Boosey & Hawkes
Since its birth, the waltz has inspired composers in more ways than one can count. Among the reasons this singular genre of dance music fascinates me is a certain tension particular to music in three. Unlike its duple and quadruple cousins, where the body moves in familiar, symmetrical pairs, the waltz adds one step too many – and with it, the left-right symmetry we take for granted comes apart. It is precisely this asymmetry that draws the dance, almost by necessity, into the round – turning around a partner, circling through space, returning again and again to where one began.
To dance a waltz, then – or to hear one, to play one, even to compose one – is to step outside the familiar track of past, present, and future, and into an illusion: a circular time that begins, unfolds, returns, and begins again. And it is here, in that instant, that a fissure opens between the linear time we actually inhabit and the circular time of the illusion. A fissure that trembles with an anxiety all its own – born of a beauty that feels eternal but lasts only a moment. We turn, and turn, believing we might circle forever inside that beauty – until the ball ends, and it shatters, and we are delivered back into the straight and onward current of time. Into reality. Which, as reality always is, is entirely indifferent to beauty. Loveless, to the last degree.
It is exactly here – in this indifference – that the waltz, for all its naïvety, for all its sentimentality, comes to carry the seed of something far more dangerous: a ruinous, delirious madness. It is, perhaps, no accident that composers at the turn of the last century – Mahler, Richard Strauss, Ravel, Alban Berg – and poets like Trakl and Yeats, reached for the waltz to hold the anxieties of their age.
Dance Card is an homage to this singular genre. Across some of my earlier works, I have woven in fragments of the waltz – some my own, some borrowed – as an expression of my unending love for this music. But the disturbing news of these recent years gave me a different kind of longing – to write something like Ravel’s La Valse, a waltz that might hold up a mirror to our own time.
The piece begins in noise. First gesture, then rhythm; only later do pitch, melody, and harmony begin to emerge. What follows is a crossbreeding – the waltz meeting the dance musics of our own ages: house, drum and bass, the Shibuya-kei I loved as a child, even the rap-metal of Rage Against the Machine – and through this crossbreeding, a complete dismantling and reassembly of the genre itself, alongside a tug-of-war between duple and triple time. Gradually the music converges toward three, and a strange, twisted waltz emerges – built from noise and extended technique. And then, briefly, the naïve and sentimental form of the waltz shows itself – only for what waits behind it to arrive: a wild, chaotic, headlong ruin.
The title is borrowed from a short piece by Roberto Bolaño – a Chilean writer I love without reservation – also called Dance Card. Bolaño’s autobiographical text, a kind of literary round-dance of his own, is a hymn – as beautiful and sad as it is funny and sardonic – to the many partners he danced with across a lifetime. It is, too, a love letter to the forgotten: to writers and poets who, like dancers helpless before reality, understand that what they write may never be read, may never move the world at all – and go on trying anyway, in whatever way they can.
I wrote this music in that same spirit.
My thanks go to my friend Malte Krasting. At a time when I was seeking a concrete idea for the piece, the long letter he sent me offered a crucial impulse and helped me find a way forward.
Donghoon Shin, 2026
Reproduction Rights
This note can be reproduced in concert programmes with a credit to the composer.