Toy Phantasy for piano and fixed media was composed in 2022-2023 for Luo Ting, the first performer of the work. The video was created specially for this piece by Anne Stagg.
The piece has been inspired by the poem by John Updike “Player Piano,” originally published in “The New Yorker” magazine and quoted below. While the poem is about the player piano, some of its characteristics and specific words used by the author (“click,” “chuckling,” “pluck”) reminded me of a different but related instrument – a toy piano, which I sampled and included in the piece along with select words from the poem. The poem has a multi-layered rhyme structure: each line has several assonances, and each line is rhymed after another line.
Most intriguing for me were certain words in this poem (such as “misstrums”), which led me into writing a phantasmagoric piece with pre-recorded spoken and sung words borrowed from the poem and transformed freely, using computer software and my imagination.

Toy Phantasy for piano and fixed media was composed in 2022-2023 for Luo Ting, the first performer of the work. The video was created specially for this piece by Anne Stagg.
The piece has been