Notation Is the Only Real Music

Here is the position, stated without softening. The score is the work. The performance is a rumor of it.

Everyone believes the opposite, and believes it so automatically that stating it aloud sounds like a truism: music is sound, the notation is only a set of directions for producing the sound, and the page is therefore a means to an end, a recipe, a blueprint, a servant to the performance that fulfills it. The mark waits humbly to be turned into music. Until someone plays it, it is silent, and silence is not yet music. This is the natural view. It is also backward.

Consider what actually happens when a score is performed. The page specifies a pitch; the room, the instrument, the player's fatigue, and the temperature of the brass bend it a few cents off. The page specifies a rhythm of ferocious precision; the body, which cannot subdivide a beat into forty-three exactly equal parts, delivers an approximation and calls it faithful. The page specifies a dynamic of ffff collapsing to ppppp across a single gesture; the hall swallows the extremes and returns a compressed shadow of the intended range. Every performance is a lossy transmission. It takes the complete specification on the page and outputs a degraded copy, filtered through wood and air and meat and nerves. We have simply agreed to call the degraded copy "the music" and the complete specification "the instructions," when the honest description is the reverse. The page is the music. The performance is the compression artifact.

Think about where the work is most fully itself. Not in the concert hall, where it exists once, imperfectly, and then is gone. It is most fully itself on the page, where every parameter is present at full resolution, simultaneously, permanently, available to be read at any speed, returned to, inspected under magnification, held in the mind entire. The score does not decay between hearings. It does not depend on a player's good night. It does not vary with the acoustics. It is the thing itself, complete and stable, and every performance is an attempt to approach it that necessarily falls short. The performance is not the arrival of the music. It is the music leaking into the air and losing most of itself on the way.

We accept this hierarchy everywhere else without complaint. The architect's drawing is the building's truth; the built structure, with its compromises and its settling foundations, is the approximation. The mathematician's proof is the theorem; any particular chalkboard rendering of it is a smudged instance. We do not say the cathedral is the real work and the plans a mere guide, because we understand that the plans contain the building completely and the building contains itself only partially, worn, weathered, deviating from spec the moment the concrete cures. Music alone insists on the opposite ranking, and it does so only because music got in the habit, centuries ago, of writing scores simple enough that the performance could plausibly contain the whole of them. When the notation is thin, the sound can hold all of it, and the illusion that the sound is the work survives. Thicken the notation past what any performance can carry, and the illusion breaks. The surplus that no performance can deliver has to live somewhere. It lives on the page, where it always lived.

This is the deepest reason to write music that exceeds its own performance. Not perversity, not difficulty for its own sake, but a wager about where the work resides. A score dense enough that no realization can exhaust it is a score that has stopped pretending the performance is the point. It relocates the music to its true home, the mark, and treats every performance as what performances have always been: a devoted, doomed, beautiful attempt to say aloud something that was already completely said in silence on the page.

I know how this sounds. It sounds like a composer defending the unplayable by declaring the page superior to the sound, which is convenient for a composer who writes pages like mine. So let me concede the thing that looks like a refutation and show that it is not. Yes, sound is why we came. Nobody falls in love with music through a score; they fall in love through the air, through a performance, through the compressed, degraded, gorgeous artifact. The lossy copy is how the work recruits us. But the thing we fall in love with, the work we are chasing when we return to the hall again and again hoping this time the performance will finally contain all of it, that thing is not any single performance. It is the complete object every performance is reaching toward and missing. We spend our lives listening to approximations of a music that exists in full only on the page, and we call the approximations "the real thing" because they are the only part of it our ears can touch.

They are not the real thing. They are the part of the real thing that survived the trip. The notation is the music. The performance is the news of it, arriving late, partial, and beautiful, from a country none of us will ever quite reach.

 

The Presiding Sign: Notation That Governs Without Commanding

Most notation tells the performer what to do.

Play this pitch. Enter here. Crescendo. Strike. Sustain. Stop.

But some marks might operate differently.

They are not instructions to be executed. They are conditions under which everything else is understood.

I think of these as presiding signs.

A presiding sign does not produce a sound of its own. It governs behavior indirectly. It may alter density, restraint, aggression, fragility, balance, pacing, or attention without ever becoming a discrete musical event.

It is less like a command and more like weather.

A symbol placed above an entire system might mean:

maintain resistance

or:

avoid closure

or:

favor unstable outcomes

Nothing in those signs is performed literally.

Yet every note beneath them changes.

The sign establishes a climate.

This distinguishes it from traditional expression markings. Dolce, agitato, sul ponticello, ppp all still point toward recognizable actions or results.

A presiding sign remains deliberately more structural.

It might govern:

how quickly decisions are made,

how much risk is tolerated,

whether events should settle,

whether repetition should feel identical or contaminated,

whether silence should feel empty or charged.

The performer does not execute the sign.

The performer performs under it.

That difference interests me.

A piece might contain only three presiding signs.

One governs the opening third.

Another appears halfway through and changes the behavioral logic without changing the notation below.

A final sign remains in force until the end.

The same written material could sound entirely different beneath each one.

In this sense, the sign behaves almost like a gravitational field.

It does not dictate the trajectory.

It bends it.

Presiding signs could also conflict.

One might demand restraint while another encourages instability.

The performer would then negotiate between simultaneous climates rather than obey a hierarchy of commands.

This opens another kind of notation.

Not notation as instruction.

Notation as governance.

The score no longer specifies only what happens.

It specifies the conditions under which happening becomes possible.

The mark is never sounded.

But nothing sounds quite the same beneath it.

 

Tolerance Fields: Notation as Specified Uncertainty

Western notation treats a note as a point.

But performed sound is never fixed. Pitch bends. Attacks fluctuate. Breath, pressure, embouchure, acoustics, and the body continually alter the result.

So what if notation stopped pretending that a sound occupies one exact coordinate?

A tolerance field defines a permissible region instead.

Instead of:

C♯

write:

C♯ ± 11 cents

The pitch now has width.

The performer may remain near the center, move through the field, approach its boundaries, or occupy different positions on repeated attacks.

This is not vagueness.

Engineering already works this way. A specification such as 12.000 mm ± 0.015 mm is precise precisely because it defines acceptable variation.

Music can do the same.

Tolerance fields can expand, contract, become asymmetrical, or overlap:

±3c → ±18c

Now uncertainty itself becomes compositional material.

The idea can extend beyond pitch to tempo, duration, vibrato, air pressure, articulation, dynamics, and physical technique.

Traditional notation places precision at the center.

Tolerance notation places precision at the boundary.

The score no longer says only:

play this sound.

It says:

this is the territory in which the sound may exist.

The performer becomes a navigator.

The note is no longer a point.

It is a place.

A Volume of Calls: On the Clarion series for trumpet, six pages becoming fifty-nine

A Volume of Calls

On the Clarion series for trumpet, six pages becoming fifty-nine

Clarion began as one page. I wrote a single sheet for solo trumpet, one centered stave with the whole apparatus climbing up and down from it, a fanfare that stated itself and stopped. Then I wrote five more. Somewhere inside the sixth I understood that I had not written six pieces. I had found a form, and the form wanted a volume. So the six are now the opening of fifty-nine.

The word clarion is not decoration on the title. A clarion is a trumpet, the high clear one, and a clarion call is the thing the instrument was invented to do, to cut through, to announce, to summon across a distance. I wanted works that remembered that the trumpet is a herald before it is anything else, before it is a jazz voice or an orchestral section or a virtuoso vehicle. So each page is a call. Not a movement, not an etude, not a character piece. A call. The trumpet is the one instrument whose entire history is signal, and I wanted a body of work that stood inside that history rather than politely beside it.

Each Clarion is one page and only one page. Nothing spills onto a verso, nothing is marked to be repeated, nothing continues elsewhere. The single page is the complete unit, and I mean complete in the strong sense, that the work is exactly the size of one sheet a player can take in at a glance. The eye receives the whole call before the lips begin it. That is a formal decision every bit as consequential as choosing the instrument, because the page is the form. A call that needed two pages would not be a call. It would be a speech, and a speech is a different genre with different obligations. The discipline of the single sheet is what keeps each of these works honest about what it is.

And each page is dense. One stave, the apparatus growing vertically off it until the stave itself is nearly buried, the trumpet pushed to the ceiling of what a single sheet can hold, tonguing and valve work and mutes and microtones and breath all stacked into one continuous gesture. The brevity of the page is not the brevity of the sketch. It is compression. Every one of these pages is a maximum folded down until it fits inside a single glance, which is the opposite of a miniature. A miniature is small because there is little to say. A Clarion is small because there is too much, and it has been forced into one page on purpose.

But the single page is only half of the form. The other half is the volume, and this is the part that changed when I passed from six to fifty-nine. One call is an event. Fifty-nine calls, ordered and bound, is something else. It is an accumulation, a census of nearly everything the trumpet can be asked to announce, a wall of signals rather than a signal. I keep thinking of Hanne Darboven's walls of dated sheets, where no single page is the work and the seriality itself is the content. The volume is a form in its own right, and no individual page carries it, the way no single day carries a year. The move from six to fifty-nine is the move from a suite to a body. A suite is a handful of related pieces you play together in an evening. A body is a complete population, and the meaning of any one member is partly that it is one of fifty-nine.

This matters for how the pieces are meant to live. You do not have to perform all fifty-nine, and most players never will. A trumpeter can take three of them, or one, and the call still sounds. But all fifty-nine have to exist, because each page is written knowing it belongs to a fixed and finite set, and that knowledge is inside the writing. A call that knows it is one of fifty-nine is composed differently from a call that thinks it is alone. The volume is the context every page is answering to, even when it is performed by itself.

And the volume stops at fifty-nine, not sixty, and the missing round number is deliberate. I do not build systems that come out even, because nothing true comes out even, and the round number is almost always a lie you tell to make a body of work look designed. Fifty-nine is a prime. It cannot be halved or quartered into tidy sub-suites of neat equal length, which is exactly why it is the right size for a volume meant to resist being tidied. It terminates one short of the number you were expecting, and that small refusal is the signature. The same instinct that puts one deliberate flaw in every score puts the whole volume one page short of the round, so that the set as a whole carries the imperfection its individual pages carry.

When it is finished it will be fifty-nine single pages for trumpet. Fifty-nine calls, each complete in a glance, and none of them complete without the other fifty-eight. The six that exist now are not a preview of the volume. They are the first six terms of it, and they already know how many follow. The trumpet has been calling since long before anyone wrote a note down. This is one attempt to write down fifty-nine of the calls it still has left to make.

The Conceptualization of Uncertain Compositional Devices is an Enduring One.

The conceptualization of uncertain compositional devices, understood as a set of possibilities, each assigned a specific notational value—a schema for performance that draws its origin from the very circumstances that gave rise to it, namely the game of chance, the die, and its faces—retains a lasting hold on our thinking about music and its indeterminate forms. This notion, which locates the act of composition within the dynamics of chance, operates not merely as a technical device but as a profound framework for understanding the engagement between contingency and intention.

In the realm of indeterminate composition, the 'occasional cause'—that is, the metaphysical spontaneity of the performer or gambler—continues to assert an intuitive grip on how we conceive of uncertain eventualities. It shapes both the interpretation and application of musical events across varied contexts. The performer's role, caught in the uncertainty of each moment, mirrors a broader existential engagement with the unknown, one that colors the relationship between agency and outcome.

However, stripped of these metaphysical associations, the meaning of composition remains as elusive as ever. Is composition an idealized construct, one that neutralizes the unpredictable through the abstraction of infinite possible trials? Or does it represent a real property of the world, a genuine propensity or random generator that functions independently of the human mind’s interpretative frameworks? This question points to the fundamental enigma of how we understand the role of contingency in artistic creation.

As composers, we dramatize this tension in the asymmetry between the wager and its outcome. On the one hand, we have the naive performer—analogous to the ordinary gambler—who approaches each roll of the die as a singular, hazardous adventure. Each note, each moment, is fraught with uncertainty. On the other hand, the composer assumes the role of the casino manager, who controls the overarching structure and never truly loses. The composer's position in the long game assures mastery over the risk inherent in each individual gamble, rendering the short-term fluctuations irrelevant to the final outcome.

Yet, what emerges from this dialectic is a deeper philosophical tension between the notion of chance as an epistemological deficit—something we confront because of our limited knowledge—and the idea of chance as an object of technical mastery, as a domain that can be quantified, predicted, and controlled. The notion of probability, and more recently, risk, provides a conceptual apparatus for this engagement. While the concept of risk may appear as a relatively modern invention, it carries with it far-reaching implications, not just for contemporary compositional techniques but for the entire intellectual framework within which we approach uncertainty in modernity.

Thus, the compositional process becomes a negotiation between two seemingly opposed conceptions: the performer's intimate, momentary engagement with chance and the composer's detached, overarching control of the totality. In this interplay, we find not just the logic of musical creation, but an enduring metaphor for how we, as human agents, confront the uncertainties of existence itself.

The Post-Conceptual Composer and Institutional Composition

The work of the post-conceptual composer is a contradiction intended to surprise both the listener and infinity. Ideas are the way a listener will refer to this surprise. The composer will state the idea as ludicrously infinite. 

Successful completions generally have been found to mitigate infinity. I predict we will see one such mitigation via Institutional Composition. This is a newly minted term meant to function as a post-conceptual commentary on infinity as well as the various institutions and assumed normalities of composing and/or a radical disarticulation of the institution of composition (radical is notationally understood in its relation to radix which means to get to the root of something). 

For instance, assumptions about the supposed aesthetic autonomy or neutrality of science fiction and fantasy are often explored as a subject in the field of literature, and are then historically and socially mapped out (i.e., ethnographically and or archaeologically) as discursive formations, then (re)framed within the context of The Infinite Library itself. 

As such, Institutional Composition seeks to make visible the historically and socially constructed boundaries between inside and outside, public and private.  Institutional Composition is often critical of the false separations often made between distinctions of taste and supposedly disinterested aesthetic judgment, and affirms that taste is an institutionally cultivated sensibility that may tend to differ according to the class, ethnic, sexual and gender backgrounds of music's audiences. 

The resulting work is meant to sound good. Sometimes the work suggests the form of the composer. I am grateful for the way a score presents itself as an autobiographical product of its creator and his/her place in the infinite. And yet, I have found this gratefulness tends to go awry in expressionist composition. 

It looks better when the score may more easily become a metric time element, a kind of objective tool that is an intrinsic part of the composer who is out to avoid subjectivity. This type of work is free even to be a belief, something that shows the size of a metric time element as representative of a belief.  The composition is representative of that belief.

"For Fortunato Depero" for Chamber Quintet. Bil Smith Composer.

"For Fortunato Depero"

for Chamber Quintet. Bil Smith Composer. 

Kindly supported by Balenciaga. 

Premiere March 7 Paris, France. 

'Paris Fashion Week' Fall/Winter Show.

Composition, viewed through a certain lens, is a medium of obsolescence... expanding, at times reflexively, its own sense of being outmoded in medium, characterization, or artistic expression.

In the grinding friction between paradigms, however, an unforeseen effect, or evolutionarily untraceable quirk, is sometimes produced: a contorted acceptance of fate, or transcendence of sonic circumstance that is either Zen-like or the acquiescent sign of aural vitality. 

Score Detail

Score Detail

Score Detail