"Treppenmusik (staircase music) is the German word used to describe Wagner's Siegried Idyll due to the unusual location of its first performance (on a staircase), as a Christmas/birthday present for his wife Cosima. In my composition, however, this title alludes to the paradoxical staircases – ascents and descents to somewhere/nowhere – and the other strange loop figurations found in the engravings and lithographs of the Dutch graphic artist, Mauritis Cornelis Escher (1898-1972)."

Symmetries, canonic-like repetitions, metamorphoses, the familiar made fantastic – underlying techniques and principles articulated through his experiments with perspective and tessellation, all combine in Escher's work which also came under the influence of mathematics. Indeed, he seems to have created in his compelling images another sentient world with its own albeit impossible celestial mechanics.”

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