"To Maintain A Certain Might" for Violin: With Commentary from Gabe Hudson

 

TO MAINTAIN A CERTAIN MIGHT

2018-2023

10 Images. 24” X 9”; 61 X 22.9 cm.

Ink, Dry Ice, Black Oil Paint, Black Watercolor, Gouache (black), Solar Ink, Walnut Ink, Chalk, Liquid Ruthenium, Ochre Pigment Powder, Manganese Dioxide Powder, Dry hermochromic pigment Powder, Acrylic on Epson Signature Worthy Velvet Fine Art.

Edition of 6 with 2 APs

 Commentary from Gabe Hudson

It begins with a whisper. A chemical hush. Not in sound, but in media: Dry Ice and Liquid Ruthenium, crushed into something that approaches notation only through the bold nerve of its presumption. A stave becomes a sediment; clefs dissolve into Manganese Dioxide; the ink itself rebels into ochre particulates and thermochromic hesitation. This is a violin score that remembers music the way an artifact remembers a ritual.  It knows its shape, but not its source.

“To Maintain a Certain Might” is not merely a title.  It is a challenge, an invocation, and a betrayal. What does it mean for a piece of music to hold might? Not just sonic force, but resistance, secrecy, presence. Each of the ten pages unfolds like a scroll of war correspondence from a world where harmony has been outlawed and only solar ink and chalky whispers remain.

The materials are not incidental; they are arguments. The black gouache crusts in corners like regret. Walnut ink drips in lines too deliberate to be accidental, too inconsistent to be directive. Here we enter Chabon’s territory: where nostalgia for order is betrayed by the seduction of the baroque. The score does not ask to be played; it dares to be interpreted, with each graphic unit, be it pharmaceutical syllable (“Thalirenol,” “Cutibax,” “Aldutor”), or near-asemic rupture serving as a narrative shard from a world adjacent to ours, though darker, denser, more holy.

Indeed, it reads like the script of an invented pharmacopoeia, a blacklisted pharmacological opera that might have been composed by a fugitive chemist, writing to outwit regulation or God. The strings of text:  “tru-4 tru-4 tru-4,” “Hepacine Tristryl,” “Macrodene Aceranon,” “Jysity-revola”are neither instructions nor ingredients but talismans, each syllable both invocation and inoculation. This is language as curse, language as salvage.

And then there is the shape. The vertical bleed of black oils and rust powders gives each page the look of having been stored improperly on purpose. The score seems unearthed rather than printed, the ink bleeding backward through time. The staff lines and text do not simply overlay the paper, but they seem to have erupted through it.

One page features a mirrored typographic echo of “LuppiLuppi”, and for a moment one thinks of Chabon’s Golems and Kavalier ghosts, names that double and repeat until they crumble under their own pressure. This is the kind of violin score that might have emerged from the ruins of a library in Prague or beneath the stage of a forgotten Yiddish theater, the violinist long gone, but the ghosts still hungry.

The agency required of the performer is immense, bordering on cruel. It’s not simply about realizing a pitch or a rhythm, but about conjuring a myth. One does not play this score so much as interpret its residue, like a scholar of medieval maps decoding notations for dragons and lost continents. Each gesture on the violin must answer a visual provocation: “What does a black gouache blister sound like?” “How does one bow a thermochromic ellipse?”

At its most intelligible, the score resembles scientific graffiti, or the kind of visual rhetoric scrawled on the walls of underground labs in speculative fiction. It offers no safety net of tradition, but instead asks its performer (and its reader) to take the violin into a new dialect, one for which there is no dictionary, only intuition.

This is not a score that documents music. It is a score that performs its own becoming, page by page, medium by unstable medium, ink by sweating chemical. If Chabon were to write its libretto, it would be buried within a footnote to a footnote, trailing off in mid-sentence, replaced by a diagram of something half-remembered and entirely unrepeatable.

“To Maintain a Certain Might” is both relic and prophecy, and the violinist? She is neither interpreter nor servant, but rather the sole surviving speaker of a language invented by shadows.