The Call Has Become a System
New pages from the Clarion series for solo trumpet
When I last wrote about Clarion, I described the pages as a population of strange little machines.
Looking at the newer scores, I think I underestimated the machinery.
The machine is no longer simply an analogy for the notation.
Increasingly, the pages behave like machines.
They route information.
They branch.
They copy.
They measure.
They fail.
They recover.
They contain feedback loops.
They expose parts that would normally remain hidden.
And they occasionally look as though someone has taken apart a trumpet, a technical drawing, a piece of software, and a musical score and then put them back together according to the wrong instructions.
Which may be closer to the point.
The basic Clarion rule has not changed:
one trumpet, one page, one call.
But “one call” no longer seems to mean one linear musical statement.
A call can now contain a history of itself.
It can contain alternate versions.
It can contain instructions for its own failure.
It can expose the mechanism producing it.
It can branch into several possible futures and still occupy one sheet of paper.
The page has become less a container for music than a system for making musical behavior visible.
The score is no longer simply a picture of time
Traditional notation performs a remarkable trick.
It turns time sideways.
Left means earlier.
Right means later.
Vertical position becomes pitch.
Duration becomes proportion.
The page converts an invisible temporal event into geometry.
Most of the time, we accept that geometry without noticing it.
The newer Clarion pages deliberately make it unstable.
In one score, the material begins as a SOURCE, proceeds through COPY 1, COPY 2, and COPY 3, reaches a BRANCH, passes through ERROR and RECOVERY, and arrives finally at TERMINAL and STATE.
That is not simply a sequence of musical phrases.
It is a model of transmission.
Something is copied.
Something changes during copying.
A branch occurs.
An error enters the system.
The system attempts to recover.
Eventually the process terminates.
Suddenly the left-to-right direction of the score is carrying more than musical time.
It is carrying provenance.
We are not only hearing what happens next.
We are watching what happens to information as it moves.
That distinction has become increasingly important to me.
A melody develops.
Information mutates.
Those are not quite the same thing.
Variation and error are not the same thing
Composition has always depended on variation.
Take an object.
Repeat it differently.
Transpose it.
Invert it.
Compress it.
Stretch it.
Disguise it.
Bring it back.
But the word variation already assumes a certain compositional dignity.
The transformation is intentional.
The composer is in control.
Error introduces another possibility.
An error is a transformation whose legitimacy is uncertain.
Something has moved away from the source, but perhaps not because anyone wanted it to.
That is interesting territory.
A valve does not quite arrive when expected.
An articulation does not align perfectly with a fingering.
A copied gesture accumulates an extra attack.
A microtonal inflection drifts.
A rhythmic proportion survives but the register does not.
At what point does a mistake stop being a mistake and become the new material?
The branch-and-recovery score makes this question visible.
The original event is copied repeatedly, but copying is not neutral.
Every reproduction creates the possibility of deviation.
By the time the call reaches its terminal state, what remains may be recognizably descended from the beginning while being materially unlike it.
This is closer to biological mutation, software versioning, rumor, memory, and cultural transmission than to classical thematic development.
The signal survives because it changes.
A fanfare is already a transmission technology
The trumpet makes this particularly appropriate.
A fanfare has never been merely a collection of pitches.
It is a technology for sending information across space.
Come here.
Pay attention.
Something is beginning.
Someone has arrived.
Danger.
Ceremony.
Authority.
Victory.
Wake up.
The trumpet existed as a communications device long before anyone worried about whether its intervals constituted thematic material.
So when these Clarion pages begin resembling routing diagrams, control systems, branching trees, engineering drawings, and signal architectures, I do not feel that the score has wandered away from the instrument.
It may have wandered deeper into it.
The call is being treated as information.
The trumpet becomes the mechanism through which that information acquires pressure, resistance, breath, metal, timing, and human fallibility.
Notation as exploded view
Several of the new pages borrow the visual grammar of engineering drawings.
Dimensions appear around the page.
Components are isolated and enlarged.
Circular detail windows expose smaller mechanisms.
Technical objects sit beside notation like components awaiting assembly.
The stave becomes a datum line running through the machine.
This produces a useful reversal.
Ordinarily, the completed sound is what matters and the mechanics disappear.
We hear the note.
We do not hear the player’s valve combination as a separate object.
We hear an attack.
We do not separately perceive the exact choreography of tongue, lips, breath, and fingers required to produce it.
The engineering drawing does the opposite.
It removes the casing.
It says:
Here is the part.
Here is another part.
Here is how they connect.
Here is the tolerance.
Here is the direction of travel.
Here is the dimension that cannot be exceeded.
Here is what normally remains inside.
That is increasingly what I want from these scores.
Not merely a representation of the resulting sound, but an exploded view of the conditions required to make it.
The tiny event and the enormous apparatus
This imbalance appears repeatedly in the new pages.
A very short musical event can produce a disproportionate amount of notation.
There may be arrows.
Boxes.
Microtonal signs.
Valve diagrams.
Pressure indications.
Trajectory curves.
Numbers.
Mechanical callouts.
Alternate states.
A microscopic sound acquires an enormous infrastructure.
I have become increasingly interested in that disparity.
Duration does not determine complexity.
A tenth of a second can be structurally enormous.
A ten-second sustained pitch can be almost empty.
Musical notation traditionally gives considerable visual space to duration.
A long note occupies time.
A short note occupies less.
But the physical reality of performance does not always obey that proportion.
The fastest instant may require the greatest coordination.
So the new pages allow the surrounding apparatus to overwhelm the note itself.
The result is deliberately strange.
The sound is tiny.
The preparation required to produce it is gigantic.
The audience hears the event.
The performer confronts its bureaucracy.
The musical body as control system
One of the newer pages makes this almost comically explicit.
Around the stave appear:
TONGUE ACTION
ATTACK PRESSURE
EMBOUCHURE APERTURE
INHALED ATTACKS
PLUNGER MOVEMENT
BREATH TIMING
MUTE
HARMON STEM POSITION
BELL DIRECTION
VALVE CLICKS
LIP BENDS
LIP TRILLS
PARTIAL TARGETING
MULTIPHONIC INSTABILITY
VOCALIZED INTERFERENCE
VIBRATO RATE & WIDTH
CENT DEVIATION
Taken individually, these are performance instructions.
Taken together, they look like a control room.
This could imply that the performer has become a machine operator.
I think the opposite is true.
The more parameters the score separates, the more clearly performance demonstrates that they cannot actually be separated.
The body is not modular.
Change embouchure aperture and air resistance changes.
Change air resistance and the attack changes.
Change fingering and resonance changes.
Change resonance and the microtonal target may move.
Introduce vocalization and the acoustic result may destabilize several other parameters simultaneously.
The notation decomposes the action.
The body recomposes it.
That is perhaps one of the fundamental dramas of these scores.
The page is analytical. The performer is synthetic.
The score takes the trumpet apart.
The player has to put it back together in real time.
Precision eventually produces instability
This leads to a paradox that has become more obvious as the series develops.
Greater notational precision does not necessarily produce greater predictability.
It can produce the opposite.
Suppose a score specifies pitch, microtonal deviation, tongue action, air pressure, valve state, vibrato rate, dynamic trajectory, and resonance behavior.
Each instruction can be perfectly clear.
But the interaction among them may be extraordinarily unstable.
The specification becomes more exact.
The outcome becomes less certain.
That interests me much more than simply writing something difficult.
Difficulty is a consequence.
Instability is compositional material.
The score establishes a set of conditions precise enough to generate behavior, but complex enough that the exact behavior cannot be completely predetermined.
This is not indeterminacy in the familiar sense of leaving decisions blank.
The page may be almost embarrassingly specific.
Yet inside that specificity is a zone that belongs only to the performer.
The drawing can specify a tolerance, not a result
Engineering language has been useful here because engineering drawings distinguish between ideal dimensions and permissible variation.
A component might be specified as:
128.000 ± 0.015
That tiny ± sign acknowledges reality.
The drawing contains an ideal.
Manufacturing contains deviation.
Music works the same way, although notation usually pretends otherwise.
A tempo marking identifies a value.
A pitch identifies a target.
A rhythm describes a proportion.
But performance continually produces tolerances.
This is not sloppy execution.
It is the condition of physical music-making.
A fascinating possibility follows:
What if the tolerance is compositional?
What if the score specifies not merely the point, but the acceptable instability around the point?
What if ± is as musically significant as the number preceding it?
Several of these pages begin moving in that direction.
They treat a musical event not as a fixed coordinate but as a field around a coordinate.
The note is the center.
The music may be what happens around it.
The machine drawings are not illustrations
The mechanical objects appearing in some pages might initially look like collage.
A pump.
A coupling.
A gear assembly.
A valve-like mechanism.
A chain of articulated modules.
But I do not think of them as illustrations of the trumpet.
They operate more like foreign bodies introduced into the notation.
They bring with them another system of meaning.
A mechanical component implies:
function
tolerance
assembly
interface
failure
load
motion
replacement
wear
Place that object beside a musical gesture and some of those meanings contaminate the score.
A phrase begins to look assembled.
A rhythmic transition becomes a coupling.
A repeated articulation becomes a gear.
A mute change becomes a mechanical state.
The image does not tell the performer to imitate a machine.
It changes the way the musical information is framed.
The machinery is conceptual pressure.
Then the machinery breaks
One of the pages goes much further.
Its center appears to have suffered a structural accident.
Columns break apart.
Platforms tilt.
Components hang at impossible angles.
Fragments fall away.
The stave passes directly through the wreckage.
I find this image especially revealing because the music does not stop when the architecture fails.
The stave survives.
The call passes through the damage.
That may describe Clarion better than many of the cleaner pages do.
The call is not the machine.
The call is what persists through the machine’s failure.
This connects back to the branch/error/recovery page.
The system is interesting not because it works perfectly, but because it is capable of continuing after something has gone wrong.
A perfect transmission is almost invisible.
Distortion gives the transmission a history.
Damage makes the signal legible as a signal.
A score can remember its previous states
The dates, serial numbers, copies, and branching structures in these works have also changed my sense of what constitutes a musical object.
Normally, we think of a composition as existing in one authoritative state.
There may be sketches and revisions, but eventually the work becomes the work.
What if those earlier states do not disappear?
What if the score contains its own archaeology?
SOURCE
COPY
COPY
COPY
BRANCH
ERROR
RECOVERY
These are not merely stages toward a final object.
They can coexist inside the final object.
The composition becomes a record of its own becoming.
I like the idea that a score might retain evidence of decisions it no longer follows.
A discarded fingering.
A corrupted rhythm.
An earlier pitch trajectory.
A superseded state.
Instead of hiding revision, the page uses revision as form.
The score remembers what it used to be.
YOU ARE NOT LOOKING
Another new page introduces a very different interruption.
Above the score is a face crossed by a red band:
YOU ARE NOT LOOKING
It is an accusation placed inside a document designed to be looked at.
That contradiction matters.
Scores train the eye.
A musician learns what to notice and what to ignore.
Pitch.
Duration.
Dynamics.
Articulation.
Certain symbols become urgent.
The paper itself disappears.
Spacing disappears.
The graphic object becomes transparent because the performer has learned to read through it toward sound.
But these Clarion pages resist transparency.
They continually remind the viewer that notation is also something seen.
The words YOU ARE NOT LOOKING reverse the usual musical demand.
A score normally says:
Play this.
The image says:
First, notice that you are looking.
And perhaps notice how selectively.
Seeing and reading are different activities
This distinction has become central to the series.
Reading a score and seeing a score are not identical.
Reading is selective.
The eye searches for actionable information.
Seeing is more promiscuous.
It notices density, symmetry, emptiness, repetition, proportion, collision, scale, and shape.
A performer may read a tuplet ratio.
A viewer sees an arch.
A performer reads an accidental.
A viewer sees a vertical tower.
A performer reads a crescendo.
A viewer sees directional force.
Neither interpretation cancels the other.
The strongest pages increasingly depend on the gap between them.
The notation must survive two kinds of attention:
What does this tell me to do?
and
What kind of object am I looking at?
I no longer see a reason to choose between those questions.
The score as interface
Looking across the new pages, another word keeps suggesting itself:
interface.
An interface is where unlike systems meet.
Human and machine.
Instruction and action.
Data and perception.
Software and user.
In Clarion, the stave increasingly behaves as just such a boundary.
Above it may be trajectories, calculations, mechanical systems, microtonal structures, or diagrams.
Below it may be actions, fingerings, valve states, or physical instructions.
At the line itself is sound.
The stave is therefore not merely the place where pitches are written.
It is where conceptual information is converted into bodily behavior.
And then into acoustical consequence.
That makes the score less like a document and more like an interface between systems that do not speak the same language.
The drawing speaks spatially.
The performer thinks physically.
The trumpet responds acoustically.
The listener receives temporally.
The score sits between all four.
One page is becoming more important, not less
With all this proliferation, it might seem logical to let Clarion escape onto multiple pages.
I have resisted.
The single-page rule now matters more than it did when the series began.
Because one page forces incompatible scales to coexist.
The whole call is visible.
So is the smallest mechanism inside it.
Macrostructure and microstructure cannot hide from one another.
You can see the first note and the last simultaneously.
You can see the branch before you experience the error.
You can see recovery while still looking at the source.
You can see the machine before it breaks.
Sound cannot do this.
Sound must reveal itself sequentially.
The page knows the future.
The performer does not.
That difference creates a peculiar tension.
The performer moves through something the viewer can already see whole.
The blank space has changed meaning
Earlier Clarion pages often used blank space as relief.
Now I think it functions differently.
After pages full of mechanisms, measurements, branches, and instructions, emptiness begins to feel almost technological.
It is not merely absence.
It is a state in which the system has stopped transmitting.
The terminal note is therefore not simply the end of a phrase.
It is the last successful packet.
After it comes no new instruction.
No recovery.
No branch.
No correction.
No apparatus.
The machine has ceased producing information.
Silence becomes a terminal state.
That phrase, appearing literally in one of the scores, has altered the way I think about endings throughout the series.
The call is no longer a noun
Perhaps the largest change is this:
I used to think of a call as an object.
A fanfare.
A signal.
A short musical entity sent outward.
The newer pages make me think of calling as a process.
Something begins as information.
It enters a system.
It is embodied.
It encounters resistance.
It branches.
It is copied.
It is distorted.
Something fails.
Something compensates.
A performer makes decisions.
The instrument pushes back.
Sound leaves the bell.
Air alters it.
Architecture alters it.
Distance alters it.
A listener receives something that is related to the original instruction but can never be identical to it.
So perhaps Clarion is no longer fifty-nine calls.
Perhaps it is fifty-nine models of what happens to a call after someone decides to send it.
That is a much larger territory.
The page proposes. The body negotiates. The sound escapes.
The newer scores have made me less interested in the old question of whether complex notation can be executed exactly.
Exact compared with what?
The score is not a recording of an ideal performance waiting to be reconstructed.
It is a proposition.
Sometimes an engineering specification.
Sometimes a map.
Sometimes a family tree.
Sometimes a damaged machine.
Sometimes a warning.
Sometimes a diagram of a process that may not quite be physically possible.
The performer does not reproduce that object.
The performer activates it.
And activation necessarily changes it.
That is where these pages now seem to live.
Between instruction and consequence.
Between precision and tolerance.
Between copy and mutation.
Between mechanism and failure.
Between looking and reading.
Between what the page knows and what the body can discover.
The original Clarion was a call.
The newer ones seem increasingly interested in the entire ecology required for a call to happen.
The valve before the note.
The pressure behind the valve.
The error inside the copy.
The branch after the error.
The machine around the body.
The body inside the machine.
And finally the sound, which after all of that preparation does the one thing the page itself can never do.
It leaves.
