Resolve Remote

Resolve Remote for violin and electronics was composed by Tod Machover in fall 2021 on commission from the Royal Academy of Music to celebrate the RAM’s 200th anniversary. The premiere performance was given at RAM (London) in February 2022 by Charlie Lovell-Jones, for whom Machover wrote the work. Resolve Remote grew out of the COVID pandemic experience of isolation and uncertainty, and the resolve needed to simply keep going. The piece starts with a series of violin phrases that stop short with a kind of crunch sound before they can fully resonate or develop. Electronics – based on the violin sound and extensions of it – enter almost imperceptibly, both intensifying the cutoffs and extending the resonances. The violin returns over-and-over to anchor pitches in the midst of increased layering, eventually overpowering the swirling complexity to reach a kind of forced focus. At this point of uneasy stillness, the electronics become fused with the violin sound – as if pulled in by a magnetic force – while a sinuous melody develops from the lowest range to the highest, releasing tension along the way through a kind of soulful singing. The final section of Resolve Remote is played in the highest register of the violin, with sound twisting and twirling weightlessly as if earthly troubles had been left behind. Here the electronics extend violin ornaments and trills into delicate inharmonic textures, finally blending acoustic and electronic sound completely to establish the meditative, aspirational stability with which the piece ends.