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.

What Tools Do I Use to Create My Scores?

 

What Tools Do I Use to Create My Scores?

A musical score is, at its most basic, a set of instructions. But what if the page itself were also a participant? What if the materials that constitute the score, not just what is drawn on it but what it is made of and what has been done to its surface, were themselves carrying meaning, generating behavior, and asking something of the person who encounters them?

This is the question that has driven my practice for the better part of a decade. What follows is an account of how I actually make these works: the digital infrastructure, the physical materials, and the thinking that holds them together.

The Digital Foundation

My digital workflow is built around the Adobe Creative Suite, but the suite functions less as a production environment and more as a set of distinct instruments, each with its own role.

Illustrator is where the glyph families and proportional grids live. It is the most architectural of the tools, responsible for the structural logic of the page and the relationships between notational elements. Photoshop handles what I think of as the surface weather: the abrasions, the accumulated micro-histories, the sense that a page has been through something before the performer ever picks it up. Substance 3D Designer, Stager, and Dimension allow me to model notational elements with genuine spatial depth, to cast shadows from one symbol onto another, and to proof how a mark reads when it begins to behave like a three-dimensional object rather than a flat inscription. InDesign assembles the final folios and maintains structural legibility across multiple pages. Fontographer is close at hand for the letterforms I cannot find anywhere else.

The Astute Manager plug-ins extend the work in two directions simultaneously, toward precision and toward chance, which is not a contradiction but a productive tension that I rely on. Topaz Gigapixel enters the process at the finishing stage, when a plate needs to scale to wall dimensions without surrendering its grain and surface particularity.

To this toolkit I have added Dassault Systemes' CATIA, the aerospace and industrial design platform that most people associate with the engineering of aircraft and complex mechanical systems. In my practice, CATIA provides something that no conventional design application offers: the ability to model notational elements as genuine engineered forms, to subject them to structural and spatial logic borrowed from industrial design, and to bring a kind of technical rigor to the construction of visual forms that would otherwise remain purely intuitive. When a notational symbol in one of my scores appears to have structural weight, to occupy space in a way that feels load-bearing rather than decorative, CATIA is often where that quality was developed.

The Physical Materials

The analog bench is where the work becomes irreversible, and irreversibility is part of the point.

Conventional oils, pastels, and pencils go down first, establishing the initial surface relationship between mark and substrate. Then I bring in materials that operate by different rules.

Mica flakes and molten salt, used in works such as Luxtrapathy, Capitalocene and the Logicade, introduce a crystalline, mineral quality to the surface, something that catches light differently at different angles and refuses to settle into a single resolved appearance. Conductive ink and xylene appear in the same work, the conductive ink carrying an implicit charge that is not merely metaphorical, and the xylene as a solvent that opens the surface to further intervention. Colored pencil worked into metallic spray foam creates a layered density that reads differently at different distances, intimate at close range, almost architectural from across a room.

Liquid metal under a wash of gilding adhesive, as seen in The Criminality on the Staircase, produces a surface that is simultaneously precious and industrial, the gilding adhesive holding and also slightly obscuring what lies beneath. In the same work, thermochromic metallic paint and photochromic metallic paint introduce genuine instability to the finished object: the surface changes with light and warmth, which means the score is not a fixed thing but a responsive one, different in a cold room than in a warm one, different under natural light than under artificial.

Methylene chloride, when applied as a sculpting agent, attacks the substrate in controlled ways, creating depressions, textures, and surface events that could not be achieved by addition alone. The page is not simply built up but excavated.

Other works introduce entirely different material logics. Sky and Dye incorporates carbon fiber, PLA filament, copper tubing shavings, graphene-based superlattice, and black phosphorus alongside more conventional oils and inks, all on Hahnemühle Deckle Edge paper. These are not randomly assembled materials. Carbon fiber carries associations of engineered lightness and tensile strength. Black phosphorus is a two-dimensional semiconductor. Graphene-based superlattice is a material of extraordinary electronic properties. Their presence in a musical score is a statement about what kinds of knowledge and what kinds of material culture belong together on the same surface.

Legends Carved into the Void's Mantle uses Replexium, doped graphene, Tyvek, infrared charcoal, turmeric paste, and moss pulp together, each material bringing its own temporal quality: some stable, some fugitive, some transforming slowly over years. Entangled Dreams in the Concrete Mirage, the viola score, combines acrylic, Cupuacu oil, shape-memory polymer foam, Criollo tobacco, French Poudre B, and Blue Tansy oil on Canson Infinity Baryta Photographique, a substrate chosen for its photographic archival quality. The shape-memory polymer foam has the property of returning to a previous form when stimulated: it literally remembers. The tobacco carries centuries of cultural weight and a particular quality of slow combustion. These are not decorative choices.

Interiority uses liquid europium, a rare earth element with luminescent properties, alongside burst charge powder, neem oil, and piezoelectric foam, materials that respond to electrical pressure, to biological chemistry, to force. Reality Bends to the Whim incorporates azurite, rhodium, and graphene oxide alongside more conventional graphite and pencil, the azurite a pigment with a history stretching back to ancient Egypt, the rhodium one of the rarest and most reflective metals on earth.

Proproxasant uses nicotine, salt crystals, aerodynamic foam, elemi oil, and Pyrodex, the last a smokeless powder propellant, on Hahnemühle Sugar Cane and Legion Colorplan Vellum. Calavist, Opreach, Revune and Trayke, among the largest works, incorporates spider silk, bioluminescent bacteria, and magnetized iron filings alongside sand, crushed circuit boards, and resin. These are not materials borrowed from another context for their associative value alone. They are chosen because of how they behave: the spider silk for its tensile strength and near invisibility, the bioluminescent bacteria for its capacity to produce light through biological process, the magnetized iron filings for the field lines they make visible.

The substrates themselves are chosen with equal care. Fujifilm Crystal Archive Maxima, Ilford Galerie Prestige Gold Fibre Silk, Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta, Kodak Professional Endura Premier Metallic Paper, Moab Entrada Digital Rag, Canson Infinity Platine Fibre Rag, Bergger Prestige Variable CB: these are photographic and fine art papers chosen not only for their archival stability and surface qualities but for the specific way each one receives and holds the materials applied to it. The conversation between substrate and substance is not incidental. It is compositional.

The Underlying Principle

I do not treat any of this as special effects, surface decoration, or the application of interesting materials to an otherwise conventional score. The piano is wood, felt, steel, and air working together. The page should answer in kind. Every material decision is a decision about what the score is asking and how it is asking it. The score that incorporates a shape-memory polymer is a score that has built memory into its physical substance. The score that uses thermochromic paint is a score that changes its appearance with the conditions of its reading. The score that carries rare earth luminescence is a score that produces its own light.

This is not notation enhanced by materials. It is notation constituted by them.

A Minute Is Not Small: "Helen Was In The Bedroom; I Had Exactly A Minute Left" for Haynes Amadeus Grenadilla Piccolo

On "Helen Was In The Bedroom; I Had Exactly A Minute Left," for Haynes Amadeus Grenadilla Piccolo

The piece lasts about a minute. That is not what happened when I ran out of material, and it is not a miniature in the usual sense of the word, a small charming thing you admire once and set back down. It lasts a minute because it is about a minute, the specific one named in the title, and I wanted the form to last exactly as long as the situation it carries. When you have exactly a minute left, the minute is not small. It is the largest unit of time there is.

I am not going to explain Helen, or the bedroom, or what the minute was for. The title gives you one person in one room and another person elsewhere with a countdown already running, and the not knowing is the condition I wrote from. A last minute is charged precisely because you cannot see over its edge. You do not get the sequel. The piece is the inside of that minute and nothing on either side of it.

I wrote it for the Haynes Amadeus grenadilla piccolo, and the instrument is not incidental. The piccolo is the most exposed voice in the orchestra, the highest and most piercing, the one that cannot slip into a texture and disappear. The grenadilla, African blackwood, gives it a body underneath the brilliance, a darkness in the wood that keeps the top from turning to pure whistle. Written where this sits, an octave above an already high line, it rides at the ceiling of hearing. There is nowhere up there to hide. The player cannot rest, cannot coast, cannot let a phrase carry itself. A minute on this instrument at this density is punishing to play, and the brightness makes every event vivid to the edge of pain. That is not a side effect I tolerated. That is what a last minute feels like from the inside, and the piccolo is the only instrument that says it without translation.

The whole thing is one bar. Twenty six eighths, a single span, with no interior barlines to reassure anyone that time is being counted off in tidy fours. One breath of time, undivided. There is no development, no recapitulation, no second subject, because a last minute does not develop. It does not build to anything or resolve. It continues, in one unbroken present tense, until it stops. I wanted the notation itself to refuse the comfort of the measured grid, so the eye moves through the line the way the mind moves through a minute you know is ending, without the small reassurances of regular return.

And it is packed. Nearly every note carries an accidental, a microtonal arrow, an inflection bending it off true. The beams stack into thirty seconds and sixty fourths. The tuplets nest inside one another. None of this is decoration and none of it is difficulty for its own sake. When you have a minute left you do not pad it, and you do not drift through it at half attention. The density is the sound of a minute lived at the absolute ceiling of attention, every instant inflected because every instant is the last of its kind. A slow, sparse, spacious last minute would be a lie about what a last minute is. This one refuses to waste a single one of the twenty six eighths it is given.

This is where the brevity earns its place, and why I want to argue for it rather than apologize for it. Brevity in music usually gets read as modesty. The sketch, the aphorism, the small form you excuse for being small. Webern taught everyone that a piece can be over in seconds and still be complete, and that lesson is real, but I am after something next to it rather than the same. The brevity here is not miniature. It is terminal. The shortness is not a reduction of scale, it is the whole subject, because the piece is a countdown and a countdown that lasted ten minutes would not be a countdown, it would be a wait. A minute that is genuinely full does not feel short while you are inside it. It feels total.

There is also an honesty in it that longer forms let you evade. You cannot hide a weak idea in a minute the way you can bury it in forty. There is no slow movement to coast through, no development section to fill with competence, no coda to let the audience down gently. Brevity is the most exposing form there is, for exactly the reason the piccolo is the most exposing instrument, and I put the two together on purpose. Everything is on the surface. Everything is audible. If a second does not carry its weight you hear the failure immediately, because there is only a minute of seconds and each one is load bearing.

The line thins at the very end into rests, quick and broken, the minute expiring in real time on the page. The last events are almost torn off. Then it stops, and whatever the minute was counting toward is on the other side of the barline where the music does not go. Helen is still in the bedroom. The minute is gone. The piece does not tell you what it was for, because at the moment it ends I did not know either, and that is the truest thing about it.

So I want to be precise about the word. The piece is not short. It is exactly long enough, which is a different thing, and the difference is the whole point. A minute is not small when it is the one you have left. It is everything you have, and the only honest way to write it is to make it last exactly that long and to fill it completely.