The Clarion Series (for C Trumpet) Continued...

 

 

Drawing With the Machine

In 1959 Jean Tinguely built a machine that made abstract drawings. He called the series Méta-Matics. You clipped a felt pen into a mechanical arm, fed in a sheet of paper, set the motor going, and the apparatus scribbled. The results were real drawings, sold, exhibited, sometimes produced by the thousand at exhibition openings while crowds watched. And they raised a question Tinguely clearly enjoyed and never quite answered: whose drawings were they? He built the machine, but he did not draw the lines. The machine drew the lines, but it had no intention. Somewhere between the two, authorship went missing, and the missing authorship was the point.

I think about the Méta-Matics constantly, because the question they raise is the exact question I live inside when I make a page. I work with an odd toolkit: the analog Exlicon drawing instruments, the Exlicon L and the Exlicon Lock, which are physical guides that constrain and generate certain curves and figures by hand; Dorico, which engraves musical notation to professional standard; Adobe Illustrator; and Catia, Dassault's industrial design suite, the software that engineers use to model aircraft fuselages and car bodies. That is a strange set of collaborators for a fanfare. And collaborators is the honest word, because none of them is simply obeying me.

Exlicon Drawing Instrument

Here is what people misunderstand about tools like these. They assume a tool is a transparent extension of the hand, that a pencil does nothing but transmit intention to paper, and that software is the same, only faster. That has never been true, and it is spectacularly untrue of an instrument that generates form. An Exlicon guide does not record a curve I already intended. It proposes a family of curves I could not have drawn freehand, and I choose among them. Catia does not draft what I imagine; it computes surfaces according to its own mathematics, and I discover what it hands back. The tool has a grain, and the grain pushes back, and the finished line is the record of a negotiation between what I wanted and what the apparatus was disposed to give. This is not a failure of control. It is the entire reason to use the thing.

So the composer's hand does not stop at a clean border where the machine's begins. There is no border. There is a zone, and the work happens in the zone. I set the constraints, the ratios, the ranges, the density, the shape of the gesture. The apparatus fills them out with a specificity I did not author and often could not have predicted. Then I judge. I keep, I reject, I push the constraint and run it again. The hand is upstream and downstream of the machine, in the setting of the rules and in the verdict on the results, but in the middle stretch the machine is genuinely drawing, and I am genuinely watching to see what it will do.

Tinguely understood something about this that the anxious version of the conversation misses. His machines were not efficiency devices. A Méta-Matic did not draw better or faster than Tinguely could have drawn; it drew differently, with a mechanical indifference no human hand can fake. That indifference was the gift. A person drawing a dense field of lines unconsciously smooths them, balances them, makes them tasteful. A machine does not care, and its not-caring produces configurations a careful hand would have edited away before they ever reached the paper. When I let Catia compute a fractured surface or let an Exlicon guide throw a curve I would not have chosen, I am buying access to exactly that indifference. I am importing a lack of taste on purpose, because my taste, left alone, is a set of habits, and habits are the enemy of the pages I want.

This is where I part company with the fear that the machine erases the composer. The fear assumes a fixed quantity of authorship, so that whatever the apparatus contributes must be subtracted from me. But authorship is not conserved that way. Deciding what a machine should be pointed at, building the constraints that make its output meaningful rather than random, and then exercising judgment over what it returns, that is composition, fully and without apology. The Méta-Matic drawings are Tinguely's. Not because his hand moved the pen, it did not, but because the entire situation that produced them, the machine, the setup, the framing, the selection, the decision to call the output art and hang it on a wall, was his. The situation is the work. The hand is only one instrument in it, and not always the decisive one.

There is a further point that matters to me specifically, because I am accused, with some regularity, of making things a machine could have made, or worse, of being a machine. And here the Tinguely comparison does real work. A Méta-Matic is not an autonomous artist. It is an apparatus with no idea what it is doing, producing form without meaning until a person supplies the meaning by framing it. My tools are the same. Catia does not know it is drawing a trumpet call. The Exlicon does not know what a fanfare is. Dorico will engrave nonsense as cleanly as sense. Every particle of intention on the page, the reason a line is here and not there, the reason the density breaks at this bar, the reason the accidental proliferates and then stops, comes from a person deciding. The machine supplies the how of the mark. The why is entirely mine. Confuse the two and you will think the page composed itself, which is exactly the mistake, and it is the mistake whether the machine in question is a motor from 1959 or a modeling suite from Dassault.

What I am really describing is an old arrangement wearing new equipment. The organ builder, the piano maker, the luthier all built apparatus that shaped what could be composed, and no one accused Bach of ceding authorship to the instrument that determined which notes were even possible. The pen that generates a curve is only a more visible version of the same bargain. Every tool proposes; the composer disposes. The Méta-Matic just made the proposal loud enough that you could no longer pretend the pen was neutral.

Exlicon Drawing Instrument

So where does my hand stop and the machine's begin? It does not stop. It changes register. Upstream I am a legislator, writing the constraints. In the middle I am a spectator, watching an indifferent apparatus do what indifferent apparatus does. Downstream I am a judge, and the judging is relentless, because a machine will hand you a hundred configurations and ninety-five of them are dead. The composition is in the law and in the verdict, and the machine is the wild, tasteless, generative thing in between that keeps my own habits from writing the same page twice.

Tinguely let a motor hold the pen and never once stopped being the author of the drawing. I let a fuselage-modeler and a set of analog guides hold parts of mine. The apparatus co-authors the page in the narrow sense that it makes marks I did not personally inscribe. It authors nothing in the sense that matters, because it wants nothing, means nothing, and decides nothing. That part is still, stubbornly, the person at the desk, setting the rules, and looking hard at what comes back.

New Clarion for Trumpet in C

 

The Devices on the Page; The Clarion Series for C Trumpet

 

The Devices on the Page

Two of the newer Clarion pages carry something that has drawn more questions than any tuplet ever has. Set among the notation, sharing the sheet with the stave and the dimension lines, are photographs of machines. A gauge panel with brass fittings and dial faces. A gear cluster on a bolted plate, stamped with a date. A machined coupling. A pump body in powder-coated colors, red and teal and yellow, standing on little feet like an appliance. They are rendered with catalog precision, lit like product photography, and they sit on the score as if they had every right to be there. People want to know what they are, and more urgently, what a trumpet player is supposed to do when the music runs into one.

Let me answer the second question first, because it is the wrong question, and the way in which it is wrong is the whole subject.

A score, we assume, is a chain of commands. Every mark on the page is an instruction, every instruction awaits execution, and anything that cannot be executed is either an error or a provocation. Under that assumption the devices are scandalous, because you cannot play a pressure gauge. But the assumption was never true, even of the most conventional page. A score has always contained more than its commands. The clef commands nothing; it orients. The barline commands nothing; it partitions. The title, the tempo word, the dedication, the engraver's spacing, all of it shapes the reading without ever being played. Notation is not a stream of orders. It is an environment the performer inhabits, and only some of that environment is imperative. The devices belong to the part that is not.

So what part is that. Look at where they sit. On the drafting-style pages, the whole sheet already speaks the language of the technical drawing: border grids, dimension arrows, detail circles, a title block with a drawing number and a scale. Within that language, the photographed machines occupy the position of the referenced component, the thing a drawing points to but does not itself constitute. An engineering sheet describes forces, tolerances, and connections, and somewhere there exists the physical part the sheet is about. My pages borrow that structure and then quietly reverse it. Here the notation is the machine. The fanfare, with its curved beam-fans and its stacked ratios and its accidentals crowding the noteheads, is the intricate mechanism the sheet documents. And the photographed devices stand beside it as its physical cousins, objects from the world of the buildable, placed next to a mechanism built entirely out of marks.

That adjacency is the meaning. The devices are on the page to assert a kinship and a difference at once. The kinship: a fanfare of this density is a fabricated thing. It has parts, clearances, load paths. Its tuplets nest the way sub-assemblies nest. Its articulation battery is a bank of switches. Its valve tablature is, without much metaphor at all, a valve tablature. I want the performer to see the notation the way a machinist sees an exploded diagram, as a precise assembly whose parts fit, and the fastest way to teach that gaze is to put an actual assembly on the sheet. The devices train the eye that then turns to the notes.

And the difference: the gauge panel is finished. It is closed, polished, complete, entirely itself, and it will never do anything again except be exactly what it is. The notation next to it is the opposite, unfinished by design, a mechanism that does not exist until breath moves through a player and comes out as sound. Set side by side, the photographed machine and the notated one interrogate each other. The device asks the notation, why are you so elaborate if you cannot even hold still. The notation asks the device, what good is your perfection if you have no next state. A trumpet realizes one of them. Nothing realizes the other. That asymmetry, which you can only feel when the two share a page, is as close as I can come to stating what a score is.

There is also a quieter register to the devices, and it lives in their details. Look closely and they carry dates, serial numbers, small stamped plates. These are the marks of provenance, the way manufactured things testify to their origin, this batch, this year, this inspector. Musical notation has almost no equivalent. A note tells you nothing about when it was made or who checked it. By importing objects covered in provenance into a field of marks that have none, the page asks which regime the music belongs to. Is a fanfare a manufactured article with a date of fabrication, or is it dateless, remade new at every performance. I do not answer the question on the sheet. The sheet exists to hold the question open.

Now, guidance, because performers deserve more than a philosophy, they deserve to know what to do with their eyes. Here is the practical doctrine. The devices are not events. They have no onset, no duration, no dynamic. Do not play them, do not translate them, do not treat them as graphic notation smuggled in photographic dress. They are load-bearing in a different way: they are the score's climate. Read them before playing the way you would read the title and the tempo word, as instruments of orientation. Let them calibrate your relation to precision. The pages they inhabit demand a machinist's exactness, tolerances, not vibes, and the devices are the emblem of that demand, standing on the sheet like the standard weights in a metrology lab. When the notation around them asks for a 43:22 in the time of a breath, the gauge panel nearby is telling you in what spirit to attempt it: not expressively, not approximately, but the way a fitter torques a bolt, to specification, with the whole body calm.

And when the passage exceeds specification, when the marks demand what the mechanism of lips and valves cannot deliver, the devices do their final work. They stand there, buildable and built, while the notation overreaches, and the distance between them becomes audible as strain. That strain is composed. It is the sound of a fabricated ideal being approached by a breathing person, and no page without the machines on it could make you hear it.

So the answer to what the devices are is this. They are the part of the score that does not command but presides. They tune the reader before the reading, declare the register of exactness, embody the finished thing the notation can never be, and hold open the question of what kind of object a piece of music is. Fifty-nine calls, and standing among them, a small population of perfect machines that will never make a sound, which is exactly why they belong there.

Clarion Series Continued...

 

Notation at the Edge of Its Own Failure

Notation at the Edge of Its Own Failure

Leopold Stokowski said the thing most musicians spend their careers politely not saying. Our notation, he argued, is extremely limited, primitive beyond all possibility. We write a black mark on white paper, we call it G natural or G sharp, and we congratulate ourselves on precision. But the mark records only the fact of a frequency. Music, he said, is a communication far more subtle than mere facts, and almost all of that subtlety escapes the page.

I want to take him at his word, more literally than he probably intended, because the sentence contains an idea most of us hurry past. If notation is a reduction, then every score is a lossy compression of something larger than itself. And a lossy system has a boundary, a place where the thing being compressed exceeds what the compression can hold. My claim is simple. That boundary is not a defect to be hidden. It is a subject, and it is the one subject notation is uniquely equipped to depict.

Start with what the black mark actually leaves out. It fixes pitch to a grid of twelve and rhythm to a lattice of halves and thirds, and it treats those two coordinates as the whole of the event. Everything that makes a single trumpet note that particular note on that particular morning, the exact weight of the attack, the microscopic drift of the pitch as the air stabilizes, the grain of the tone, the way the sound decays into the room, is either crammed into a handful of added symbols or, more often, simply omitted and left to a word like espressivo. We have built a system of astonishing rhythmic and harmonic precision that is, about most of what we actually hear, nearly silent. It is a ruler that measures length beautifully and cannot see color at all.

For most of history this did not matter, because the system was calibrated to the music it served. Common-practice notation is a superb instrument for common-practice music. The reduction is invisible when the thing being reduced fits comfortably inside the grid. You do not notice the walls of a room you never try to walk through.

The interesting thing happens when you push toward the walls on purpose. Add microtonal inflection to every note and the accidental, that quiet little sign, swells into a lexicon the staff was never designed to carry. Nest the rhythm past the point of clean subdivision and the tuplet bracket, meant to mark a modest exception, begins to stack into towers that the beat can no longer contain. Ask for more simultaneous dimensions of sound than a single line can bear, and the notation starts to buckle under its own specificity. This is the moment I am interested in. Not the failure of the composer, and not the failure of the performer, but the failure of the system, the point at which the marks are asked to hold more than marks can hold.

And here is what becomes visible only there. When notation is comfortable, you see through it, the way you see through a clean window to the view. You read the marks and think only of the sound. But when notation is strained to its edge, the window stops being transparent. You begin to see the glass. The apparatus of representation, ordinarily invisible, becomes the thing you are looking at, and you are suddenly aware that music was always passing through a system, a grid, a set of conventions, a reduction, and that the reduction was never neutral. The strained page shows you the frame that the comfortable page hides. It makes the medium visible by overloading it, the way you only notice a language when someone bends it past its grammar.

This is why I keep drawing the pages I draw, and why I am unmoved by the objection that they contain instructions no single player can literally execute at once. Of course some do. That is not an oversight. It is the boundary made visible. A score that specifies a little more than a hand can perform is doing, in miniature, exactly what Stokowski described, holding more than the reduction can carry, and letting the overflow become part of what the page is about. The impossibility on such a page is not fantasy. It is the honest residue of a system depicting its own limit, and a trained reader resolves it into sound through a hierarchy of priorities, the way a figured bass or a densely marked Baroque part has always been resolved. The excess is real, and it is also playable. Both things are true, and the tension between them is the point.

There is a deeper reason this matters, beyond any individual score. Every representational system eventually has to decide what to do about its own edge. It can pretend the edge is not there and stay forever in the comfortable middle, producing only what the grid can hold cleanly. Or it can go to the edge deliberately and make the edge its subject. Painting did this when it stopped hiding the brushstroke and began to show the paint as paint. Architecture did it when the drawing itself, the unbuildable proposal, became the work. Notation can do it too. A score can be about sound, and a score can also be about the act of trying to write sound down, about the gap between the thing and its record. The second kind is rarer, and it is the kind I am after.

Stokowski meant his remark as a lament, a sigh about how little the marks capture. I hear it as an invitation. If the marks capture so little, then the space between the marks and the music is enormous, and that space is unexplored territory. To write at the edge of notation's failure is not to abandon the system. It is to stand at its farthest wall and describe, in the system's own language, what lies just beyond the reach of the system. The page cannot hold the whole of the sound. It never could. But it can hold the shape of its own insufficiency, and there is more truth in that admission than in a thousand pages that pretend the window is not there.

The black mark on white paper is primitive, exactly as he said. That is not a reason to stop making marks. It is a reason to make marks that know what they are, and that are brave enough to point at the darkness just past the edge of what they can say.

Fifty-Nine Calls and Counting: More pages from the Clarion series for solo trumpet

 

Fifty-Nine Calls and Counting

More pages from the Clarion series for solo trumpet

When I first wrote about Clarion, the series had grown from one page to six, and six had somehow announced that it intended to become fifty-nine. That seemed excessive at the time. It still does, which is probably why I am continuing.

The basic rule remains unchanged: one trumpet, one page, one call.

Each work is complete on a single sheet. Nothing turns over, nothing continues on the back, and nothing asks the performer to return to the beginning. The entire piece is visible before it is played. The eye can see where the call starts, where it rises, where it gets itself into trouble, and where it finally stops.

The new score images make clear that the series has become less like a collection of fanfares and more like a population of strange little machines.

Every page has the same essential materials: a five-line stave, notes, breath, valves, mutes, articulations, dynamics, rhythmic ratios, microtonal signs, and a player trying to make the whole contraption work. But each page organizes those materials differently. One becomes a tower. Another becomes a staircase. Another looks like it has been assembled from brackets, cables, and badly behaved plumbing.

This was not entirely planned.

One stave, many attachments

The stave remains the main structural line in each Clarion. Everything else clips onto it, grows from it, hangs beneath it, or threatens to bury it completely.

A trumpet note is rarely just a trumpet note in these works. It may arrive with a valve combination, a cent deviation, a partial number, a tongue pattern, a breath instruction, a vibrato rate, a bell direction, a mute position, and several reminders that all of this must happen very quickly.

The result can look disproportionate. A note lasting less than a tenth of a second may require an alarming amount of printed machinery. A long high note may appear simple until the surrounding instructions reveal that the player is expected to alter almost everything about it while pretending it is still one sustained sound.

This imbalance is part of the fun.

The score shows the amount of work hidden inside a small event. The audience may hear one bright attack. The player sees a construction project.

Not every call behaves properly

The traditional fanfare is confident. It announces the king, the ceremony, the victory, the beginning of something important.

The Clarion calls are not always so sure of themselves.

Some rise magnificently and then stumble. Some arrive at a high note and refuse to leave. Some begin with great authority and end in a tiny exhausted click. Others seem to spend so much time preparing to make an announcement that the actual announcement is nearly over before it begins.

This does not make them anti-fanfares. They still project outward. They still summon, signal, interrupt, and make themselves heard. They simply acknowledge that a call can be awkward, damaged, overprepared, misdirected, or slightly ridiculous.

A trumpet can declare. It can also panic.

Why fifty-nine?

Fifty-nine is large enough to be unreasonable but not large enough to become infinite.

Sixty felt too tidy. It sounds like a complete set, a commemorative edition, or a box containing exactly the right number of objects. Fifty-nine keeps the series one page short of that comfort.

It also allows the individual pieces to behave very differently. One can be nearly empty. Another can be crammed with nested tuplets and accidental towers. One can be ceremonial, another comic, another stubborn, another almost silent. No single page has to explain the entire project.

The volume carries the identity. The pages are free to misbehave.

Scores as images

The new images also emphasize something that performance cannot: the whole call can be seen at once.

Sound moves through time. The page does not. On the page, the opening attack, the central high point, the descending cascade, and the final isolated note all coexist. The viewer can jump between them, notice repeated shapes, compare densities, and spot small visual jokes before hearing anything.

This is especially useful in a series where the notation sometimes becomes architectural. Beams turn into cantilevers. Brackets become frameworks. Curves resemble ducts, cables, or pressure lines. Accidental signs stack into small totems beside the noteheads.

The pages are visual objects, but they remain scores. The marks are not simply there to make an interesting picture. They ask for specific actions, or at least for very specific attempts.

That last distinction matters.

The performer gets the final word

However detailed the notation becomes, the player is never just operating a machine.

At a certain point, several demands collide. A fingering complicates an articulation. A mute change interferes with a rapid passage. A microtonal deviation becomes difficult to stabilize while the pitch is moving through several partials. The notation may be precise, but the performance still requires judgment.

The player decides what must remain exact, what can bend, and how an apparently simultaneous collection of instructions can become one physical gesture.

This is not a flaw in the score. It is where the score becomes interesting.

The page proposes an event. The performer discovers what kind of event it can actually become.

A growing crowd of calls

As more pages are added, the works begin to answer one another.

A gesture from one piece returns in another, slightly altered. A high note that once served as an ending becomes an opening. A rhythmic shape migrates to a different register. A mute instruction reappears in a new context and seems to have acquired a different personality.

The connections are not organized into a grand narrative. They are closer to echoes, misremembered signals, or messages picked up from somewhere else in the volume.

That may be what the series has become: not one long statement, but fifty-nine attempts to get someone’s attention.

Some calls are clear. Some are overloaded. Some are heroic. Some are comic. Some appear to have been designed by an engineer who had never met a trumpet player.

Together they form a volume of announcements, alarms, summonses, interruptions, and small acts of unreasonable confidence.

The first Clarion stated itself and stopped.

The others apparently heard it.