Unromantic Fragments takes as its starting point the idea of the romantic fragment. Romantic fragments originated in music written in the first half of the nineteenth-century, notably the work of Schumann and Chopin. Romantic fragments were short pieces which exhibited a tension between self-containment and open-endedness. Each of the movements of Unromantic Fragments exhibits a similar tension, with the open-endedness of each movement – again following a nineteenth-century lead – deriving to a large extent from audible continuity between consecutive movements. The piece is for the most part light-hearted and fun, hence the title Unromantic Fragments.