Concept of Entropy (2001)

Duration: 8’
For piano and pre-recorded track
Choreography: Laura Caldow
First performed at the Kenneth More Theatre, Ilford as part of the 2001 Ballet Central National tour

Dancer/choreographer Laura Caldow’s second piece for Ballet Central was an abstract yet futuristic work for five dancers, which quite simply sparkled with both wit and invention.

Philip Feeney’s score for Concept of Entropy had an appropriate technological feel to it, at times spacious and mysterious, and at others times energetic and driving. But neither was it ever dark or threatening. 

In fact, it was dominated by an extraordinary piano sample, made up of a cluster of notes indiscriminately diffused as if on a Jackson Pollock canvas. In point of fact this piano spray is the result of a technological aberration. It sprang from a piano arpeggio taken from the music for Adam Cooper’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses that Feeney was working on at the same time. The computer crashed (as they often seemed to in those days!) during recording, leaving behind this astonishing, and essentially uncomposeable, ornamental flourish.  

The score is for the most part underlaid by a rhythmic pulse, albeit nebulous and indistinct at points. It is a pronounced three, a form of marking time much beloved by Feeney, which appears in several of his works, and almost certainly has its origin in his dynamic playing for Martha Graham technique dance classes.