Performance Guidance for a Soloist: Notes on a New Piano Score

For the past few weeks I have been posting pages from a new score for solo piano. What you have seen is the core: staves that move between familiar notational signs and alternate tablatures, spatial cues that stretch time, color fields that behave like dynamics, symbols that suggest attack or touch rather than pitch alone. The pages look finished, yet they are only the hull. This work lives equally in what I call Performance Guidance, a set of parallel documents that are longer than the core score and just as binding on the imagination.

Cardboard Ready-Made (a.k.a. Thomas Demand)

How the pages are made

My studio moves between screens and benches, vector paths and stained rags. On the digital side I work across the Adobe Creative Suite. Illustrator carries the glyph families and proportional grids. Photoshop holds the surface weather, abrasions, and accumulated micro-histories. Substance 3D Designer, Stager, and Dimension let me model notational depths, cast shadows from signs onto other signs, and proof how a symbol reads when it behaves like an object. InDesign assembles the folios and keeps the structure legible. Fontographer is close at hand for the letterforms I cannot find elsewhere. The Astute Manager plug-ins extend precision and chance in equal measure. Topaz Gigapixel is a finishing tool when a plate must scale for the wall without surrendering grain.

Page from Core Score

The analog bench is just as crowded. Conventional oils, pastels, and pencils talk to the page first, then I bring in less dutiful materials: film strips, mica flakes, molten salt, conductive ink, xylene, fur, saffron, colored pencil layered into metallic spray foam, liquid metal under a wash of gilding adhesive, thermochromic and photochromic metallic paints that change their mind with light and warmth, even traces sculpted by methylene chloride. I do not treat these as special effects. They are extensions of the instrument. The piano is wood, felt, steel, and air. The page should answer in kind.

Segment from Core Score with Crafted Neologisms

What you are looking at

The posted leaves show two things at once. They carry a performable top line for any pianist who can live with alternate reading, and they display a map of behaviors that the Performance Guidance activates. The symbols are less about dictation than about permission. A cluster in ink might function as a corridor, a pattern of pedaling, or a local choice between resonance and refusal. Traditional notation appears where certainty is needed, often as a point of return after a detour through the graphical systems.

Customized Crafted Pill with Neologism for the Core Score

The Guidance

Alongside the score sits a portfolio of texts. It includes a short story, a radio drama, a sonnet, a memoir, a privacy policy, a weather log, and a short parody. Each may be read privately as preparation or folded into the performance as spoken or projected material. Some performers will stage the texts, others will let them haunt the playing from inside.

Why put literature next to a piano part. Because performance is not only a chain of actions. It is a stack of attentions. The pianist carries body memory, social memory, and the present air of the room. The Guidance addresses those layers in different dialects.

Footnotes from the Short Story

• Short story. Narrative teaches arc. A story invites the pianist to steer tension and release across a span larger than a phrase. Read it before playing and you will shape rubato with a novelist’s patience. Speak parts of it aloud and time becomes architectural, a set of rooms the music must cross.

• Radio drama. Radio reminds us that signal and noise share a wall. The pianist learns how to color loudness without volume, how to move a scene with only rhythm and timbre. If performed, the drama becomes a second instrument that frames the keyboard like a soundstage.

• Sonnet. Fourteen lines teach proportion. The rhyme logic, even when it is slant or hidden, calibrates breath and cadence. The sonnet’s turn becomes a hinge for a musical modulation. It is a clinic in inevitability.

• Memoir. First person writing encourages risk and intimacy. The memoir is an ethics policy disguised as memory. It asks for tone without decoration, sincerity without cliché. That discipline helps the pianist place a single sustained note without apology.

• Privacy policy. Bureaucratic language has its own poetry. Clauses, subclauses, consent, exceptions. This text models rigor and care. It shapes a performer’s sense of boundary, what can be disclosed and what must remain secret inside the keys. Read aloud, it becomes percussion.

• Weather log. Barometric drift is a tempo map. Cloud, pressure, wind, visibility. The log gives the pianist a way to grade dynamics as if shading a sky. Moving from scattered to broken to overcast teaches gradation better than any decibel scale.

• Parody. Comedy is a lesson in timing. The parody invites the player to break character and then recover, to test how far a gesture can stretch before it snaps. It also keeps the room human.

The point is not to decorate a recital. The point is to enlarge authorship. The pianist is asked to make choices that are not only technical but ethical and narrative, to hear the score as a site where multiple literacies meet. This Guidance treats preparation as part of composition. When a performer reads, the music has already begun.

Core Score Element (Statue of a Deity, Cotton sculpture, Shamtazz!)

Why length matters

People notice that the Guidance is longer than the core score. That is intentional. The notes we put on a staff are a small region of the performance’s territory. By making the paratext heavier, I weight the performer’s imagination. I want rehearsal to be audible in the final account. The tradition of “performance notes” often sits at the back of a part like a footnote. Here it moves to the front and assumes the size of a partner.

Notational Iconography created in Illustrator

On interpretation

None of this cancels clarity. The pages include conventional notation where it serves the argument: voices that must align, pedal figures that depend on exact distances, attacks that need standard names. The alternate tablatures do not obscure pitch so much as redirect attention. Some passages draw the eye over the page like a path in sand. Others freeze the gaze until a threshold is crossed. The pianist learns to read with the whole body.

Closing

When I am asked what tools I use, I answer with the list because the list matters. The software gives me precision and an elastic patience for revision. The analog bench gives me friction and a place for chance. The substances stain, flake, burnish, and change. Those changes become part of the score’s instruction, a reminder that a page is a living surface, not a transparent window.

The work is written for a soloist, yet it assumes an ensemble of selves: reader, actor, witness, technician, timekeeper. The Guidance recruits all of them. What you hear in performance is the piano, of course, but you also hear weather moving across paper, policy negotiating consent, a memory saying yes, a joke arriving on time, a sonnet turning its corner. That is the music I want to share.