The Score as Cognitive Ecology

For most of my working life I accepted a quiet assumption that sits underneath almost everything written about notation. The assumption is that a score instructs. You write it, a performer reads it, and if both of you have done your jobs the sound that results is the sound you intended. The page is a set of commands. The performer is the processor. Music is what happens when the commands run.

I no longer believe this describes what I do, and I am not sure it ever fully described what anyone did.

The recent body of work has forced the issue. Somewhere in the making of these pages the score stopped behaving like a list of instructions and started behaving like an environment. Not a message passed from one mind to another, but a place a mind has to enter and move through. I have started calling this the score as cognitive ecology, and I want to take the time here to say exactly what I mean by it, because the phrase is easy to wave around and much harder to earn.

From instruction to ecology

An instruction assumes a clean separation between the thing that commands and the thing that obeys. The score is active, the performer is passive, and meaning flows in one direction only. That model is efficient, and for a great deal of music it is entirely adequate. I have no argument with the composer who wants a C sharp played mezzo forte and writes exactly that. The instruction works because the world it describes is small and settled.

An ecology is different in kind, not just in degree. In an ecology nothing is purely active or purely passive. Every element conditions every other element, and the behavior of the whole cannot be predicted from any single part. When I say these pages behave like ecologies I mean that they are feedback systems. The reader changes the page by reading it, and the changed page changes the reader in turn, and there is no final state where the reading is simply complete. Semiotic overload, architectural suggestion, and graphic vibration are not decorations laid on top of the notation. They are the weather of the environment, and they act on the performer continuously, the way humidity acts on a body without ever being addressed to it.

Consider the pages I titled DOLAVANCE and LAVYNTIA. I resist calling them pieces, because the word carries the wrong assumptions. They are closer to spatial economies. Industrial design, linguistic suggestion, and performative typography meet on a single field and refuse to sort themselves into a hierarchy. There is no layer that is obviously the music and no layer that is obviously the frame. A form that reads as a machined bracket in one glance reads as a dynamic envelope in the next. A word that looks like a title turns out to be a passage you are meant to play, or to fear, or to pass through. These pages establish temporary worlds, and inside those worlds the ordinary logic of reading is bent just far enough that the performer has to build new logic on the spot.

This is the crucial move, and it is worth saying plainly. The score no longer directs. It pressurizes. It creates conditions dense enough that a response becomes necessary, without specifying what the response must be. The performer is not decoding a message I encoded. The performer is surviving a situation I built.

What drifts, and why it matters

The most visible symptom of this shift is that symbols come loose from their classical moorings. On a conventional page, position is destiny. A notehead means what it means because of exactly where it sits on the staff, and the entire apparatus of Western notation is a machine for making position unambiguous. When I let symbols drift across the field, unmoored from that alignment, I am not being careless and I am not being decorative. I am removing the guarantee that position provides, and I am asking the performer to supply, from their own body and history, the certainty the page has withdrawn.

Something strange happens once that guarantee is gone. Timbral cues begin to dissolve into volumetric geometries. A sonic gesture stops being a set of notes and becomes an object with mass and edges, and an object with mass and edges starts to imply a sound. The traffic runs both ways. Sound becomes thing, thing becomes sound, and the border between the two, which notation normally polices with great vigilance, is left deliberately open.

I want to be careful here, because there is a lazy word waiting to be used and I refuse to use it. This is not interdisciplinary work. Interdisciplinary suggests separate disciplines brought politely into the same room, each keeping its own coat on. What I am describing is not a collaboration between fields. It is a single entangled environment in which sound, symbol, code, and contradiction were never separate to begin with. The synthesis is not added at the end. It is the ground condition. The reading is ecological because the elements coevolved, and none of them can be extracted without killing the others.

Typographic noise as material

If there is one development in these works that I would point a newcomer toward first, it is the changed status of language on the page. In my earlier scores, language functioned mostly as interference. It got in the way of the notation, and the getting in the way was the point. That was a useful stage, but it kept language in a subordinate role. Interference is still defined by the thing it interferes with.

In the recent pages language has been promoted. It is no longer annotation. It has become topography, volume, and terrain, which is to say it has become something the performer walks across rather than something the performer reads. I have started to think of these dense passages as semiotic condensates. A condensate is what you get when you cool a substance until its particles collapse into a single shared state, and that is close to what happens when letterform, metallic geometry, and sonic implication are compressed hard enough. They stop being separate signs. They become one dense node of visual sound that ripples outward across the rest of the field.

The pages I called ACTEMBRATE and BOLRIBINE are where this is most advanced. I think of them as a hypermodern baroque. Baroque because they are maximal, ornamented past the point of comfort, horror of the void made visible. Hypermodern because the ornament is not floral but industrial, letterform fused with machined geometry until the type itself produces a kind of sonic texture. These are not instructions and they were never meant to be. They are noise surfaces, and their richness lives precisely in their unreadability. The illegibility is not a failure of the design. It is the content. A surface you cannot fully read is a surface that keeps giving, because it never resolves into a single settled meaning and hands you nothing to file away and forget.

This changes what a letter is. A letter has always been a symbol of language, a stand in for a sound in speech. On these pages a letter is a carrier of sonic behavior in a much broader sense. Some words are playable, and the performer is meant to find the sound folded inside the shape. Some words are obstacles, placed to block a path the eye wanted to take, and the blockage is a musical event in itself. And many words are thresholds. They mark the exact line where interpretation ends and speculation begins, where the performer stops asking what I intended and starts discovering what the situation will allow. That threshold is the most valuable territory in the entire body of work, because it is the place where the music stops being mine and becomes theirs.

The wager underneath all of it

I am aware that everything I have described asks a great deal of the performer, and that some will read this as an abdication. If the score no longer instructs, the objection goes, then the composer has simply stopped doing the work and handed the burden to someone else.

I understand the objection and I think it is wrong, but not obviously wrong, so let me answer it directly. Building an environment is not less work than writing instructions. It is different work, and in my experience it is considerably harder. An instruction only has to be clear. An environment has to be alive. It has to hold together under a kind of pressure that a list of commands never faces, because it has to remain coherent no matter which path a reader takes through it, and it has to keep producing meaning long after a simple instruction would have been exhausted. The precision has not disappeared. It has moved. It now lives in the design of conditions rather than the specification of outcomes.

What I am really wagering is that a score can be a place to think rather than a set of orders to follow, and that music made this way is richer for everyone who enters it. Not richer because it is difficult, though it is difficult. Richer because it treats the performer as a mind rather than a mechanism, and treats reading as an act of inhabitation rather than obedience. The page is no longer a message I send. It is an ecology I cultivate, and then step back from, and then trust.

That trust is the whole art. Everything else is weather.

"Infinite Jester" for Tuba

Link to PDF File (Hi-Res)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/10e45Ra3RwCNQ-20GpHbGfnF681ISwEX1/view?usp=sharing

In “Infinite Jester,” through an entirely intuitive process, I test the particular sequence and rhythms of various notational mediums harnessing the emerging visual forces within my prescribed framework.  You will observe that the notational representation neither congeals in clusters or breaks out in a tumultuous manner.  The result is a closely woven tablature that opens up a sense of depth; yet it is an unstable arena, where the more the performer looks through the composition, the more the visual rhythms shift before the eye.

The syncopated changes subvert what would otherwise be a rigid structural order, generating the sense of disturbed equilibrium that forms the essence of the work.

“Monuments and Mirages: The Score as Relic, Reflection, and Remainder”

 

“Monuments and Mirages: The Score as Relic, Reflection, and Remainder”

In the shifting terrain of contemporary score-based performance, the role of the score itself, once a sovereign edifice of musical authority, has become more nomadic, unstable, and conceptually porous. 

My Ready-Made Compositions do not simply respond to this condition, they intensify it, drawing in deliberately jarring elements: the antique, the banal, and the iconographically enigmatic gazing ball. These ingredients are not stylistic gestures. They are philosophical intrusions, demanding that the performer reassess what it means to read, to reflect, to witness, and to enact.

The Score as Relic: Antiquity without Context

Antiquity, in this curatorial frame, does not enter the score as reverence or revival. It arrives fractured unmoored from chronology. Classical statuary, inscriptions, and pseudo-epigraphic glyphs are layered into the score like found debris from a civilization only half-remembered. These elements resist function. They do not serve as ciphers to be translated; they are there to haunt. The performer, confronting these symbols, experiences an archaeological imperative... an urge not to interpret as in music, but to excavate.

The presence of antiquity invokes remainder: not history as clarity, but as ghost. The score becomes a ruin in the Benjaminian sense, in which the past flashes up in fragments... never whole, never resolved. Thus, the performer’s role is not unlike that of a forensic archaeologist attempting to reconstruct a ritual from incomplete bones and ceremonial ash. What sound could emerge from a silent sarcophagus? What gesture from a broken frieze?

The Banal Interrupts the Sacred

If antiquity brings gravitas, banality is its corroding counteragent. Product packaging, grocery lists, JPEG artifacts, amateur typography, instructional signage populate the score, unapologetically. They arrive not to be mocked or ironized, but to rupture expectations. Banality is deployed as a critical decoy, a way to draw the performer’s attention to the assumed value hierarchies in reading. Why should one glyph feel “sacred” while another is dismissed as background noise?

This juxtaposition forces a collision between the revered and the discarded, between formality and detritus. The performative act becomes one of ethical navigation: what does it mean to give sonic or gestural weight to the mundane? Can the banal be exalted by the framing of a score? And if so, who holds the authority to exalt it?

In this regard, my scores function as notation-as-collage, where value is constantly in flux, and where the performer’s selections constitute a critique of canon, of prestige, of musical decorum. Banality is not a joke in this context; it is the terrain of truth.

The Gazing Ball: Mirror as Instrument

The most enigmatic of these inserted objects is the gazing ball.  It is an orb that is both ornamental and oracular. Borrowed from garden kitsch, from Koonsian irony, and from 18th-century landscape design, the gazing ball’s role in the score is not symbolic alone, it is performative. Its inclusion becomes a site of self-reference, a reflection machine that implicates the performer, the audience, and the surrounding space in the act of reading.

Placed within or beside the score, the gazing ball disrupts the flatness of the page. It reflects not content but presence of the performer’s own body, distorted. The audience, too, appears within its curved logic. The gazing ball transforms the score into a three-dimensional ritual zone, one that contains the image of the performance as it happens. It is both mirror and memento, creating a feedback loop where interpretation reflects interpretation, and no act of reading remains private.

In this sense, the gazing ball is not merely visual; it is philosophical. It calls into question the ontology of observation: who is watching, and who is being watched? Who performs, and who interprets? The ball becomes a literal beholder’s narrative, not embedded in the score, but refracted through it.

Imperatives in the Field

Introducing these dissonant materials of antiquity, banality, and the gazing ball into the field of performative composition brings with it a series of imperatives:

1. Reject Notational Totality: These scores dismantle the illusion that notation can fully encode intention. They require the performer to function as a critical subject, not a conduit.

2. Affirm the Interpretive Body: Interpretation is not secondary. It is generative. These works demand not technical precision, but perceptual reckoning.

3. Reconfigure Temporality: Antiquity and banality alter time in the score, one stretching it backward, the other flattening it. The performer must navigate these collapsed temporalities, creating a new temporality through gesture and sound.

4. Accept the Score as Object: The gazing ball resists dematerialization. It insists on the objecthood of the score, on its presence as thing, not just instruction.

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In this conceptual constellation,  Ready-Made Compositions become more than frameworks for sound. They become ritual objects, activating space, memory, materiality, and presence. Each score is not a piece to be played, but a situation to be embodied. The performer, as beholder, becomes composer anew.  One caught in the loop between looking and sounding, reflecting and being reflected, reading and being read.

The gaze is no longer one-way. It returns. It distorts. It implicates. It begins again.

"Binde – Call and To" for Alto Flute: Reading a Score That Thinks Like a Foundry

 

"Binde – Call and To": Reading a Score That Thinks Like a Foundry

The first impression: this is not a score, it's a drawing of a casting

Open the page and the eye doesn't find a staff. It finds a foundry drawing. One of  sprues, vents, a parting line, a locating key, a long tubular cavity running the width of the page. The header confirms the intent rather than hiding it: "Sustained Tone / Negative Mould Cavity / For One Pitch Band."   I am presenting, in the driest possible technical language, that a held tone is being treated as an object to be cast in metal, not a note to be read off a stave.

This is the governing idea of Binde – Call and To, and everything else on the page...those ratio ladders, the cent deviations, the exponential timeline, the pseudo-taxonomic labels radiate outward from that single conceit: sound as a poured, cooled, and vented material.

For a performer used to five lines and a clef, that's disorienting on purpose. My score asks you to stop reading pitches and start reading a process: how a tone is introduced (sprue), how pressure escapes as it fills (vents), where two pours meet and risk a flaw (the interference region), and where the mould finally releases the object (the parting line). The alto flute, in this reading, isn't playing melody... it's acting as the crucible.

The harmonic ladder: just intonation as architecture, not ornament

Center-top, a bracketed staircase of ratios climbs from the simplest interval to the most complex:

3:2 → 5:4 → 7:5 → 11:7 → 13:8 → 17:8 → 17:10 → 23:12 →
29:15 → 31:16 → 37:20 → 41:24 → 43:22 → 47:24 → 53:28 → 59:30

Each rung is a just-intonation interval built from a higher prime than the last.  This is a Stern-Brocot-like tree of rational tunings, not a scale in the tempered sense. The numbering to the left of each bracket (1, 5, 6, 8, 9, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19...) doesn't track scale degrees; it tracks prime limit.  How far up the harmonic series you have to reach to justify that particular ratio. It's the same lineage of thinking found in Harry Partch's 43-tone just-intonation gamut, Ben Johnston's extended just-intonation string quartets, and the Helmholtz-Ellis notation used by Marc Sabat and Wolfgang von Schweinitz ... all of whom needed a way to notate pitches that standard accidentals can't express.

That lineage explains the strange fanning diagrams in the top corners: two mirrored bursts of flats and sharps radiating from a single point, each stamped with its own micro-fraction (13/1.7/5 on the left, a denser mirrored fan on the right). These aren't key signatures in the traditional sense, however they're spectral fans, harmonics of a fundamental laid out as a bouquet of accidentals, the way spectralist composers (Grisey, Murail, and later Haas) notate the overtone series when it needs to be played rather than merely implied. Here the fan sits at both extremes of the piece, framing it: the work opens and closes inside a harmonic field, not a key.

The two isolated fractions, that of 13/56 on the left and 29/128 on the right,  sit like coordinates rather than time signatures. Read against the ratio ladder above them, they mark where in the harmonic lattice the two long lens-shaped tones underneath them are drawn from: the 13th and 29th rungs of the climb, at denominators of 56 and 128. In performance terms, these are the two most harmonically remote sustained tones in the piece.  These are the ones that will require the most careful lipping and breath-pressure control to locate and hold.

The four lenses: tones as optical events

Running through the piece are four dark, vertically elongated lens or vesica shapes.  They present as almond forms shaded from black at the core to pale at the edges, like an eye, or like two overlapping circles' zone of intersection. They sit directly above the casting-cavity diagram at four points along the horizontal timeline, and a large, faint oval traces the entire page, containing everything else inside it as if the whole score is itself one enormous lens.

Read together with the ratio-ladder and the fraction markers, these lenses are best understood as pitch bands rendered as depth-of-field.  The shading gradient standing in for the tone's stability. Dense black at the center: a pure, locked pitch. Pale, feathering edges: the tone drifting, destabilizing, opening into beating. This is a visual vocabulary borrowed less from music notation than from optics and lens-grinding diagrams.  It is appropriate, since the piece is already speaking in the language of another craft (foundry work) to describe sound. The player is being shown, quite literally, how "in focus" each sustained tone should be at its core versus its decay.

The black ring near the right-hand lens signals a torus, an eye seen head-on and reads as the piece's single moment of pure resonance: a tone with no directional drift at all, a closed loop rather than an elongated band. It's the calmest object on the page, and its placement just before the final sprue and locating key suggests it functions as the work's still point before release.

The mould itself: sprues, vents, and the interference region

The long horizontal cavity is the spine of the piece, and its foundry vocabulary maps cleanly onto breath and tone production:

• Sprue A / Sprue B — the two points where molten metal (breath, tone) enters the mould. These sit at the absolute start and end of the piece: the first attack and the final release.
• Locating Key (appearing at both ends) — the mechanism that ensures the two halves of a mould align correctly. Structurally, this is the piece's rhyme: whatever gesture opens the work should be recognizable, if inverted, at its close.
• Parting Line — the seam where the two halves of the mould separate once the metal cools. In performance terms, this is the fingering/embouchure "seam". It becomes the point of maximum instability, where a shift in air support could visibly (audibly) crack the tone.
• Vents 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11 — small outlets that let trapped air/gas escape as the metal fills the cavity, preventing a flawed casting. The absence of Vent 2 and Vent 10 from the labeled sequence is almost certainly deliberate: two silent, ungoverned moments where nothing bleeds off.  These are points of maximum internal pressure. These are strong candidates for the piece's two most exposed, breath-strained passages.
• The Interference Region — the single most important annotation on the page: "Pitch bands overlap. This band: +14.2¢. Neighbour: −11.7¢. (Attack may occur before it begins.)" This is the score's plainest instruction, and its most radical one. Two tones.  One pulled 14.2 cents sharp, the other 11.7 cents flat.  Theses are meant to beat against each other, and the performer is warned that the next attack may need to begin before the written interference has finished resolving. It's an instruction about overlap and impatience: don't wait for silence or stability before moving on.

The four small glyphs strung along the ticks beneath the cavity are tuning-fork-like marks paired with accidentals and small directional arrows.  They function as micro-cues: local reminders, at specific timepoints, of which direction to bend a pitch (the arrow) and by how much (the fraction beneath it). They're the score's closest approach to conventional performance directions, scattered sparsely rather than continuously, which keeps the player oriented without overriding the ear.

Time that grows like a shell: the golden-ratio timeline

Beneath the cavity runs a timeline from Datum 0.0 to 2,377.9, in units the score never names (most plausibly milliseconds, though a performer could just as reasonably read them as a proportional map of an 8-second span, since the final box states the whole structure resolves against "Event Duration of 8.000 seconds.")

The intervals aren't linear. From roughly the fourth marker onward, each value is close to 1.287–1.289 times the one before it.  It is a steady exponential growth rate, distinct from but reminiscent of the golden ratio proportioning found in Bartók's and Nancarrow's rhythmic structures, and of Xenakis's architectural approach to musical time (unsurprising, given Xenakis trained as an architect and thought about sound the way this score thinks about casting). The practical effect for a performer: events are packed close together at the start and spread increasingly far apart as the piece proceeds. The piece opens dense and closes dilated. Whatever happens in the first second happens many times faster than whatever happens in the last.

The four triangular fans at the very bottom of the page, growing from sparse lines to dense cross-hatching and back to sparse again, visualize this directly.  They are density maps of event-frequency across the timeline, confirming that the piece has a real accelerando/decelerando shape underneath its static, technical-drawing surface.

The closing tally of "Stack Total: ± 58.4 cents against event duration of 8.000 seconds" reads as the piece's summary statistic: across the whole eight-second unit the drawing represents, the cumulative pitch drift the performer is asked to carry (and resolve) totals just under 60 cents, a little over half a semitone. It's a small number for a page this dense and a reminder that Binde is a piece of fine tolerances, not large gestures.

The specimen labels: what "Vespa novedecimus" and "Apus undecimus" are doing here

Flanking the mould at each Sprue are two boxed labels, styled like museum specimen tags:

• Left: Vespa novedecimus — "nineteen-wasp" — 19/80, catalog 0295
• Right: Apus undecimus — "eleven-swift" — L.P./M.C., catalog 0292

These are invented Latin binomials, but they're not decorative Latin, they're coded. Novedecimus (nineteen) and undecimus (eleven) point straight back to the harmonic ladder: 19-limit and 11-limit just intonation, the two outer edges of the tuning system the ratio-tree climbs through. A wasp and a swift (one earthbound and stinging, one aerial and fast) stand in as characters for the two harmonic "species" that anchor either end of the piece, the way a naturalist's chart pairs an image with a name and a catalog number. It's a small but telling gesture: the piece wants its abstractions (11-limit, 19-limit) to also be creatures, with a body, a behavior, and a number in a ledger.  19/80 and 0295 on one side, an unresolved fraction, "L.P./M.C.," and 0292 on the other. Whether L.P./M.C. is read as a pressing/edition mark or as a tempo direction (lento poco / molto cantabile), it deliberately leaves the right-hand creature less fully catalogued than the left and swifter, harder to pin down, true to its name.

The title: Binde – Call and To

Binde is the German first-person verb "I bind." or, as a noun, a tie, a bandage, a ligature. Paired with the fractured English "Call and To" (very likely a deliberately severed "call and response," with the answering half withheld or left as pure direction.  A "to," a vector without a destination), the title mirrors the score's own logic: everything here is a binding-together of two things that don't quite resolve into each other.  Think two pitch bands that beat rather than merge, two mould-halves joined at a parting line that will eventually split them apart again, a call sent out with its response deliberately incomplete. The title isn't decoration; it's the same interference-region logic the score notates in cents, translated into two languages that don't finish each other's sentences.

Influences, in brief

Binde doesn't sit inside any single tradition, but it's legible against several:

• Harry Partch / Ben Johnston / Marc Sabat & Wolfgang von Schweinitz: For the extended-just-intonation ratio ladder and the HEJI-style fanned accidentals.
• Alvin Lucier: For treating audible beating between two close, deliberately mistuned frequencies as the actual subject of the piece, not an error to be corrected.
• Éliane Radigue: For the patience of the "sustained tone" framing, and the idea that a single held pitch can be a whole compositional world if you listen closely enough to its interior drift.
• Iannis Xenakis: For the architectural, almost engineering-schematic approach to time and material, and the exponential (rather than metric) handling of the timeline.
• Gérard Grisey / Tristan Murail (spectralism): For treating the harmonic series itself, rendered as a literal spectrum/fan, as compositional material.
• Industrial and technical draftsmanship more broadly (sand-casting and mould-making diagrams, specifically) as the score's actual notational language, borrowed wholesale rather than referenced in passing.

None of these are quotations; Binde doesn't sound like any of them individually. It's closer to a piece that took the diagrams several of these traditions produce as supporting material and made the diagram itself the score.

A performer's guide

For a flautist approaching Binde – Call and To on alto flute, a few practical anchors:

1. Treat the ratio ladder as your tuning reference before you touch the cavity diagram. Locate 13/56 and 29/128 on the ladder first (rungs 13 and 29).  These will be the two hardest tones in the piece to place by ear alone, and they're worth finding on a tuner or drone before rehearsal.
2. Read the four lens shapes as focus, not volume. A dense black center asks for a tone with almost no vibrato and rock-steady air support; the pale, feathering edges are an invitation to let pitch and timbre soften and drift.  Don't fight the decay into instability, lean into it.
3. The interference region is the emotional center of the piece, not a technical footnote. +14.2¢ against −11.7¢ is roughly a 26-cent gap It is audible, deliberate beating, not tuning error. Don't correct it. And take the instruction "attack may occur before it begins" literally: the next gesture is permitted, even expected, to overlap the unresolved beating rather than wait for it to settle.
4. Pace by the exponential timeline, not a metronome. Events compress hard in the first third of the eight-second unit and stretch out dramatically by the close. If you're using the timeline as a literal proportional map, expect the opening to feel almost rushed and the ending to feel suspended, spacious, nearly stalled. That asymmetry is structural, not a performance choice to smooth over.
5. Vents 2 and 10 are the pressure points. Because every other vent is marked and these two are conspicuously silent, treat the passages around them as the places where breath control is most exposed.  There is no scheduled release, so the player has to find their own.
6. Let the specimen labels inform character, not just tuning. The 19-limit "wasp" material (left/Sprue A) can be played with more grounded, articulated weight; the 11-limit "swift" material (right/Sprue B) invites more air, more velocity, less definition at the edges.

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Binde – Call and To asks a flautist to stop thinking of the alto flute as a melodic instrument for the duration of the piece, and to think of it instead as the thing pouring metal into a mould requiring patient, precise, alert to where the pressure needs to escape, and willing to let two close, unequal pitches sit in the same space without ever quite becoming one.

The New Compositional Lexicon: "Dectrition"

 

Dectrition (noun): The intentional process of eroding traditional musical notation through the integration of alternative visual, physical, and conceptual elements, resulting in the gradual degradation of conventional compositional systems. Dectrition in contemporary music compositions refers to the deliberate breakdown of standard notation, using methods such as iconography, sculpture, typography, film, and physical materials like combustion or oil, to create an abstracted framework where sound is interpreted through an evolving, non-linear, and multidimensional medium. This practice embodies the erosion of rigid musical structures in favor of fluid, subjective, and tactile engagement, pushing the boundaries of how music is both composed and performed.

Who Is The Score Talking To?

WHO IS THE SCORE TALKING TO?

Every score is written in the second person, and almost none of them say who they mean.

Open any page of notation and you will find imperatives. Play this. Hold that. Louder here. Wait. The grammar is unmistakably addressed. Something is being told to somebody. But the addressee is almost never named, and the moment you start looking for who is standing on the receiving end of all those instructions, the page turns out to be far stranger and more crowded than it first appeared.

There are at least five candidates. They want different things, they read the same marks differently, and most scores are talking to several of them at once without acknowledging it. That unacknowledged crowd is where a surprising amount of the trouble in this repertoire actually lives.

THE PERFORMER

The obvious answer, and the one everyone gives.

But notice how quickly it fails to hold. Consider a marking like a metric modulation equation, boxed and set above the system, showing that the previous sixteenth now equals the new triplet eighth. A performer does not use that. What a performer uses is the resulting pulse, arrived at through some combination of counting, feeling, and a conductor's arm. The equation is not an instruction to a body. It is a proof of consistency, addressed to whoever wants to check that the composer did the arithmetic.

The same is true of a great deal of what appears on a complex page. Nested tuplet brackets past a certain depth are not operative instructions in any practical sense. Cent deviations to two decimal places are not playable distinctions. They are true, but they are not being said to the person holding the instrument.

So the performer is one addressee among several, and often not the one being served by the specific mark you are looking at. The honest question about any notation on the page is not what does it mean. It is who needed this.

THE CONDUCTOR

An entirely different reader with an entirely different job, and much of what looks like performer instruction is actually conductor instruction.

The conductor reads vertically and structurally. They need to know what aligns with what, where the convergence points are, which line is load-bearing at any moment, and where the ensemble is most likely to come apart. Much of the apparatus of a complex score, the alignment of systems, the visual spacing, the placement of cues, is designed for that vertical reading and is of almost no use to the player of a single line.

This produces a genuine conflict that engraving practice quietly manages. What makes a score legible to the conductor often makes a part harder to read, and what makes a part comfortable often destroys the score's vertical logic. The existence of separate scores and parts is not a convenience. It is an admission that these are two different documents addressed to two different readers, and we have simply agreed to call them the same piece.

THE EDITOR

The reader nobody wants to admit is there.

An enormous quantity of notation exists to preempt editorial questions. Courtesy accidentals. Cautionary naturals. Redundant clarifications of things a competent musician would have inferred. None of that is for the performer, who mostly does not need it and occasionally finds it patronizing. It is defensive writing, aimed at whoever might later have to prepare, correct, or defend the text.

There is a second, larger category. The composer's own hedge. Markings that exist so that if something goes wrong, the score can be shown to have specified it. A metronome marking with a tolerance. A technique defined in a footnote that no player will read mid-performance. An ossia offered without conviction. These are not instructions. They are evidence, filed in advance, addressed to a future dispute about whether the piece was done correctly.

Once you see this category you see it everywhere, and it explains a good deal of otherwise puzzling density. Some of what looks like rigor is liability management.

THE FUTURE SCHOLAR

The addressee almost nobody will admit to, and the one whose influence on the page is most obvious once named.

There are marks in this repertoire that no performer will ever execute, no conductor will ever read, and no editor requires, and yet they are there, engraved to the same standard as everything else. Complete parametric specification of a gesture too fast to be parametrically controlled. Ratio numerals at the ninth level of nesting. Rhythmic notation that resolves at a temporal grain finer than human perception.

These marks are addressed to the record. They exist so that the piece can be analyzed, so that the system can be demonstrated to be consistent, so that a future reader can reconstruct the logic that produced the surface. That is a real and legitimate purpose. Documentation matters. But it is worth being clear that a mark serving that purpose is not talking to anyone in the room. It is talking past all of them, to somebody who will arrive later with a pencil and no instrument.

And the future scholar is a very safe addressee. They will never sight-read it. They will never come to you in a break and say this is not possible. They will read it exactly as slowly as they wish, which is to say, at the speed at which the specification actually makes sense.

NOBODY AT ALL

Which leaves the fifth possibility, and I think it is more common than the field would like to concede.

Some notation addresses no reader. It is not an instruction, not a structural aid, not a hedge, and not documentation. It is the composer talking to the composer, a record of the process left visible on the finished object, the way a builder's chalk lines sometimes survive on a wall. A ratio is written out fully because writing it out fully was how the composer thought it. A parameter is separated onto its own stave because separating it was the compositional method, not because anyone downstream needs it separated.

I do not think this is illegitimate. Some of the most interesting pages in the repertoire are pages where the method stayed visible. But it is a different thing from an instruction, and the page does not distinguish between them. A performer opening that score has no way to tell which marks are addressed to them, which are addressed to the conductor, which are filed for the record, and which are the residue of somebody else's thinking that was never for them at all.

WHY THE CONFUSION IS AN AUTHORITY PROBLEM

Here is why any of this matters beyond taxonomy.

Because the addressee is unnamed, every mark carries the same apparent authority. The courtesy accidental and the fourteenth-order tuplet are engraved identically, in the same ink, on the same staff, with the same implicit force. A performer confronting a page that is talking to five different readers at once has no principled basis for deciding what to prioritize under pressure, and under pressure something always has to be prioritized.

So they decide anyway, privately, and the decision is invisible. This is where performance practice actually comes from: an accumulated, unwritten, unaudited consensus about which marks are operative and which are ceremonial. That consensus is usually correct. It is also completely undocumented, which means every new performer has to rediscover it, and every composer gets to pretend it does not exist.

Naming the addressee would fix a great deal of this at almost no cost. Some composers already do it, informally, in performance notes. This system is approximate. This line is a guide, not a target. These values are structural and need not be audible. Every one of those sentences is a composer telling the truth about who a mark is for, and none of them weaken the piece. They make the page honest about its own crowd.

WHAT I THINK THE ANSWER IS

A score is not a message from one person to one person. It is a document held in common by several parties with different jobs, different competencies, and different stakes, and the reason it feels overloaded is that it genuinely is overloaded. It is doing five jobs while presenting as one.

The useful discipline, for anyone writing, is to go through a page and ask of each mark, one at a time, who is this for. Not what does it mean. Who is on the other end of it.

The answers are clarifying and occasionally embarrassing. Some marks turn out to be for the performer and are doing real work. Some turn out to be for the conductor and belong in the score but not the part. Some turn out to be for the record, and could be moved to a preface without losing anything. And some turn out to be for nobody, left on the page because they were part of how the thing got made.

Knowing which is which does not make the music simpler. It makes the page truthful about what it is asking, and of whom. That seems like the least a document written entirely in the imperative could offer the people it is ordering around.

"Immoral Geography" for Soprano Saxophone

 

"Immoral Geography" 

for Soprano Saxophone

Bil Smith Composer

Link to PDF

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sRWIVRMHbeTOVzXm7C25HJ4TlCmyHhcj/view?usp=sharing