Telstar Loops

for piano and electronics
commissioned by Nadia Shpachenko

Telstar Loops (2021) is a piece inspired by the iconic Adidas Telstar soccer ball. Made famous with its appearance in the 1970 FIFA World Cup in Mexico, the beloved pattern is a truncated icosahedron and features twelve black pentagons and twenty white hexagons. The ball’s namesake references the first communications satellite with a similar alternating black and white color scheme developed by Bell Labs in 1962.

The outer playful and athletic movements of the work (“Tensegrity” and “Buckyball”) make reference to the well-known polymath inventor Buckminster Fuller, whose industrial designs exploit the surprising tensional integrity of geodesic domes. Fuller is often misattributed as the soccer ball’s architect, since the characteristic pattern shares many similarities with the geodesic dome’s form. The middle movement “Satellite” pays homage to science and space exploration through its slow perpetual motion and strophic treatment of shape-shifting harmonies. The blurred and distorted delay effect on the piano imitates the transmission of signals to and from space throughout our daily communications.