CLARION #4
for solo trumpet in C — Performance Guidance
Preface: The Register the Piece Is Named For
Before any note is addressed individually, the title has to be taken seriously as an instruction. On the natural (valveless) trumpet, "clarino" or "clarion" playing refers specifically to the upper register of the harmonic series, conventionally the eighth partial and above, where the overtones sit close enough together to produce a usable diatonic and even chromatic melodic line without any mechanism to alter pitch. It is the register of Baroque florid trumpet writing, achieved entirely through the player's ear, air, and lip.
This score is built as if that historical fact were still true of a modern valved instrument. The numeral rows beneath the staff (discussed in full below) read far more coherently as harmonic partial numbers than as valve combinations: ordinary fingering charts never produce figures like 8, 9, or 12, but the natural harmonic series does, and a natural series pushed to absurdity produces figures like 859 or 983. The entire piece can be understood as a meditation on the clarion register taken past the point of physical possibility, an harmonic series extended, on paper, toward infinity, which the performer's body then has to negotiate back down into something playable. That negotiation, made explicit near the center of the piece with the single word cull, is the interpretive key to everything that follows.
1. Formal Overview
Read left to right, the piece moves through four zones:
Cluster/multiphonic zone (opening, ♩=88.3): dense stacked dyads over a bend-value row, under a mute-and-technique band.
Turn/threshold zone (♩=112.7): a triplet turn into the gradient notehead, a fermata, and the piece's most complex proportional marking (37/48 over 7/192) sitting directly on the double bar.
The cascade (from the pppppp seed tone through the ratio-fan to the flurry and "cull"): the structural climax, both visually and durationally the largest event in the score.
Closing gesture: three upward-bent arrivals on a single partial, resolving into the final dotted chord.
The long fff bracket running under nearly the entire piece (discussed in Section 8) tells you that this four-part shape is not a dynamic arc from quiet to loud. It is closer to a single sustained physical effort that happens to pass through a whispered moment in the middle.
2. Tempo and Proportional Time
Four tempi are given as decimals with stated tolerances: ♩=88.3±0.2, ♩=112.7±0.1, and two implied inside the bracket markings. No trumpet player, no metronome a player can watch and follow in real time, can hit 88.3 beats per minute and hold it to two-tenths of a beat. That is the point. These are not tempi to be metronomically verified; they are tempi to be aimed at with the same seriousness a scientific instrument would demand, so that the performer's relationship to pulse throughout the piece carries a quality of over-precision straining against the body's actual limits. Practice with a metronome capable of decimal BPM, internalize the feel of 88 that is very slightly held back from 89, and then let go of the metronome. The tolerance marking is a description of intention, not a pass/fail test.
The bracketed markings (± = 120 →|= 144, ± = 96 →|= 72, ± = 0 →|= :4, ± = 160 →|= 200, and the closing 40 →|= 32) are transition zones: begin loosely around the first value and arrive, by the marked point, at the second. Two of these are worth singling out:
± = 0 →|= :4, under the flurry, begins from stasis, effectively a fermata with no pulse, and accelerates into a proportional subdivision four times faster than whatever pulse preceded it. This is the notational engine that turns the ratio-cascade from a static fan of numbers into a physically executed accelerating gesture.
40 →|= 32, at the very close, is a deceleration into the final chord, the only tempo motion in the piece that slows into its ending rather than speeding toward a climax.
The stacked fraction 37/48 over 7/192, sitting exactly on the first double bar, is the piece's most extreme proportional marking: two layers of metric relationship (a coarser 37:48 ratio governing the surface tempo relationship across the barline, and a 7:192 ratio beneath it governing micro-placement within that new tempo) stacked on top of each other. Treat it as a tempo modulation pivot rendered at a resolution finer than ear or motor control can execute exactly. Land approximately; the numbers exist to describe the character of the pivot, an abrupt, mathematically over-determined gear change, rather than to be counted.
3. The Opening Clusters and the Multiphonic Reading
The four dense chords that open the piece are built from stacked seconds, consistently spelled with sharps in the upper voice and flats in the lower voice. A trumpet cannot sound four adjacent chromatic pitches as pure tones; it is a monophonic instrument. The only idiomatic way to realize a genuine pitch cluster on trumpet is the well-established technique of singing while playing: the performer hums or sings one pitch through the instrument while fingering and blowing another, producing a multiphonic dyad rich in difference tones and beating.
Read this way, the superscript 1 and 3 appearing over specific noteheads in the third and fourth clusters are valve numbers for the played component of each multiphonic, while the remaining stacked pitches indicate the sung component and its resulting difference tones. Practically: finger valve 1 or valve 3 as marked, and sing the interval implied by the surrounding stack. The consistent sharp/flat spelling split (sharps above, flats below) is not enharmonic carelessness; it is a visual key distinguishing the sung voice from the played voice at a glance, and should be treated as such throughout any passage where the two conventions recur.
The bend-value row underneath (7↓ 76↓ 73↓ 73↓ 72↓ 78↓ 68↓ ...) gives, in cents, how far below the written pitch each attack should be lipped or valve-vented before settling, or in the case of the outlying "7," barely inflected at all. These are not ornaments; they are integral to the pitch identity of each cluster, a controlled instability that should sound tuned to be almost, but not quite, in tune.
4. Mutes and Threshold Techniques
The symbols beneath the opening (an open circle, a circled minus, and the word "strait") mark a mute-state toggle: open bell, then stopped/muted, coordinated with the text "straight," almost certainly indicating a straight mute inserted at that point. This same open/closed vocabulary recurs later at "mute / straight, cup," specifying an actual mute change (straight to cup) synchronized with the flurry.
The handwritten, shaded instruction "FELLA-TUTE majah" is not a standard technique marking and appears nowhere in conventional notation practice; it should be read as an invented, piece-specific instruction. The most useful way to realize an invented compound term like this is componentially: it plausibly fuses "flutter" (flutter-tongue, a rolled or fluttered articulation) with a sustained, full-voiced ("major," full-throated) air stream, suggesting a flutter-tongued passage played with unusually broad, generous air support rather than the thin, whispery flutter more common in contemporary technique. Where a score deliberately withholds a legend, the performer's task is not to guess the "correct" answer but to commit fully and consistently to one physical realization across every instance of the marking.
The instruction "/kiss/", paired with a bidirectional arrow, calls for the documented brass "kiss tone": lips barely meeting the rim, air moving, no true embouchure buzz engaged, producing a breathy near-pitch. The double-headed arrow indicates this should be approached and left in both directions, that is, faded into and out of rather than attacked and cut off.
5. The Gradient Notehead and the Turn
At ♩=112.7, a small "3/2" sits above a looping arrow that curls down through a large, radially shaded oval notehead before rising back into a cluster of three grace-like notes. The 3:2 is a tuplet ratio (a hemiola against the surrounding beat) governing that loop's internal timing. The gradient notehead itself, shaded like a lit sphere rather than filled solid, is best understood as this score's marking for an indeterminate or clouded pitch: a tone whose center is stable but whose edges are deliberately blurred, realized as a slow lip shake or a wide, unmeasured trill whose rate is left to the performer, with the gradient's light-to-dark axis suggesting a swell and fade shaped into the tone itself rather than a fixed dynamic. The loop drawn through it confirms that this is a circular, returning gesture, arrive at the cloud, circle within it, and rise back out the way you entered, rather than a linear event.
6. Reading the Numeral Row as Harmonic Partials
The row of numbers running under the entire piece (/5, 9, 8, /4, 8, 8, 4, //, #, 5, ○4, 4/8/7, 859/983, 4·58, 112, 5:, 5:, 5:) does not correspond to any real trumpet fingering system; ordinary valve combinations never exceed the low single digits or simple pairs. Read instead as harmonic partial numbers, tied directly to the piece's title, the numbers resolve into something coherent:
A bare number (8, 9, 5) calls for that partial of the harmonic series, lipped and voiced as a clean natural harmonic rather than a valved pitch.
A slash-prefixed number (/5, /4) indicates the partial should be scooped or slurred into from below, an approach rather than a clean attack.
A compound sequence (4/8/7) is a fast slurred run across those partials in that order.
The circled 4 (○4) marks a moment of complete simplicity: an open, unmuted, untouched natural fourth partial, a moment of clearing before the cascade begins.
4·58 asks for a micro-tuned partial 4, lipped fifty-eight percent of the way toward partial 5, a controlled, sustained mistuning.
859/983, by contrast, describes partials that do not exist on any instrument. These are the piece's clearest gesture toward the impossible extension of the harmonic series, an idea rather than an instruction, and should be approached the same way as the ratio-cascade above the staff: as a notated horizon the performer gestures toward via the fastest, highest, most saturated lip-slur flurry the embouchure can produce, rather than a literal pitch to locate.
The closing 5: 5: 5:, paired for the first time with upward rather than downward arrows, calls for the fifth partial approached from below three times in succession, a triple arrival that functions as the piece's structural resolution after a piece otherwise dominated by downward inflection.
7. The Ratio Cascade: Excess and the Instruction to Cull
The fan of more than twenty arcs above the staff, each labeled with a ratio (2:9 at the smallest, up through 43:22 at the largest), all launch from the single pppppp half note marked "3/2" and land across a wide span culminating at the final chord. No single trumpet line can independently realize twenty-odd simultaneous ratio relationships; the notation deliberately exceeds what one performer, one instrument, and one pass through the piece can deliver in full.
That excess is not a mistake to be resolved by finding the "real" reduced version underneath. It is the piece's argument. Directly beneath this fan, exactly where the ratios collapse into the dense field of downward arrows and the rapid descending run, a single word is written: cull. This is the instruction for how to relate to everything above it: the performer does not attempt all twenty-plus ratios, and does not arbitrarily discard them either. The performer selects, in real time or in fixed rehearsal decision, which subset of that impossible density becomes the sounding gesture, while the page continues to hold the full, unplayed possibility space in view. What is heard is always a culling from what is written; what is written is deliberately more than any single hearing can contain.
Practically, this suggests treating the ± = 0 →|= :4 flurry as a single accelerating lip-slur/valve-tremolo gesture through the natural harmonic series, as wild and dense as the embouchure allows, landing on the mute change (straight to cup) exactly as the arrows thin out into the three final bare downward arrows. The specific ratios need not each be audible; their cumulative density should be.
8. Dynamics as Effort, Not Only as Volume
A single fff marking, under a bracket running from partway through the opening cluster section all the way through the cull and flurry, governs a passage that also contains a written pppppp at the cascade's seed tone and a breathy, near-silent kiss tone shortly before it. Taken as a literal volume instruction, this is a contradiction. Taken as a marking of physical exertion and air support, it resolves: the performer is asked to sustain fortississimo-level breath pressure, core engagement, and embouchure tension continuously across this entire span, even in the moments where the audible result is a whisper. The pppppp seed tone should feel, to the player, like holding back a scream, not like relaxing into quiet. This reading also clarifies the long-held ± = 64.9 ± 0.3 tempo bracket that spans the same territory: an extremely steady, effortful pulse maintained underneath surface material (clusters, bends, mute changes) that might otherwise pull the tempo around.
9. "You Are Not Looking": The Portrait as Instruction
The portrait fragment in the upper right, a face rendered in charcoal and wash, eyes open, gaze middle-distant and unreturned, banded across the eyes with the phrase YOU ARE NOT LOOKING, sits directly beside the densest, most visually overwhelming passage in the score: the ratio-cascade's twenty-plus overlapping arcs and labels. That placement should be read as deliberate rather than decorative.
Two readings work simultaneously and are worth holding at once rather than resolving into one. First, as a direct address to the performer: confronted with a page carrying more information than eye and mind can track in real time, the honest state of the performer's attention during the cascade is not-looking, an admission built into the score rather than a failure of the player. The practical corollary is permission: this passage is not meant to be sight-read with the eyes glued to every arc: it should be internalized in rehearsal to the point where the eyes can release the page, because the page itself predicts that they will. Second, as a description of the pictured face itself: a gaze that is open, attentive in form, but not fixed on anything returning it, an image of looking that isn't perceiving, hung directly over a passage that asks the performer to do the same. Whether the phrase addresses the player, the audience, or the face in the image, its function in performance is the same: it grants license to stop visually policing the impossible density of the cascade and to play the cull instead of the page.
10. Suggested Preparation Sequence
Learn the harmonic-partial rows first, away from tempo. Slur through the bare-number partials (5, 8, 9, 4) until they sit securely, then add the slash-prefixed scoops, then the compound sequences (4/8/7), before ever touching the impossible numbers (859/983), which should be approached only as a flurry-texture, not a pitch target.
Build the multiphonic clusters as sung/played dyads, isolating the valve-marked pitches (1, 3) from the sung stack, tuning the difference tones by ear before reintroducing the bend-value row's downward inflections.
Set the two core tempi (88.3, 112.7) on a decimal metronome, internalize them by feel, then rehearse entirely without the metronome, treating the stated tolerances as a description of expressive restraint rather than a measurable target.
Decide, in advance, what is culled. The ratio-cascade and the 859/983 flurry reward a fixed interpretive decision made in the practice room, not a different improvised reduction every performance. Choose a consistent, physically reliable gesture and commit to it.
Rehearse the mute changes (straight to cup) inside the flurry itself, since the instruction places the change during, not before or after, the densest material.
Let the fff/pppppp contradiction live in the body, not the bell. Practice the pppppp seed tone under full fff-level air support so the whisper carries the same internal pressure as the loudest material elsewhere in the piece.
Closing Note
Clarion asks a single question of its performer, repeated in different notational languages across every system: what do you do when you are given more than you can play? The tempo markings are more precise than a body can execute. The ratio-cascade is denser than one instrument can sound. The harmonic row extends past any playable partial. And at the exact center of that excess, the score answers itself in one word. You cull. The performance is not a failure to realize everything notated; it is the audible record of the choice made among everything notated, which is the only kind of performance this piece was ever asking for.
