Clarion II for C Trumpet - A Fanfare

 

Excerpt - "Griffzeit - Future, Pleasure, Commodity" for Cello

 

Excerpt - "Griffzeit" for Cello

 

Excerpt from "Bogenzeit and Sky Draw" for Cello

 

Desiring Machines and Impressions: Raymond Roussel and the Notational Logic of Subjective Mechanics

Desiring Machines and Impressions of Africa: Roussel and the Notational Logic of Subjective Mechanics

At the surreal edge of early 20th-century invention lies Impressions d’Afrique, Raymond Roussel’s theatrical hallucination of mechanical marvels, linguistic automata, and ritualized absurdities. It is not merely a play or novel, but a structural machine in itself.  It is one powered less by plot than by processes of invention. Within its eccentric tableaux, Roussel presented machines that operated without function, rituals without precedent, and contraptions whose logic bypassed utility altogether. These artificial systems, unconcerned with realism, foreshadowed a lineage of conceptual machinery that would be retooled by artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, both figures who took Roussel’s perverse mechanization and rendered it into a language of erotic engineering and poetic obstruction.

Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique presents a world governed not by mechanical efficiency but by mental interference. His machines are metaphysical jokes, often producing aesthetic or linguistic results rather than physical outcomes. It is precisely this tension, between the machinic and the subjective, that so deeply influenced Duchamp’s own diagrams of desire, most notably in his Large Glass, or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. Here, the bachelor machine is an erotically frustrated system.  It's a parody of Newtonian logic in which fluids stall, pistons hesitate, and desire misfires across layers of transparent glass. The machine, like Roussel’s inventions, is designed to not work—at least not according to the traditional laws of motion or cause-and-effect. Picabia, too, followed suit, his drawings populated with mechanical forms that were more symbolic than operational, drawn from crankshaft schematics and sexual innuendo rather than engineering blueprints.

Where Roussel gave us machines that symbolized inner thought and circular logics, Duchamp and Picabia imagined a new class of mechanism altogether: the bachelor machine is a machine not for production but for interpretation, not for utility but for symbolism, governed not by thermodynamics but by erotic failure. The machine becomes a vessel for inner contradiction, a ritualistic object capable of enacting desire, delay, and conceptual comedy.

It is in this precise tradition that my notational systems evolve, not as devices for translating composerly intent into performance, but as score-machines, configured to resist linear instruction while inviting interpretive friction. My approach is not one of symbolic legibility but of architectural complexity. Visual notational elements are placed within, under, next to, and inside each other as a designed refusal of standard compatibility. Like Roussel’s inventions, my notational forms are compatible with their own material logics, but not necessarily with the performer’s expectations. They invite an ontology of notation that is self-sufficient where the signs refer not to sound, but to their internal relations, interdependencies, and disobedient syntax.

The performer, in this scheme, is not a reader of instructions, but a decipherer of tensions. The score-machine, like the bachelor machine, is eroticized, not in the sexual sense, but in its pursuit of affect, resistance, and entanglement. It draws attention to itself as a structure, not simply a path. If Roussel could invent a phonographic plant that grows wax cylinders or a machine that translates color into sound into gesture, then I too aim to place glyphs and forms in paradoxical constellations.  They emerge as notations that resist being performed as they insist on being seen.

Thus, these scores become a mode of material abstraction, animated not by a drive to be played but by a drive to be solved, misread, and misremembered. In this light, the influence of Roussel is not merely aesthetic, but mechanical and conceptual. His legacy passes through Duchamp’s transparent partitions, Picabia’s eroticized cogs, and lands here, in the flickering tension of a page where notation has ceased to instruct and instead begins to dream.

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So, the whole thing with 'WET' scores

 

So, the whole thing with 'WET' scores (which, if you’re keeping track, stands for Words, Events, Text) is that they upend the entire traditional structure of musical notation, which is usually as rigid and predefined as a Monopoly game...one rule, one symbol, one interpretation. 

But what happens when we treat the score less like a set of instructions and more like, say, a kind of linguistic collage? Enter Augusto de Campos and the entire verbivocovisual paradigm of concrete poetry, which takes language and breaks it apart, frees it, so that words aren’t just units of meaning but also visual and sonic objects. In Campos’s hands, the page becomes a space for the interplay between text, sound, and image, something that a traditional poem or sentence can never fully do. WET scores, I’d argue, are basically that same idea, but for music. They blow up the whole idea of notation as this series of prescriptive symbols and instead invite the performer into a space where words do things...where they’re active, dynamic agents in the music, not just placeholders for sound.

If you’re familiar with de Campos, you’ll know his work leans on this whole idea of verbivocovisual creation.  It's a fancy term that just means he’s fusing words, sound, and visual elements into one, single, intertwined act of communication. It’s not that the words represent sound or image; it’s that they are sound and image, simultaneously. This is where the influence on WET scores becomes crystal clear. We’re not just looking at words on a page; we’re engaging with them as performative objects, as active participants in the creation of sound. It’s like the score is saying: What if language itself (written, spoken, visual) was the music? What if the symbols we use to “notate” sound were actually part of the sound, not just stand-ins for it?

Here’s the kicker, though: In WET scores, language doesn’t just accompany or describe music. It becomes the music. The words, whether written, spoken, or interpreted as events, aren’t there to “help” the performer get from point A to point B, like traditional notation does. They are point A and point B, and everything in between. In the same way that de Campos’s poetry plays with the physicality of language (letters stretching, shrinking, flipping, repeating), WET scores transform language into something performative, something that transcends the flat, linear boundaries of traditional notation.

And it’s here, I think, where the real meat of the argument lies: WET scores break down the hierarchy of composer, performer, and audience in a way that’s uniquely 21st century. Much like de Campos’s work, which makes the reader complicit in the creation of meaning by forcing them to engage with language as a multi-sensory experience, WET scores do the same with the performer. The performer can’t just read the score like they would a conventional piece of music; they have to engage with it, manipulate it, interpret it through the lens of language itself. It’s an act of co-creation. The score, the performer, and the audience all become intertwined in this act of verbivocovisual creation, where sound, word, and action are fused into one fluid, living process.

Which brings us back to de Campos and his concrete poetry: there’s no “right” way to read a concrete poem. The experience is fragmented, layered, and open-ended. WET scores mirror this experience, pushing against the idea that musical meaning is fixed or absolute. The performer isn’t just playing music; they’re navigating a linguistic landscape that’s constantly shifting, much like how a reader of de Campos’s poetry has to negotiate multiple layers of meaning, sound, and image all at once. And this, I’d argue, is what makes WET scores so radical.  They treat the score as a living, breathing thing, one that resists the neatness of traditional musical forms and instead embraces the messy, overlapping, multi-sensory reality of language as a performative act.

 

The Score as Cognitive Ecology

For most of my working life I accepted a quiet assumption that sits underneath almost everything written about notation. The assumption is that a score instructs. You write it, a performer reads it, and if both of you have done your jobs the sound that results is the sound you intended. The page is a set of commands. The performer is the processor. Music is what happens when the commands run.

I no longer believe this describes what I do, and I am not sure it ever fully described what anyone did.

The recent body of work has forced the issue. Somewhere in the making of these pages the score stopped behaving like a list of instructions and started behaving like an environment. Not a message passed from one mind to another, but a place a mind has to enter and move through. I have started calling this the score as cognitive ecology, and I want to take the time here to say exactly what I mean by it, because the phrase is easy to wave around and much harder to earn.

From instruction to ecology

An instruction assumes a clean separation between the thing that commands and the thing that obeys. The score is active, the performer is passive, and meaning flows in one direction only. That model is efficient, and for a great deal of music it is entirely adequate. I have no argument with the composer who wants a C sharp played mezzo forte and writes exactly that. The instruction works because the world it describes is small and settled.

An ecology is different in kind, not just in degree. In an ecology nothing is purely active or purely passive. Every element conditions every other element, and the behavior of the whole cannot be predicted from any single part. When I say these pages behave like ecologies I mean that they are feedback systems. The reader changes the page by reading it, and the changed page changes the reader in turn, and there is no final state where the reading is simply complete. Semiotic overload, architectural suggestion, and graphic vibration are not decorations laid on top of the notation. They are the weather of the environment, and they act on the performer continuously, the way humidity acts on a body without ever being addressed to it.

Consider the pages I titled DOLAVANCE and LAVYNTIA. I resist calling them pieces, because the word carries the wrong assumptions. They are closer to spatial economies. Industrial design, linguistic suggestion, and performative typography meet on a single field and refuse to sort themselves into a hierarchy. There is no layer that is obviously the music and no layer that is obviously the frame. A form that reads as a machined bracket in one glance reads as a dynamic envelope in the next. A word that looks like a title turns out to be a passage you are meant to play, or to fear, or to pass through. These pages establish temporary worlds, and inside those worlds the ordinary logic of reading is bent just far enough that the performer has to build new logic on the spot.

This is the crucial move, and it is worth saying plainly. The score no longer directs. It pressurizes. It creates conditions dense enough that a response becomes necessary, without specifying what the response must be. The performer is not decoding a message I encoded. The performer is surviving a situation I built.

What drifts, and why it matters

The most visible symptom of this shift is that symbols come loose from their classical moorings. On a conventional page, position is destiny. A notehead means what it means because of exactly where it sits on the staff, and the entire apparatus of Western notation is a machine for making position unambiguous. When I let symbols drift across the field, unmoored from that alignment, I am not being careless and I am not being decorative. I am removing the guarantee that position provides, and I am asking the performer to supply, from their own body and history, the certainty the page has withdrawn.

Something strange happens once that guarantee is gone. Timbral cues begin to dissolve into volumetric geometries. A sonic gesture stops being a set of notes and becomes an object with mass and edges, and an object with mass and edges starts to imply a sound. The traffic runs both ways. Sound becomes thing, thing becomes sound, and the border between the two, which notation normally polices with great vigilance, is left deliberately open.

I want to be careful here, because there is a lazy word waiting to be used and I refuse to use it. This is not interdisciplinary work. Interdisciplinary suggests separate disciplines brought politely into the same room, each keeping its own coat on. What I am describing is not a collaboration between fields. It is a single entangled environment in which sound, symbol, code, and contradiction were never separate to begin with. The synthesis is not added at the end. It is the ground condition. The reading is ecological because the elements coevolved, and none of them can be extracted without killing the others.

Typographic noise as material

If there is one development in these works that I would point a newcomer toward first, it is the changed status of language on the page. In my earlier scores, language functioned mostly as interference. It got in the way of the notation, and the getting in the way was the point. That was a useful stage, but it kept language in a subordinate role. Interference is still defined by the thing it interferes with.

In the recent pages language has been promoted. It is no longer annotation. It has become topography, volume, and terrain, which is to say it has become something the performer walks across rather than something the performer reads. I have started to think of these dense passages as semiotic condensates. A condensate is what you get when you cool a substance until its particles collapse into a single shared state, and that is close to what happens when letterform, metallic geometry, and sonic implication are compressed hard enough. They stop being separate signs. They become one dense node of visual sound that ripples outward across the rest of the field.

The pages I called ACTEMBRATE and BOLRIBINE are where this is most advanced. I think of them as a hypermodern baroque. Baroque because they are maximal, ornamented past the point of comfort, horror of the void made visible. Hypermodern because the ornament is not floral but industrial, letterform fused with machined geometry until the type itself produces a kind of sonic texture. These are not instructions and they were never meant to be. They are noise surfaces, and their richness lives precisely in their unreadability. The illegibility is not a failure of the design. It is the content. A surface you cannot fully read is a surface that keeps giving, because it never resolves into a single settled meaning and hands you nothing to file away and forget.

This changes what a letter is. A letter has always been a symbol of language, a stand in for a sound in speech. On these pages a letter is a carrier of sonic behavior in a much broader sense. Some words are playable, and the performer is meant to find the sound folded inside the shape. Some words are obstacles, placed to block a path the eye wanted to take, and the blockage is a musical event in itself. And many words are thresholds. They mark the exact line where interpretation ends and speculation begins, where the performer stops asking what I intended and starts discovering what the situation will allow. That threshold is the most valuable territory in the entire body of work, because it is the place where the music stops being mine and becomes theirs.

The wager underneath all of it

I am aware that everything I have described asks a great deal of the performer, and that some will read this as an abdication. If the score no longer instructs, the objection goes, then the composer has simply stopped doing the work and handed the burden to someone else.

I understand the objection and I think it is wrong, but not obviously wrong, so let me answer it directly. Building an environment is not less work than writing instructions. It is different work, and in my experience it is considerably harder. An instruction only has to be clear. An environment has to be alive. It has to hold together under a kind of pressure that a list of commands never faces, because it has to remain coherent no matter which path a reader takes through it, and it has to keep producing meaning long after a simple instruction would have been exhausted. The precision has not disappeared. It has moved. It now lives in the design of conditions rather than the specification of outcomes.

What I am really wagering is that a score can be a place to think rather than a set of orders to follow, and that music made this way is richer for everyone who enters it. Not richer because it is difficult, though it is difficult. Richer because it treats the performer as a mind rather than a mechanism, and treats reading as an act of inhabitation rather than obedience. The page is no longer a message I send. It is an ecology I cultivate, and then step back from, and then trust.

That trust is the whole art. Everything else is weather.