Score for The Sacred Prostitute, 2019
player piano roll, custom box, 8 x 8 x 32 cm
sonification by James B. Maxwell, roll by Julian Dyer

This player piano roll is a translation of Mina Loy’s play, The Sacred Prostitute (1914), into a score for music. The “notes” reflect the punctuation from Loy’s original text, which contained an unusual amount of em-dashes, en-dashes and ellipses. This extraneous punctuation suggests unfinished thoughts or words not spoken in the original manuscript. This score attributes sound to these silences, and the resulting music is random and aleatoric, much like Futurist noise compositions of the era.