"White Pumice Fossilizing the Dusty Heat Trap"
for Two Violas
This score proposes sound as geology. Its pages are not a conduit for transmission but a cooled field of forces, a crust where heat has already done its work and left pores, residues, and seams. The title names the process: pumice is lava arrested mid-eruption, air captured in stone. Likewise the notation captures motion as suspension. The two violas do not illustrate the image; they traverse it as one would a quarry face, reading strata and voids, learning how a surface stores time.
The architecture of the page is columnar. Translucent vertical bands of turquoise, sand, and bruise run from margin to margin like standing cores cut from a desert. These bands are not background. They behave as corridors that regulate pressure and temperature for the players. Within and across them, black micro-glyphs accrete into constellations, sometimes compacted into plates, sometimes dispersed as ash. The eye wants to read left to right, but the field refuses the corridor of staff notation and asks for vertical speculation, for the logic of a section rather than a plan.
At the top a calibrated ruler announces duration without prescribing meter. It is a measuring device, not a grid. Below, the glyphs adopt the role of fossils: legible imprints of actions whose vitality has already passed through. Bow pressures, sul ponticello shadings, harmonics, and tremors are notated as traces rather than commands. The two violas operate as paired instruments of excavation. One brushes, the other pries. Together they reveal pockets of air inside the rock, stretches of silence that are not absence but captured breath.
Along the bottom edge, each page carries a chromatic band of thin horizontal stripes. Their genealogy is painterly and deliberate. They recall the serial horizons of Gerhard Richter’s Strip works, images produced by sampling, slicing, and extending a painted surface until it becomes a barcode of color and memory. In this score the stripes serve a double purpose. They are an index of the page’s tonal climate and a navigational baseline. For the performers they function as a horizon line held in peripheral vision, a continual reminder of orientation while the central field pulls them into local detail. The stripes are the only element that runs parallel to the edge without interruption. They stabilize the reading the way a lintel stabilizes an opening.
Because the page refuses to be a corridor, navigation must be learned. The legend embedded in the mark-types offers a compact grammar: density equals porosity, distance equals delay, color temperature equals bow placement. The score thus behaves like a site plan in which space is already encoded with conditions of use. The violas step from band to band as one would cross rooms that retain different heat. Each crossing creates turbulence. The audible result is a slow exchange between cooling and ignition, between the matte grain of pumice and the friction of bow hair.
The music’s dramaturgy emerges from this spatial ethics. There are no central protagonists, no figure and ground. Instead there is sedimentation and weather. The eye recognizes pockets where the notation gathers into nodal reefs. These are not climaxes in a theatrical sense but pressure ridges where the ensemble must concentrate attention and technique. Elsewhere the writing thins to drift, and the players are asked to maintain tensile listening so that nothing collapses into indifference. The discipline is to keep air in the stone.
The two instruments are equals but not mirrors. Their tasks interlock as complementary erosions. When one traces the fine pitting of the surface with harmonics and flautati, the other sounds the deeper cavities with stopped tones and inflected bow angles. The score makes room for contingency...contours can be re-entered and re-read, yet it is not open in the casual sense. Its openness is that of a terrain where paths are many but geology is stubborn. You may choose the route, not the mountain.
In curatorial terms the work sits within a lineage that treats notation as matter. It shares with Arte Povera an insistence on process made visible, on the poor but eloquent intelligence of surfaces. The page is not backdrop; it is a partner that insists on its own physics. The “Richter” stripe at the bottom is the crucial curatorial move: a thin but authoritative device that connects the local to the global, the figure to the frame, the performer’s next choice to the memory of the page itself. It is the horizon that lets one read the weather.
To perform White Pumice Fossilizing the Dusty Heat Trap is therefore to practice a kind of fieldwork. The violists measure rather than decorate. They confirm the weight of each layer, test the porosity of each band, and use the stripe as a constant to recalibrate their bearings. The sound that results is not an illustration of the image but its corollary: a music of accretion, abrasion, and breath, where dust is not refuse but record. The page fossilizes heat; the players restore its temperature long enough for the audience to hear stone remember f
Link to Full Score - PDF
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TDCtC0Gz0AbDnx6VquZwd5he1WJ--bAt/view?usp=sharing
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