'Touching Pitch': Prof. Cheng Interviewed in Radcliffe Magazine

Professor William Cheng, currently in residence as Rita E. Hauser Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, was interviewed recently for Radcliffe Magazine. In the interview, Prof. Cheng discusses his current project, Touching Pitch: A Decolonial Escapade ("equal parts memoir-treatise, live-recorded collaborative album, and...visual novel role-playing game,") and one of its main components: three recently recorded albums of improvisations on musical cyphers generated by the names of new friends.

The final project, says Prof. Cheng, will be "an experimental video game where, through your own decisions as a player, listener, and reader, you get to choose the kind of musical world that we live in. One player's utopia might be another's dystopia. Through certain choices, you might end up in a world where improvisation flourishes, or where it becomes extinct and outlawed...The reason I choose a game format is precisely to encourage people to think about the story of classical music differently and to think about what it still can be in the future. Do we continue to go down this road where improvisation in this tradition is just on the fringes? Or do we want to center it?"

The full interview is available here.