“Dark Matter Facticity”

The pages of Dark Matter Facticity greet the eye with almost nothing, and then with too much. Against a field of near-black, faint rings and quarter-arcs consolidate into moiré; an apparition that occurs only when two disciplined systems trespass upon one another. The score does not picture sound; it materializes pressure, the way closely spaced lines suddenly thicken into interference. What we hear in performance is the audible remainder of those collisions.

From staff to system

Conventional notation is an alphabet; this score is an instrument. Each page establishes a mechanical ecology whose line density and phase offset form a playable terrain. The ensemble is asked to treat the geometry the way a bow treats a string: an apparatus that resists, yields, and stores energy. Where rings are tight and the moiré thickens, time compacts; where spacing opens, the music ventilates. The long radial rays become black vectors descending like surveyor’s marks locate thrust, initiate attacks, and apportion breath.

The moiré here is not ornament. It is a profiling device which delivers an indexed map of intensities. Two families of curves, minutely misaligned, produce a third entity that belongs to neither set. Pitch is read topographically: concentric height equals register; azimuth equals timbre allocation or player assignment across the semicircle of the chamber ensemble. The system yields music that is determinately indeterminate which is strict in its metrics, open in its matter.

Facticity and the unseen

The title wagers on a paradox: dark matter is posited by cosmology not because it can be seen, but because without it, visible motion fails to add up. The score’s moiré takes the same stance. What is “given” (the facticity) is a set of regular, sober rulings; what drives the performance is what appears between those rulings. Interference becomes the instrument by which an invisible grammar acquires public form.

There is a quiet historical argument embedded here. Twentieth-century graphic music often traded clarity for voluptuous image; this work declines the spectacle, even as it courts optical phenomena. Its black-on-black economy refuses the histrionics of the spectacular score and instead models causality. The page is an experimental field: adjust offset, alter density, and new sonic states precipitate. In this sense the notation is not symbolic; it is operational.

Arte Povera, by other means

The score’s discipline belongs to the ethos of Arte Povera, not as quotation but as attitude. The Italian movement’s core proposition was that the most ordinary materials such as lead, felt, earth, paper, and rope could index forces larger than themselves. Think of Giovanni Anselmo letting gravity complete a sculpture, or Mario Merz tracing growth through Fibonacci arcs, or Jannis Kounellis staging coal and flame so that energy enters the room as a protagonist. Dark Matter Facticity belongs to that lineage: paper, lines, and slight offsets stand in for mass, attraction, drift.

The moiré becomes a poor technology in the Arte Povera sense: cheap, direct, almost household. Two sets of lines conjure a third, irreducible phenomenon. The pages enact a pedagogy of minimum means / maximum consequence. If Arte Povera sought “the presence of the world in the thing,” the score seeks the presence of sound in the page, but not through depiction but through physical analogy. The eye perceives beating where curves nearly coincide; the ear then manufactures beating through phase, unisons just off true, pressure that edges toward noise.

There is also an ethical echo. Arte Povera distrusted institutional smoothness; it insisted on process, resistance, and contingency. The performers experience the grain of the page as the grain of the music. Nothing is merely “executed”; everything is negotiated.

Reading the pages

Across the set, several architectures of attention recur:

Concentric bodies (sometimes complete, sometimes cropped) operate as time reservoirs. Circulations around a body constitute cycles; partial arcs imply asymmetric periods, producing polyrhythmic slippage when different players circulate at different angular speeds.
Quadrant ellipses and partial donuts separate center from edge. Centers invite sustained tone, edges favor percussive incident or breath-noise. The “donut interior” acts as a null: a held silence or filtered tone that makes the surrounding ring audible by contrast.
Fans of rays ground the page. They are entrance vectors, dynamic ramps, or spatial cues for sound projection into the room...downstage/outward when the page points below, inward when rays converge.
Grids within circles of faint cross-rulings and survey ticks offer calibration. They allow players to reconcile personal time with ensemble time, like notched rulers laid across a turning lathe.

The beauty of the method is that it scales. Each instrument maps the same moiré profile to its own material logic, which is why ensemble sound coheres without collapsing into unison. The score is a shared physics rather than a shared melody.

Optical phasing as sonic pedagogy

Because moiré is a function of near coincidence, the notation educates the ear toward difference tones and beats. Performers learn to aim for the edge of alignment practicing how to sustain just-off unisons that produce living vibration in the room. In rehearsal, the pages behave like a tuner that refuses to show a number: they teach by shimmer, not by command.

This matters culturally. The work turns away from the fantasy that complexity must be built from more symbols. Instead, it argues that complexity is what simple systems do when pressed together. Two steady hands produce a tremble. Two clean arcs produce turbulence. The chamber ensemble becomes a laboratory for emergence, and the audience is asked to witness how sound is made, not just that it is.

Darkness as medium

Why the black field? It is not mood but method. Black collapses the page into field conditions with no margins and no pictorial hierarchy so that the light rings appear as events in a continuous medium, like wakes on a night sea. The optical effort required to see the lines prepares the listening effort required to hear the micro-events the ensemble will propose. Darkness is a calibration of attention.

Toward performance

In practice, the conductor (or a designated principal) reads azimuth as clock time and radius as intensity. Each page proposes a function of accumulation, dilation, and dispersal realized through local decisions the notation both permits and disciplines. Transitions between pages are thresholds rather than cuts; players carry residual energy across, as if friction could not be reset by a page turn. The piece therefore behaves like matter: it conserves something.

What the work contributes

Dark Matter Facticity makes a clear wager about the future of notation. It proposes that scores need not represent sound; they can instantiate the physical conditions from which sound will arise. It borrows the poverty of simple means of lines, offsets, and paper and confers on them cosmic responsibility. In so doing, it honors an Arte Povera ambition: that the real world, with its gravity and friction and thresholds, can be present inside the artwork, not merely pictured by it.

The moiré is thus not a trick of the eye but a contract with the ear...a promise that if we superimpose our actions with enough care, something third will appear, something neither yours nor mine, neither page nor performance. Call that third thing the music; call it, with the composer, the facticity that keeps our invisible structures honest.