In “Now In Hot Attics and Institutional Vaults...”, the score intertwines a rich tapestry of Western musical notation with a new sub-discreet notational lexicon, creating an ever-modulating and elusive sonic landscape. At its core, this work explores the precarity of matter in both its musical and philosophical dimensions—an idea that resists stasis, defies preservation, and questions the very essence of form.
To approach this composition is to confront the paradox of matter itself: it is never static, always shifting, always undercutting the assumption of fixity. This is not merely a technical concern about notes on a page; it reflects a deeper metaphysical uncertainty about the world we inhabit. Jeremy Waldron’s conception of precarity, notably his philosophical engagements with security and vulnerability, serves as an apt intellectual backdrop for interpreting the tensions that animate this piece. Waldron’s reflections on the fragility of legal and political systems resonate with the fragility of form in this composition, as the pianist must continuously navigate a set of circumstances that refuse to cohere into any definitive, stable narrative. The material of the score itself is contingent, susceptible to forces of disintegration and reinvention, much like the social orders Waldron interrogates in his writings.
The sub-discreet notational lexicon employed here is subtle in its deployment but profound in its implications. Traditional Western notation, long the bedrock of classical composition, is subverted by these elements, which are woven through the score in ways that quietly shift the terrain under the performer’s hands. These modulations do not merely add texture; they invoke a sense of flux that mirrors the illusory spaces the piece explores. The illusory here is not an ethereal abstraction; it’s grounded in the reality that matter, in both musical and physical senses, is subject to constant change. The illusory is the precarious—the sense that everything, no matter how solid, can dissolve under pressure, temperature, or simply the passage of time.
Waldron’s work often returns to the theme of institutional fragility—how political and legal institutions, which we often take as enduring, are in fact deeply precarious and vulnerable to disruption. This fragility resonates with the thematic undercurrent of “Now In Hot Attics and Institutional Vaults...” The score gestures towards spaces of preservation—vaults, attics—yet these are not safe, sealed environments. They are spaces where materials degrade, where air, heat, and neglect can act as agents of destruction. The institutional vault is no longer the final resting place for permanence but a space where the fragility of matter is laid bare.
I engage with the precarity of ideas themselves. Playing with different musical conditions necessitates, at times, the destruction of the original idea. The performer, in navigating the score, is compelled to destroy and reconstruct, almost as though engaging in a kind of musical archaeology, where the original material is not meant to be preserved but to be understood in its decay and reinvention. The destruction of an idea is thus the avenue through which newness emerges. This is a creation through negation, where the very act of dismantling an idea, a motif, or a rhythm, gives rise to the possibility of something genuinely new. There is no clear plot, no narrative resolution embedded in the score—only the potential for transformation. The score offers a set of conditions with no plot; the pianist, much like the philosopher interpreting law, must find a way to finish the story, but the story, in this case, may never truly end.
A major obsession is the challenge of taking something quotidian and often insufferable—whether it be the bureaucratic machinery of the state or the mundane repetitions of daily life—and rendering it magical again. This is where the piece takes its most radical stance: it insists that beauty, far from being an easy achievement, is something precarious, something that must be wrested from the conditions of insufferability. There is always a tension inherent in beauty—the tension of its transience, its fragility, and the fact that it can dissolve as quickly as it appears. In the same way that Waldron explores how rights and liberties can erode under the strain of political forces, the composer here explores how beauty itself can be eroded by the mundane forces of repetition, entropy, and neglect. But far from resigning to this erosion, the score fights back, liberating the material from stasis and offering a momentary glimpse of transcendence.
The musical magic evoked in “Now In Hot Attics and Institutional Vaults...” is not the magic of enchantment but the magic of survival, of perseverance through precarity. It is a work that invites us to think about how we preserve, not in the sense of locking something away in a vault, but in the sense of allowing something to exist in a state of flux, constantly reinventing itself in the face of disintegration. The illusions we might hear in the interplay between the traditional notation and the new sub-discreet lexicon are not there to deceive, but to remind us that nothing is fixed—neither the music, nor the matter of the score, nor the institutions we think protect us.
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