Revealing the Hands of “Palm-of-the-Hand Songs”

11.9.2026 2 Tykkää 0 kommenttia

On September 12, Yuto Obata’s first portrait concert will be held at Musiikkitalo in Helsinki.

The concert features my duet works – pieces for two instruments – that I have composed since moving to Finland in 2022. At the same time, because this is my first portrait concert, I wanted to use the occasion to take on a challenge I have never attempted before.

This led me to create “Palm-of-the-Hand Songs,” a new work for a dancer, a pianist, and electronics. In this work, I have extended my main musical attempts at “depicting faint boundaries” to visual and physical dimensions of performance. This piece focuses on the visual commonalities in the gestures of the dancer and the pianist, as well as the auditory commonalities between accidental noises contained in those gestures and the extended techniques of the piano. This piece questions the conventional relationship between music and dance: which one accompanies the other? What kind of new artistic expression might emerge when a dancer and a pianist work in an equal relationship?

The choice of the piano was personal. The piano is my main instrument, and I have felt that a pianist’s hand movements on the keyboard resemble dance, even though they are not intended as choreography. This observation connected to my strong interest in the expressive power of the human hand. Through subtle movements, we can sense one another’s intentions and emotions, and perceive the slightest changes in physical presence. For me, the hand represents something universal yet highly sensitive, which also resonates with the expression of delicateness I seek in my own creative work.

Since this spring, I have been developing the piece with the dancer and choreographer Ada Freund and later with pianist Lambis Pavlou through a series of improvisational sessions. Through improvisation, we discovered small “ignorable” physical movements of the pianist: arm and wrist movements, shifts between sitting and standing while playing inside the piano, and subtle back-and-forth movements of the body. These findings became important not only as material for the choreography, but also as material for the music itself. I began to consider the physical actions of the performers as part of the compositional material. 

In the process, we experimented with different directions of creation. Sometimes I composed the music first, and Ada created choreography in response. In another section, she developed choreographic material through improvisation, which then became the basis for my composition.

This process also made me realize the limitations of my usual way of composing. When I use conventional musical notation, with its fixed rhythms and temporal structures, the dancer can easily end up simply following the score. This reinforces a hierarchy in which the musical score determines the dancer’s actions. To move away from this relationship, I introduced open notation, allowing greater flexibility and improvisation.

Electronics became another important part of this process. The dancer uses sound-producing objects such as a metal plate, a chair, and aluminum foil. These materials make subtle gestures, friction, weight, and touch audible, allowing physical actions to become both sound and choreographic material. Microphones amplify the sounds produced by the objects, including the dancer’s breath. Sound designer Saku Liimatainen has played a major role in developing this aspect of the work.

For me, working with artists from outside my own field has been an opportunity to reconsider my own methodology. Encountering questions from another artistic perspective has made me aware of differences in our ways of thinking and creating. At the same time, gradually entrusting parts of my own domain as a composer to other artists has revealed possibilities that I might not have discovered alone. Although this might sometimes be perceived as “cutting corners” from a composer’s perspective, I have come to see entrusting others not as a loss of authorship, but as a way of expanding the scope of my artistic expression.

These past eight months have not merely been a period for carrying out a project; they have also deepened our friendship. As we encouraged one another through creative challenges and continually reaffirmed our shared goals, we fostered a process that could not have been achieved through a typical division-of-labor collaboration. I believe this collaboration, built on trust, has resulted in a more open work—one that incorporates space for improvisation by the dancer and pianist.

Written by Yuto Obata