Chadabe writes:"In performing Solo, I stood behind two antennas positioned about three feet apart in front of me so that I could move my hands towards them or pull my hands back away from them. The first version of the antennas, custom-designed and built for me by Robert Moog, were six-foot rods, about a half-inch in diameter, mounted in wooden bases sitting on the floor, as shown in the photo from the New Music New York festival in 1979 where I performed it for the first time. About a year later, I redid the antennas using Volkswagon car antennas mounted in small metal boxes so that I could collapse them and fit them easily into equipment cases for travelling. What the audience saw and heard in a performance was that I was waving my hands in the air relative to the antennas, controlling sounds that varied between long sustained chords of up to eight simultaneous sounds and a fast flurry of notes that scurried up and down as if in a wild improvisation.

In fact, the melodic idea was based on a wild clarinet improvisation by J. D. Parran that I had heard in New York, with notes racing around through changes in register and speed. In Solo, the melody was articulated in eight voices - two "clarinet" sounds, two "flute" sounds, and four "vibraphone" sounds - that converged around and diverged from the melody. As I moved my left hand closer to the left antenna, I brought in different combinations of the instrumental sounds. As I moved my right hand closer to the right antenna, I changed the tempo from very fast to very slow.

Waving my hands in the air suggested a conducting metaphor. And indeed I was conducting tempo and orchestration, not unlike what normal conductors do. But my orchestra was improvising. I never knew exactly what would come next. In positioning my hands for the next sounds, I knew what the tempo would be and I knew which instruments would be playing, but I never knew what the notes would be. Would it be wide voicing over several octaves? Or would it be a tightly knit group of sounds? There was great unpredictability in the notes of the melody itself and in the notes played by the instruments in their deviations from the melody.

The unpredictability in the succession of notes represented a random walk, in which a random number generator answered the following questions: What's the starting note? Does the next phrase go up or down? How many notes are in the next phrase? What are the intervals from note to note? If the melody goes up or down beyond the highest or lowest note of the virtual "keyboard", what's the new starting note? And each instrument asked, with every note it played, what is my interval of diversion from the melody note?

But I mention these questions not so much to describe the technical process as to get at the concept of interaction that animates the composition. The performer interacts moment-by-moment with unforeseen pitches and orchestrations, sharing control of the music with the unpredictability of the random numbers. One might observe that performing Solo is more than a metaphor for conducting an orchestra. It's also a metaphor for life. We interact moment-by-moment with unforeseen events, sharing control of our lives with unpredictable complexities."