In this week’s Futures story, Andrea Kriz takes a musical approach with Piano concerto for new hands. Regular readers will remember Andrea’s previous stories Chrysalis and The coded messenger. Here, she reveals what inspired her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Piano concerto for new hands

In February, I heard Ravel’s Piano Concerto for Left Hand for the first time. I’d been reluctant to listen to the piece before then. Growing up playing piano, no composer left as much of a mark on me as Ravel. Both physically and mentally (I once bled over the keyboard after cutting my finger on a glissando in his piece Jeux d’eau). Because of that, along with the concerto’s backstory — Ravel writing the piece for a pianist who’d lost his arm in the First World War — I thought it’d be painful to listen to. I was both right and wrong. It’s true that from the first swells of strings that filled the concert hall I felt tension, from the outbursts of piano, loss and anger almost bordering on desperation — but intertwined with that were reflective interludes, a jazzy playfulness, and in the last cadenza — triumph.

I’d been working on idea about an amputee, inspired by a lot of anime and video games I’d experienced with similar characters, like Violet Evergarden, Fullmetal Alchemist and Metal Gear Solid V. I was having trouble because I knew that at the end Cygnus decides to walk away from the military, despite really believing it’s his true calling, despite being given prosthetics that were essentially identical to his original limbs. But I couldn’t understand why. I heard Ravel’s Piano Concerto for Left Hand … and that piece fell into place.