Renee Baker 

Ancient to the Future on Paper: AACM, BAG, Braxton, and Renée C. Baker in My Scores

The scores on my desk treat the page as an ensemble. They invite players into a field where image, text, and procedure share authority. That ethic comes directly from three sources in Black experimental music: the AACM, the Black Artists Group, and Anthony Braxton. It comes alive most vividly when AACM musicians perform the work, especially the visionary violist, composer, conductor, and leader Renée C. Baker.

Art Ensemble of Chicago

AACM: self-determination as form

The AACM taught me that composition is also institution building. The collective designed schools, ensembles, and performance infrastructures, then wrote music that assumed those structures. I translate that into pages that behave like micro ecologies. Layers of glyphs, legend blocks, and verbal modules operate as policy rather than decree, so the performer enters a civic space with rules that can be bent. Instrument choice functions as governance, not ornament. When a line moves from brass phonation to air noise to typography as articulation, the piece is shaping time and attention through the identity of tools, a very AACM move.

BAG: multidisciplinarity as engine

BAG’s theatre, poetry, dance, and visual art did not sit beside the music, they powered it. I think of each score as a set that must be staged, even in silence. Materials and graphics carry risk and residue. Bureaucratic type, pharmacological schemas, and industrial markings slip into the field, so that civic context becomes playable content. The result is not collage, it is conjunction as composition, a core BAG lesson.

Anthony Braxton - Score-Compositions No. 10 and No. 16

Braxton: systems that invite you in

Braxton’s Language Music and Ghost Trance Music offer a model of freedom engineered by pathways. A page can be a map with corridors, gateways, and re-entry points. My modular ribbons and diagrammatic wayfinding let players dock to a through line, depart, then rejoin with memory intact. Structure produces volition. The notation becomes a consent architecture that licenses choice without losing ensemble identity.

When AACM musicians realize the page

The ideas above are not theoretical for me. I have been fortunate to hear AACM artists perform these scores, including Renée C. Baker. Baker’s career links string virtuosity, large scale composing, and the creation of institutions. As founder and director of the Chicago Modern Orchestra Project and as a member of the AACM, she builds the very contexts that new music requires. Her conduction-like leadership supplies a live protocol for negotiated form. Gesture becomes a switching language. Cue vocabularies align with symbol families. Ensemble memory keeps the spine taut while local decisions bloom.

Baker’s cross-media work is equally instructive. Her new scores for early Black cinema treat sound as a curatorial frame for image and history. That sensibility mirrors my own interest in pages that hold archival traces and speculative futures at once. Audience formation is part of her composition practice, and that expands what my scores can do in the room. The music is not only a sonic object, it is a social event that teaches its own literacy.

Anthony Braxton

What this changes for performers

Agency arrives with guardrails. The page explains itself through keys and modules, yet refuses to close. Players read stagecraft, not only pitch and rhythm. Roles can rotate, and leadership becomes a function of need rather than rank. Navigation becomes audible, choices register as form, and the ensemble hears its own system as it plays it.

'Unsent Compounds for French Horn'

A compact analogy

AACM gives the ethic of system building, BAG gives the engine of convergence, Braxton gives the syntax of navigation. Baker connects all three in performance, turning the notation’s invitations into lived practice. The page is a commons, the rehearsal is already inside the paper, and the music steps forward carrying both memory and possibility.