"A Game of Curtains, Glass Door, Twice Closed" For Oboe

 

"A Game of Curtains, Glass Door, Twice Closed" 

for Oboe

(Commissioned by EssilorLuxottica) 

A Game of Curtains, Glass Door, Twice Closed is not a narrative composition. It is a visual and sonic apparatus, a typological field in which equivalence replaces hierarchy, and documentation replaces emotion. The score asks the performer to operate with detachment—but not apathy. It asks them to see the score, to interpret through optical logic, and to allow the listener to experience a world where seeing becomes hearing, and hearing becomes a study of surfaces.

It is music, but it is also showroom, lens factory, design archive. It is notation-as-device.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, the master of the nouveau roman, often constructed narratives that meticulously cataloged surfaces and objects, stripping away traditional psychological depth in favor of a stark, almost photographic rendering of the visible world.  His titles, like "La Maison de Rendez-vous" or "Dans le labyrinthe," hint at enclosed spaces and repeated actions, suggesting a world observed with a detached yet persistent gaze. 

 

This score delves into the very act of seeing, its limitations, and the subjective filters through which we perceive reality. The oboe aims to explore the boundaries of the individual and the universal, the normative and the real, through the contrasting juxtaposition and direct comparison facilitated by a unique system of notation.

The core of this notational system lies in the employment of typologies. This approach, seeks to establish an equivalence between diverse visual elements.

The score immediately introduces a crucial paradox: despite this pursuit of equivalence, the notation remains a highly challenging and complex notion. How can one translate the nuanced visual world into a system of musical notation without inevitably imposing a form of subjective interpretation? The oboe, an instrument capable of both piercing clarity and melancholic introspection, is placed within this paradoxical regime.

On one hand, the typological approach promises a systematic recording of people and objects based on extreme objectivity... a score that functions as a precise catalog of visual data, translated into a sonic language. The oboe, with its distinct timbre and dynamic range, could meticulously trace the contours and qualities revealing itself as a disturbing and potentially subversive act. The very act of selecting and categorizing visual phenomena into musical equivalents is inherently subjective. 

The interplay between the seemingly objective nature of typology and its underlying arbitrariness, as translated through the singular voice of the oboe, becomes the central tension of this artistic endeavor, prompting us to question not only how we see, but how the act of notation itself shapes our perception of reality.

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Further Commentary on Meaning of "A Game of Curtains, Glass Door, Twice Closed"

for Solo Oboe

“A Game of Curtains, Glass Door, Twice Closed” is not merely a musical composition—it is an epistemological device, a score that cloaks itself in layers of visual entropy and narrative obfuscation. It is constructed as a multi-dimensional event field: part semiotic machine, part cryptographic topography, and part ontological provocation.

Across its pages—rendered in operatic panels, surrealist tableaux, pharmacological overlays, and high-density graphical notation—this work for solo oboe imposes not just musical demands, but psycholinguistic and performative agency. What follows is a deep reading of its constituent visual architectures and the obligations they place upon the performer.

Cartographic Panels as Conceptual Entry Points

Chromatic Identity Panels

Each of the six squares labeled with neologistic names—“REQUIPTISC,” “OPTISC,” “XEFROT,” “TYIOPE,” “ESITIV,” “LIBREI”—acts as a discrete pharmacological metonym. These words suggest synthetic compounds or conditions, possibly emotional states, intellectual modes, or sonic colors. Below, each panel is visually mirrored by double-exposed portrait overlays: a male figure overlaid with a female gaze—detached, cool, forensic.

Here, identity is double-imaged and mutually surveilled. The oboist is implicitly asked to engage in layered character play, choosing not one subjectivity but many—gendered, medicated, vocalized, occluded. This begins the “game” of the title: a ritualized shifting of selves across opaque surfaces.

Surrounding Grid-Architecture

The outer borders—filled with syntactical glissandi of lettered nonsense (LYSTOCCA, RIELANT, MYAFERON)—suggest synthetic languages or naming systems. The performer navigates not within a fixed vocabulary but within a constructed pharmacopoetics.

Audio-Visual Scene Disruption and Urban Surrealism

The second layer of panels pulls the oboist into a cinematic détournement: street photography altered with industrial surrealism—massive tractor wheels, feminine figures with radiating discs, and place-names (QLORYTHMAD, KPRELYZHO) invented anew. These names, like pharmaceutical brands or failed cyberpunk dialects, frame each panel as a location and condition.

The oboist does not merely play—they inhabit.

Each station in this “score-arcade” offers a scene of embodiment. It is a gameboard of performative states, triggered by interaction with visual density, spectral color filtering, and digitally twisted vernaculars.

Diagrammatic Assemblage of Sonic-Material Agency

Now the iconography becomes dense, numerically coded, and materially charged. Rendered objects (vintage cash registers, grid overlays, sports masks, molecular gels) are juxtaposed with floating numeric tokens (87, 03, 21, 48) and spherical interference patterns.

These pages operate as temporal calibration tools—offering nonlinear guides to breath, pacing, and internal modulation. The performer reads these pages like radio schematics:

Numbers suggest time-stamps (in seconds), or durational magnitudes

Spheres imply spatialization of tone—how far a gesture should resonate or diffuse

Material motifs indicate timbre-association: the “metallic” register of the cash drawer; the “paper” brittleness of the texture; the “rubber” malleability of intonation

Pharmacosemiotic Gradients and Kinetic Flow

Three color-blocked gradients (green-silver, red-gold, ochre-blue) each contain floating elliptical emblems and thick directional arrows, reminiscent of evacuation signage or genetic channeling. Below them are coded compound names: ENOVITOCYN, PEOVIC, and FIBE—entirely fictional, yet instantly evocative.

Each name is a dosing cue: a signal for the performer to alter embouchure, pacing, resistance, or vibrato flow. The performer "ingests" each title—performing its chemical fiction through sound. This is a subcutaneous score, where notation is metabolic rather than linguistic.

Cinematic Overload and Recursive Embodiment

The tenth panel breaks open into a kinetic collage—1950s pulp women, geometric overlays, nuclear blasts, foam pistons, nightclub flashbulbs. The yellow bar bisects the page, labeled with a screw icon and the word “FOLD”—a folding of timelines? Interpretations? Genders?

This page calls not for a sound, but for a sonic attitude—a visual noise rendered as brass and air. It demands performance as social distortion—an oboe line that sexualizes, explodes, disorients. The performer becomes not a reader of notation, but a loudspeaker for iconographic intensity.

Hyper-Notational Mechanics and the Score as Machine

Here, we return to notation proper—but it is no longer musical in the conventional sense. The stave has been overtaken by typographic weapons:

Sculpted dynamic fields—represented as waveforms, vector bursts, and nested rotational matrices

Floating pharmaceutical capsules—labeled TF, VR2, Z1

Visual “interruptions”—3D-rendered lips, screw heads, drops of liquid: interruptions that act as semantic brakes or dynamic surges

These are pages where the oboist must make non-cochlear decisions. Is a graphic a breath? A fracture? A joke? The agency rests entirely on the performer’s willingness to co-author meaning.

Curtains, Doors, and the Closing Gesture

The title—A Game of Curtains, Glass Door, Twice Closed—echoes throughout. The curtain conceals. The door reveals. The “twice closed” implies repetition, denial, or trauma—a silence that isn’t enough the first time.

This score demands a performer who is willing to become a filter, not a translator. It requires choreographic imagination, pharmacosemiotic sensitivity, and an ability to navigate notation as architecture. Sound is no longer the goal—it is the residue of moving through the system.

What is “played” here is not the oboe.

It is the space between visual logic and sonic instability.

And that is the true game.

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