The Score Functions as an Object and as a Protocol

 

ECHOES FROM THE ANTHROPOCENE

The score titled ECHOES FROM THE ANTHROPOCENE arrives as a field, not a text. You do not leaf through it for melodies. You stand before it and feel the pull of engineered bands, stacked horizontally in a dense chromatic geology. The square panel at the center repeats in variant palettes across the folios, each time encircled by an orbital ellipse that carries treble clefs, vectorized clusters, and instrument emblems. The eye tracks along the bands like a stylus moving across strata. The notation is not framed by staves so much as embedded in them, which turns reading into excavation.

This compositional posture calls up a precise art historical kinship. In 2011 Gerhard Richter subjected an older abstract painting to a regime of digital slicing, mirroring, and lateral extension. From thousands of vertical cuts he harvested the thinnest, end-stage strips, then laid them horizontally under Lucite. The result produced pressure on the retina. Color behaved like frequency. In my score the same conversion happens between image and sound. Digital procedure, once attached to pigment, is now attached to instruction. The bands do not decorate a system, they are the system, and the performer is asked to move across them as a needle passes across data.

Look closely at the first plate and you see a procession of glyphs that descend the square like instruments lowered into a shaft. The black noteheads do not align with any single staff; they puncture multiple bands at once, which collapses the old contract between sign and pitch. Accidentals sit like geological markers. A sharp becomes a pilon that pins one layer to another. A fermata resembles a centrifuge. When the eye reaches the periphery, small ornamental clusters appear. They feel like sensors or outposts that register the core’s activity. The ellipse that holds them is a rehearsal of orbit and feedback, a calm diagram of a planet that has turned its atmosphere into a recording surface.

The kinship with Richter is not a quotation. It is a shared ethic. Richter erased the painter’s hand by subjecting his own work to algorithmic violence. I erase the security of traditional notation by exposing it to the same industrial cut. In both cases the source remains, yet it is stretched until meaning becomes behavior. Early Richter cuts produced mirrored blots that still read as images. Late cuts produced bands that act like energy. Mine mirrors this arc across the sequence. One plate retains legible staff logic and suggests chamber polyphony. Another increases the density of bands and adds dotted verticals that read as time drilling through color. By the last plates the square is a bright field where signs hover and the ellipse itself threatens to become the score, not its frame.

I exploit this field with a practical ruthlessness. Cells are introduced, then split, then mirrored, then extended laterally until they function as durations rather than events. A black block lands like a slag deposit. Adjacent dots descend as if sifting through a grate. Arrows and anchors ask for pressure, not emphasis. There are passages where a single band, narrow and acidic, is asked to carry breath or bow noise while all other behavior is suppressed. The effect is not atmospheric. It is clinical. You feel what Richter made you feel when he sealed color behind glass. Sensation, then a layer of mediation, then the knowledge of your own looking or listening.

Material choices intensify the parallel. Richter’s strips sat under Lucite that reflected the gallery and folded spectators into the image. My folios are drawn for glossy stock, sometimes Mylar, so light rakes across the page and throws a second score onto the surface in the form of reflections. Performers must read through glare. The physical delay becomes an audible one. Gestures arrive with latency and the room begins to play back at the players. When the ellipse returns as a dotted perimeter, it begins to feel like a map of indirect sound paths. Richter’s 6 Standing Glass Panes had already taught viewers to accept reflection as content. I turn that lesson into method.

There is another link. Richter’s color charts from the 1960s used factory paint chips to strip subjectivity from selection. The digital strips updated that logic for the age of code. My bands work in the same historical current. Ready-made pitch and duration are no longer sufficient, since they tie the music to a literacy that hides its industrial context.  The page becomes an array of operations that can be executed by a trained ensemble, with or without the cushion of tonal memory. Execution is the painting. The performance is not an interpretation of content. It is the release of pressure along a designed path.

The title announces the field of discourse. ECHOES FROM THE ANTHROPOCENE does not illustrate weather or lament the glacier. It models systems that exceed intention. The orbiting ellipse reads as a governance diagram. Inputs travel along the circumference. Outputs strike the core, are recorded in the bands, then return as changes in density or hue. A white blur across one square is not atmosphere. It is the visual equivalent of compression, the crush that occurs when flows exceed capacity. A vertical seam that interrupts the spectrum is not a column. It is a fault line, and the notational objects that perch on either side of it behave like instruments trained to live with rupture.

My directive language deepens the analogy. Instructions are compact, almost pharmacological. Duration feels like dosage. Repetition functions as interval. The score speaks in protocols that treat the body and the room like a joint patient. Short exposures to high frequency. Long exposures to infrasonic pressure. Breaks calibrated for recovery. In rehearsal the ensemble becomes a clinic. The parts keep a log. The same passage is administered twice at different amplitudes in order to observe how the hall metabolizes stress. Musical phrase gives way to measured release.

What does this produce in listening terms. First, an awareness of scale. The bands read as horizons, yet the micro-signs embedded within them demand close work. The eye and ear must shuttle between far and near. Second, a transposition of cadence. Instead of symmetrical phrases you receive cycles of accumulation and discharge that belong to weather systems and supply chains. Third, a reframing of virtuosity. Craft is still there, but the heroism is in calibration. The most difficult task is to sustain a held behavior without telegraphing aim. Richter’s end-stage strips looked like smooth color, yet carried a history of cuts so fine they were no longer visible. My end-stage behaviors sound like sheen, yet carry a history of rules and refusals.

Exhibition should honor this. The score functions as an object and as a protocol. Show the plates at eye level in a continuous frieze, so the visitor experiences the strip effect before hearing sound. Stage public rehearsals, since the work’s ethic relies on transparency. Present take sheets that document timings, failures, and recovered solutions. Install acoustic baffles in the shape of the outer ellipse, then let the ensemble play through them. You will hear the echo pattern that gave the piece its title.

I have translated a decisive lesson from late painting into a new language of musical inscription. Richter demonstrated that digital process can operate as a historical instrument, not as a fashionable trick. I take that stance and applies it to notation. The bands, the cuts, the mirrors, and the lateral pulls are not quotations. They are structural tools for composing in a century defined by replication, extraction, and feedback. The result is a score that thinks like infrastructure and sounds like pressure made audible.

You leave the room with a recalibrated ear. Horizontal color has become time. Glyphs have become valves. Reflection has become a voice. The echo is not a metaphor. It is the world answering back.