As dusk settled over the MCA, whispers and quiet jokes mingled with the passing lights and reflected glass, humming across Chicago. A piano sat at the small crowd’s center, its still, wooden body pronounced against the spectators’ static flutterings and turns. With no bench in sight—nor even seats for the audience—the piano and spectators hovered in a space of awkward and indefinite potential. At six o’ clock the room settled and expectant silence reigned. At six o’ one a delicate but ferociously dressed woman walked to the piano’s back and turned a switch. The onlookers waited.

   Based on an algorithm of elephants’ twenty-year forecast to extinction, artist Jenny Kendler programmed a vintage, ivory-key piano to sonically and mathematically simulate excess greed and death. According to Kendler, the pitch frequency corresponds to the animal count; therefore, as the piece concludes into extinction, the notes fall lower and lower, eventually dropping off the board into a setup of nonexistence. Being mechanized and programmed, the piano performs for, and is played by no one. It is switched on, and runs approximately ten minutes.

From the program notes, I wasn’t expecting much. I have grown cynical of music that is more theoretically shadowed than aesthetically reasoned. I believe that aesthetic expressivity must come first—if the aesthetic is uncoordinated and/or sloppy, the message is useless. In music specifically, I tend to rebuke compositions that submit the composer’s craft to abstraction. I have thought that music should be created by people for people; therefore, to remove it from human reason is to render it incommunicable and functionless. Well, Kendler proved me wrong. Wearing my sharp-edged cynicism to the “performance,” I was surprised when an algorithmic piano pulled at my heartstrings. Based on an equation with absolutely no connection to music, the composition somehow communicated distant and pleading distress. Luck? Maybe.

Kendler’s work mixes historical technologies to create a contemporary instrument that seems novel in its combination yet antiquated in its mechanized, visual aesthetic. The piano’s wood and ivory mixed with the churning, metal cylinder compares to an antique music box. But unlike a typical music box, its large size calls for attention and authority. The single notes’ delicate transparency ring all the more poignantly in context to the instrument’s firm weight and unavoidable presence. Their clear and singular placements express a loss that seems defenseless in relation to the solitary piano. Thus, the composition’s emotional expressivity is actually augmented by the absence of a human performer. Pushing the lines between live and recorded, Kendler’s work explores the room for play between a performance and dynamic object. Is the performer she who switches on the machine? Is the composer the mathematician who unknowingly programmed a sonic machine? Or is the composer an algorithm—an objective observation?

After the performance, Kendler spent about twenty minutes advocating elephant rights. While I agree and sympathize with her animal rights activism, I was disappointed in her lecture’s focus. I wanted to hear thoughts on composition, technology, the performer and instrument. In only discussing her work’s overarching message, I left feeling confused, frustrated and had by the work’s radical experiment with medium. Though the work’s correlation to elephant extinction is fundamental to the message, its aesthetic expressivity and technological exploration can stand, autonomously significant.