A Bassoon Duet

 

In this bassoon duet, the I enter into a rigorous and irreverent dialogue with the visual vocabularies of Ed Ruscha and David Carson, translating their typographic and conceptual experiments into sonic performance. This is not simply a duet in the conventional sense, but a layered performance score where the materiality of language collides with the embodied noise of double reeds.

The abundance of text across the score is not supplemental but structural. Letters are not subservient to tone.  They are tone. The graphic gestures of the score suggest a collapse of the boundary between writing and playing, between reading and listening. The composer does not employ text to instruct, describe, or annotate, but to disrupt, to sediment, to imply tempo, breath, silence, interference. This is a work that asks performers to sound language, not as speech or lyric, but as spatial and temporal force.

Echoes of Ruscha's coolly detached word paintings resonate here, particularly in the way text is presented not as narrative, but as image and form. Likewise, Carson’s deconstructed typography, fractured syntax, and layout anarchy leave their trace in the score’s refusal to align itself with any fixed interpretive grid. The pages feel more like typographic landscapes than notation with each one a site where meaning is unstable, where visual rhythm replaces linear phrasing.

The performance becomes an act of decoding and encoding simultaneously. The bassoonists must navigate not only pitch and duration, but density, opacity, fragmentation. They are readers, improvisers, graphic interpreters. What emerges is a textured field of breaths, multiphonics, slaps, whispers, exhalations. A kind of verbal music that precedes language or perhaps mourns its collapse.

In theoretical terms, the duet may be understood as a procedural palimpsest. It excavates the sedimentation of communication itself, drawing attention to the instability of signification when mediated through print, breath, and wood. The score privileges performative error, the glitch of interpretation, the body’s limitations as a meaning-making machine. It is not about playing something correctly, but about witnessing what happens when notation unmoors itself from legibility.

There are moments in the piece that feel like reading a word you've seen a thousand times only to realize you've forgotten what it means. That rupture is where this piece lives. Between comprehension and confusion. Between mark and sound. Between text and textlessness.

This duet is not so much for two bassoons as it is for two bodies grappling with the weight and residue of language...exhausted, elusive, still urgent.

As such, this work aligns with emergent models of post-notation: scores that function less as instructions and more as speculative terrains. It is an anti-score and a hyper-score, formal and disruptive, text-drenched and illegible. It is a performance of print, a composition of surfaces, a duet for breath, typography, and bodies.