Rob Moloney

Disintegration is an irreversible performance for solo cello that interrogates hierarchy through brute force. The score demands the physical destruction of the instrument, thereby creating the conditions in which the work can only be achieved after the cellist commits to its performance. Upon breaking through the score’s inherent tipping point, the means necessary to complete the piece are discovered live. Consequently, both score and composer become superfluous as the performer takes ownership of the music, liberating themselves from the score as they wrestle it out of a theoretical framework and forge it into reality by manipulating the instrument to destruction.

"There was, deep inside this so-called world, something that had no price. No gold could buy it, no church could sing it, no-one could understand it. It appeared in the middle of life, and it meant nothing but itself. For a while I hated it, like everybody else, then all of a sudden it filled my entire reality. I still don’t understand it. What it was. Why it mattered so much, and what is the nature of the hole that is left now that it has gone. But most of all I can’t understand the rage with which we would tear it apart, such hatred against a love so impossible, and so beautifully broken." - Sean Bonney