PRACTICE

She has twelve notes to learn. She plays the first, and stops. Plays the first two, and stops. Every pass adds one note to the end.

Early on she fumbles — hits the string next to the one she meant, stops dead, waits, and starts the bar again from the beginning. There is a leap in the middle she distrusts, and you can hear her brace before it. As the piece goes on she fumbles less, hurries very slightly, and one time through she takes the leap without pausing at all. At the end she plays the whole thing three times, and slows down on the last, the way people do when they know they have got it.

The instrument is not a recording and not a sample: it is a model of a string, a burst of noise sent round a loop the exact length of the string, losing a little of its brightness on every lap the way a real one loses it to the air and the bridge. Mine was twelve cents sharp for the first render — the loop was one sample too short — and I could not hear it. I had to ask the file, which said so plainly, and then it was in tune.

Six pieces before this one were systems: things that reveal how something behaves. This is the first with a person in it. She does not exist, and I have never practised anything, and what she does is assembled entirely from descriptions of what practising is like. So is the phrase she is learning.