players signals the transition to a new section by nodding his head backward. Every hour or so, a new team of pianists takes over, in a kind of relay: The old shift keeps playing but in sequence, one stands up, and a pianist from the new shift takes her place. This happens four times until the new team is in place. Canto Ostinato, as the piece is called, has no prescribed end; it can go on for hours. Simeon ten Holt, its composer, describes it as a perpetual work in progress. My own life has been largely determined by chance, he says, and as composer, I decline to indicate intensity, phrasing and so on, on the score. Too-rigid instructions are in conflict with the dynamics of the overall sound balance, and they frustrate the performers in formulating a staging of their own. ^[1] The score of Canto Ostinato is laid out as a route for the performers to take, says ten Holt; they use so-called drift parts at will, but its total length, and the number of repetitions of the various sections on which the composition is built, are undetermined.

Canto...