From the realm of the living, death feels like a residue. It’s a mystery. Vague, inexact. It’s impossible to replicate, ungraspable across the threshold of life. It is a reminder of our own biology. It is a sombre melody. to a close translates a reflection on death from text to music. Each letter of the English alphabet corresponds to a specific note on the piano. Every measure articulates a word. The composition, combined with a slow tempo, recreates the cadence of the original text.

Throughout the composing process, the musical notes are determined by a fixed system. Whereas their respective durations are improvised to adapt to the strict confines, based on the set number of beats, within each measure. Even when working with a transmedia translation such as this, the process shares essential similarities with translating from one language into another. In both, there is a transformation to communicate the text’s literal meaning, built on an established foundation to bridge the original material and its new form. This new form is then imbued with its own character; idiosyncratic qualities emerge as it becomes a stand-alone denotation of meaning. It is no longer an automated output of a lifeless procedure, but rather exemplifies an impossible attempt to transmute something inaccessible and animate it in an entirely new context.

The very physical phenomenon produced by this piece—in which the audience is interacting with a translation that activates a different sense—reminds us of the distance between the original text and our new aural experience. Translations are vague and inexact mysteries taken out of a mold, then reshaped and probed at, going through a second transformation. But it is not a residue. The residue is elsewhere—lost in the process, ungraspable.