The Composer is not the Expert on Their Own Piece

THE COMPOSER IS NOT THE EXPERT ON THEIR OWN PIECE

Sound Morphology

I want to state something plainly that the last essay in this series only circled.

The person who wrote the piece is not the leading authority on it. On some questions they are the worst-positioned person in the building. And the field is organized almost entirely around pretending otherwise.

This is not a claim about intention or meaning, which are old arguments and largely settled ones. It is narrower and more uncomfortable than that. It is a claim about facts. There are specific, checkable, empirical questions about a piece of music where the composer's answer is systematically less reliable than someone else's, and we go on asking the composer anyway, because the alternative would require building institutions we have never bothered to build.

WHAT THE COMPOSER CANNOT KNOW

Start with difficulty, since that is where the previous essay left off.

Climbers grade routes, and no climbing community on earth accepts the first ascensionist's grade as final. Everyone who subsequently attempts the route votes, and the number drifts toward what the accumulated, embodied experience of many bodies actually reports. The reasoning is not complicated. The person who established the route solved it with their particular reach, their particular finger strength, their particular tolerance for exposure, over however many sessions it took, and by the time they were done they could no longer perceive what was hard about it. Their proximity is precisely what disqualifies them.

A composer is in exactly this position and has none of the correction.

I have spent, in a given piece, four months with a passage. I know which note came first and which arrived on the ninth revision. I know the fingering I imagined, which is almost always the fingering nobody uses. I know what the bar is for, structurally, and that knowledge silently smooths the difficulty every time I look at it, because I am not reading the notation, I am recognizing it. A performer opening that page has none of that scaffolding. They have ink, a deadline, and a body. Their encounter with the material is the real one. Mine was over before the piece existed.

So when I say a passage is difficult, or worse, when I say it is not that difficult, I am reporting on a mental object that has ceased to resemble what is on the page. And I will keep doing this for as long as anyone keeps asking me, because I am not lying. I simply cannot see it anymore.

THE LIST OF QUESTIONS

It is worth being specific about where composer authority actually fails, because the claim is not that we know nothing about our own work.

Where the difficulty is. Not whether the piece is hard, which any competent reader can see, but where the crux sits. Almost every composer I know has been surprised by this at least once. You brace for the passage you agonized over, and the ensemble sails through it and stops dead at three bars you wrote in an afternoon and never thought about again. Fifty performers hitting the same unexpected wall is data. One composer's expectation is a guess.

How long it takes to learn. Composers estimate rehearsal requirements badly and almost always in the same direction. We have no feedback loop that would correct this, because we are rarely in the room for the hours that matter, which are the private ones.

What is actually audible. This is the most uncomfortable item on the list. The composer knows what is written. That knowledge makes it very hard to assess what a listener without the score receives. The thirteenth-order tuplet is on the page. Whether it arrives as a distinguishable rhythmic identity or as a texture is an empirical question, and the person who wrote the ratio is the last person who can answer it, because they will always hear the intention through the result.

What the notation communicates. Not what it means. What it transmits. If eight performers independently read a marking the same wrong way, the marking is wrong. The composer's intent is not a defense. It is not even relevant. A specification that fails to specify has failed, and the only people who can detect the failure are the people who were not present when it was written.

Whether the piece works. Composers are famously unreliable here in both directions, championing the pieces that cost the most and dismissing the ones that came easily, as though difficulty of manufacture were a measure of value. It is a measure of manufacture.

WHAT THE COMPOSER IS THE EXPERT ON

The argument would be dishonest without this section.

The composer knows what was rejected, which is often the most valuable unrecorded information about any piece. They know why the fourth movement is short. They know which passages are load-bearing and which are transitional, and therefore where an interpreter has latitude and where they do not. They know what the piece is in conversation with. They know, usually, what would constitute a bad performance, even when they cannot say what would constitute a good one.

That is real expertise and it matters. But look at the shape of it. Every item on that list concerns the piece's history and its architecture. Not one of them concerns its reception, its difficulty, its legibility, or its effect. The composer is the leading authority on how the piece came to exist. They are an ordinary witness, and sometimes a poor one, on what it does now that it does exist.

We routinely conflate those two authorities, and the conflation is not innocent. It is how the first one gets used to settle arguments that belong to the second.

WHY THE FIELD IS BUILT THIS WAY

Because the alternative requires infrastructure, and infrastructure requires admitting that the individual authorial voice is insufficient.

A climbing gym employs route setters who watch. If nobody can do the crux at the intended grade, or if everyone finds it trivial, the route gets reset. The hold angle changes. The foot placement moves. This is a profession built on the premise that a difficulty judgment is a hypothesis tested against real bodies and revised when the bodies disagree.

Music has no equivalent and does not want one. A score is published and its difficulty becomes permanent, along with its reputation, its performance practice, and its errors. There is no mechanism by which fifty performances of the same passage produce a revision. There is no forum in which a claim about a piece can be collectively re-litigated. Some composers revise editions after performer feedback, and when they do it is described as generosity, which tells you everything. In climbing it would be called doing the job.

The result is that we have built an entire critical and pedagogical apparatus on a single unaudited source, and then we have made deference to that source a marker of seriousness. Ask the composer. Consult the composer's writings. Check what the composer said in the interview. All of it treating one person's account as evidence, when in most other domains that account would be considered the least reliable input available, precisely because of the informant's involvement.

THE PERFORMERS ALREADY KNOW THIS

Here is what makes the whole arrangement slightly absurd.

The distributed knowledge exists. It is simply unrecorded. Performers who specialize in difficult repertoire know exactly which pieces are sandbagged, which reputations are inherited rather than earned, which markings everyone quietly ignores, which passages have a standard solution that no score mentions, and which composers write beautifully for the instrument versus which ones write beautifully at it. They know all of this in detail and they mostly say it to each other, in rehearsal breaks, off the record, because saying it publicly reads as complaint, and complaint is a career problem.

So the most accurate available account of what a piece actually is lives in an oral tradition that is deliberately kept out of print, while the least accurate account, the composer's, is published, cited, taught, and consulted.

WHAT I AM ACTUALLY ASKING FOR

Not less authority for composers. A correct allocation of it.

Ask the composer what was rejected, what is structural, what the piece is arguing with. Those are genuinely composer questions.

Do not ask the composer how hard it is, how long it takes, what a listener hears, or whether the notation is clear. Ask the fiftieth performer, and then ask the fifty-first, and treat the aggregate as more authoritative than any single account including the author's. That is not disrespect. It is the ordinary epistemics of every field that takes its own claims seriously.

And write it down. The reason climbing grades converge on something usable is not that climbers are more honest than musicians. It is that they built a public record and argue in it constantly. We have the arguments. We simply hold them in corridors.

I have written pages I was certain were the hardest thing I had ever asked of anyone, and watched them turn out to be nothing. I have written bars I thought were a rest stop and watched three excellent players fail at them in exactly the same place, which is the clearest signal in the world that the fault is mine and located precisely there. Every time, the information came from somebody else. It could not have come from me.

The score is the only thing I actually know. Everything after it belongs to other people, and they are better witnesses than I am.

W.I.P.>>>>>>>>

 

Performance Guidance - Source Plate for Optical Score Aperture for New Project

 

 

Complexity Is Not Depth

One of the most persistent misconceptions in contemporary composition is the assumption that complexity and depth are interchangeable. They are not. Complexity is a measurable property of a system. Depth is a property of an experience.

A score may contain thousands of notes, nested tuplets, multiple layers of microtonal notation, independent temporal streams, and enough performance instructions to overwhelm even the most accomplished musician. Yet none of this guarantees that the work possesses depth. It merely demonstrates that it possesses information.

Likewise, a single sustained tone can reveal extraordinary depth if it is situated within a sufficiently rich conceptual, perceptual, or acoustic context. The question is never how much has been written. The question is how much continues to unfold.

This distinction matters because the history of music has repeatedly confused accumulation with significance.

The Baroque equated complexity with counterpoint. The serialists often equated it with organization. The New Complexity movement explored the limits of notation and execution. Algorithmic composers frequently celebrate computational richness. Each expanded the language of composition in important ways. Yet each also produced works in which the complexity became the destination rather than the means.

Complexity attracts composers because it is visible.

Depth remains invisible.

Complexity can be counted. One can calculate the number of pitch classes, rhythmic strata, stochastic parameters, recursive transformations, or spectral components. A computer can verify that one work is objectively more complex than another according to almost any chosen metric.

Depth resists every such measurement.

It appears as persistence.

A work possesses depth when it continues revealing new relationships long after its mechanisms have become familiar. It survives repeated listening because its internal ecology cannot be exhausted by a single encounter. Depth is less concerned with information than with inexhaustibility.

This is why certain medieval chants, Japanese shakuhachi pieces, Morton Feldman works, Javanese gamelan cycles, or the late string quartets of Beethoven continue to generate new meanings centuries after their creation. Their depth is not proportional to their informational density.

They remain alive because they continually reorganize the listener's perception.

Depth is therefore relational.

It exists neither in the score nor in the listener alone.

It emerges between them.

A useful analogy comes from architecture.

A Gothic cathedral is not profound because of the number of stones it contains. It is profound because every structural decision participates in a coherent spatial experience. Remove half the ornament and much of its emotional force remains. Remove its proportional logic and no amount of decoration can recover it.

Music behaves similarly.

Surface complication often conceals structural poverty.

Conversely, radical simplicity may conceal astonishing organizational richness.

The composer's responsibility is therefore not to maximize complexity but to maximize consequence.

Every gesture should alter the conditions under which subsequent gestures are understood.

Every decision should increase the number of meaningful relationships available to perception rather than merely increasing the quantity of information presented.

These are fundamentally different ambitions.

One produces density.

The other produces resonance.

The future of composition may depend less upon discovering ever more elaborate systems than upon discovering systems capable of generating inexhaustible perception.

The most interesting musical structures are not those that explain themselves completely.

They are those that continually produce new explanations.

Depth begins precisely where complexity ends.

Or perhaps more accurately.

Depth begins when complexity disappears, leaving only the persistent feeling that something remains beyond understanding.

THE CRUX On Notation, Climbing, and Who Gets to Set the Grade

 

THE CRUX.  On Notation, Climbing, and Who Gets to Set the Grade

Two essays ago I borrowed from critical theory to ask what happens to difficulty once it becomes fashionable enough to teach. One essay ago I borrowed from game design to ask whether difficulty and pleasure were ever really opposites. This time I want to go somewhere the series has not been yet, a discipline that has spent roughly a century building the most sophisticated public vocabulary for objective physical difficulty that exists anywhere, and that music, oddly, has never borrowed a word from.

Rock climbing.

WHAT A GRADE ACTUALLY IS

Climbers grade routes. A boulder problem might be a V4. A rock face might be rated 5.11c. These numbers look, from the outside, like the kind of fixed technical specification a composer might put at the top of a score, a tempo marking, a difficulty rating, an objective fact stamped onto the material before anyone has touched it. But that is not how climbing grades actually work, and the difference is the whole point of this essay.

A grade is proposed by the first ascensionist, the climber who establishes the route. But it does not stay fixed. Every subsequent climber who attempts the route effectively votes on whether the proposed grade is honest, and over months and years, the number drifts toward whatever the accumulated, embodied experience of the climbing community actually says the route demands. A grade is not a specification handed down from the person who made the thing. It is a rolling consensus built from everyone who has since tried to do it. Climbers argue about grades constantly, in gyms, in guidebooks, in comment threads, with the kind of granular seriousness usually reserved for religious doctrine, and this argument is not a flaw in the system. It is the system. Difficulty, in climbing, is understood from the outset to be a social fact, not a private one.

Music has never built anything like this. A score's difficulty is treated as settled the moment the composer sets the final barline, an intrinsic property of the notation itself, discussed forever after in the composer's own terms. Nobody revises a piece's reputation for difficulty the way a climbing community revises a grade. We inherited difficulty from the person who made the object and mostly never questioned it again. Climbers would find this bizarre. They have never trusted a first ascensionist's grade in isolation, because they understand something the concert world mostly does not: the person who made the thing is the single worst-positioned person to know how hard it actually is for everyone else.

SANDBAGGING

Climbers have a specific word for a route that is significantly harder than its stated grade. They call it sandbagged. Sometimes this happens by accident, the first ascensionist was simply strong enough that the route did not feel as hard to them as it will feel to almost everyone who follows. Sometimes it happens by design, an old-school ethic in certain climbing areas that considers an honest, generous grade to be a kind of moral failure, so the numbers stay deliberately conservative and everyone downstream pays the difference in skinned knuckles.

Music has sandbagged pieces too, though we have no word for it and so we rarely notice the pattern clearly. There are scores with unglamorous, almost plain-looking pages that turn out to be exponentially harder to actually inhabit than their visual density would suggest, extended, exposed simplicity that offers a performer nowhere to hide, no flurry of notes to disappear the exact quality of a single sustained pitch into. There are also, and this is the more uncomfortable admission, pieces whose fearsome reputation for difficulty is inherited rather than earned, passed down through decades of program notes that keep repeating the same claim about how hard the piece is until nobody checks whether that claim still holds against how playable it has actually become inside the specialized training that now exists for exactly this repertoire. We do not have the climbing community's habit of publicly, collectively re-litigating these claims. We mostly just repeat the grade the first ascensionist assigned, forever.

ONSIGHT, REDPOINT, BETA

Here is the part of climbing's vocabulary I think matters most, and the part I think exposes something genuinely uncomfortable about how we talk about difficult performances.

An onsight is when a climber completes a route on the very first attempt, with zero prior knowledge of the sequence, no falls, no information from anyone who has already solved it. It is the purest possible expression of meeting difficulty in real time, cold, with nothing between the climber and the problem. A redpoint is different. It means the climber has succeeded after previous attempts, previous falls, previous study of the route, and can now execute the sequence cleanly because they have already solved it in private and are now demonstrating the solution. Both are real achievements. Climbers do not consider a redpoint lesser. But they never, ever confuse the two, and every serious climbing conversation specifies which one happened, because the two performances are answering completely different questions about the climber's relationship to the difficulty.

Then there is beta, the specific sequence of holds, weight shifts, and body positions that solves a given route, often discovered by the first successful climbers and then passed down, sometimes freely shared, sometimes guarded, always understood as inherited knowledge rather than something each new climber must rediscover alone.

Now consider how new music discourse handles this same distinction, which is to say, it mostly does not. A performer plays a work of extreme notational difficulty at a premiere, having rehearsed it in private for months, having received coaching, fingerings, and interpretive guidance from a teacher who studied it with the composer, having effectively inherited beta through a specific pedagogical lineage, and the resulting performance is very often praised in language that implies something closer to an onsight, a live confrontation with impossibility, happening in front of us, in real time, for the first time. It is not that. It is frequently, and honorably, a redpoint, executed beautifully, built on real labor, but built on labor that happened somewhere the audience cannot see, using solutions the performer did not discover alone.

I do not say this to diminish redpoint performances. A clean redpoint of something genuinely hard is a real achievement and deserves real praise. I say it because I think our critical language quietly collapses the distinction climbers would never tolerate collapsing, and that collapse changes what we think we are witnessing. When we praise a performance as though difficulty is being encountered live, when it is in fact being demonstrated after being solved, we are not lying exactly, but we are letting the audience believe something about the nature of the moment that climbers, of all people, would immediately correct.

THE ROUTE SETTER'S FEEDBACK LOOP

Indoor climbing gyms employ professional route setters, whose entire job is to design difficulty on purpose, calibrated to a specific intended grade, and then watch. They watch climbers attempt the route. If nobody can do the crux move at the intended grade, or if everyone finds it trivially easy compared to the number on the tag, the route setter does not shrug and move on. They often reset the route. They adjust a hold's angle, change a foot placement, recalibrate, because the entire discipline of route setting assumes that a difficulty curve is a hypothesis, tested against real bodies, and revised when the hypothesis is wrong.

I raised something adjacent to this in the essay before this one, about games and feedback loops, but climbing route setting makes the point in a way I find even more useful, because it is not metaphorical, it is a literal profession built entirely around treating difficulty as revisable. A composer publishes a score and that score's difficulty, whatever it turns out to actually be once real performers with real bodies get their hands on it, is essentially permanent. There is no reset. There is no professional feedback loop in which the composer watches fifty different performers attempt the passage and adjusts the notation based on where they all, independently, hit the same unexpected wall. A few composers do revise editions based on performer feedback, this happens, but it is the exception treated as generosity rather than the standard practice treated as basic professional discipline, which is exactly backward from how climbing does it.

What would it mean to treat a score's difficulty the way a route setter treats a boulder problem, as a working hypothesis rather than a finished pronouncement, checked against the actual, accumulated experience of everyone who attempts it, open to genuine revision when the accumulated evidence says the hypothesis was wrong.

THE CRUX, NOT THE GRADE

I want to end with the word I think is actually more useful than difficulty itself, because it is more honest about where difficulty lives.

A crux is not the whole route. It is the single hardest sequence within it, often shockingly brief, sometimes a single move, surrounded on both sides by climbing that is merely demanding rather than at the absolute limit. Climbers do not describe a whole route as uniformly, undifferentiatedly hard. They describe its shape. This part is approach. This part is the crux. This part is the exposed, easier climbing after the crux where you still have to hold it together because a fall here would be worse, even though the moves themselves are simpler.

Music criticism, and the original essay this series responds to, mostly still talks about difficulty as a blanket property, a piece is difficult, a passage is difficult, in a way that treats the whole terrain as flat. I think naming the crux, the specific two bars where the actual limit lives, surrounded by writing that is merely serious rather than impossible, would be a more honest way to talk about almost every hard piece in the repertoire, and it would help performers prepare with more precision than a generalized reputation for difficulty ever could.

Every difficult score has a shape. Somewhere in it is the actual crux, and everywhere else is approach and exposure. The composer, unlike the route setter, rarely gets to stand at the base and watch fifty people fall at the same three notes before finally understanding exactly where their own crux was. That is not a failure of the composer. It is simply a discipline that has not yet built itself a feedback loop as honest as the one climbers built for themselves, one grade, one route, one argument in the gym at a time.

S(CORE)

 

Legacy Score (2001)