"Pathetic Piano" is a multimedia project based on the 2nd movement of Beethoven's Opus 13. piano sonata Pathtique generated by an interactive process programmed through Max-MSP and Jitter. It is a piece for people without any experience in playing the piano to control multiple videos of a piano keyboard via a midi-keyboard and thus take control and create variations of the historic piano work.

This project continues with my investigation into the Western Classical music canon. The act of composing by sampling musical phrases from previous works to build up a new work is a gesture to explore its structure, its elements, and its history. The objective is to gain a contextual perspective, to see if something new is sustained, created, and stimulated. This method of nudging and querying the original allows for a continuation of invention into musical discourse in both its aural and textual meanings. By dismantling the Beethoven structure exposes meaning and sound, leaving only the bones to construct a new shapes. In this work one has the potential to focus only on one note at a time, disrupting the logical order of the piano sonata, and by doing so offers a historic classical piano reduction, speculating if it can still be a musical form with out its companion, or recognizable parts.

Ten keys on the midi-controlled keyboard are dedicated to ten videos, one key per video. The original Beethoven work's musical notes are numbered to correspond to the specific finger playing the specific note. Each scored section only encompasses parts for that particular finger, and thus has one video per finger breaking down the muscular interrelatedness of a hand. The participant holds down a key to activate the video playback and corresponding audio from the virtual piano. When the key is released the video goes into pause mode waiting to be pressed again to continue the video and fractured Beethoven.

The participant may press any number of the keys and in any combination, breaking down the original composition and executing infinite compositional variations, and ultimately simulating the action of playing the piano.