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)

 

THE DIFFICULTY CURVE A Third Way Into the Question of Hard Music

 

THE DIFFICULTY CURVE A Third Way Into the Question of Hard Music

"Notation and the Politics of Difficulty" gives difficulty exactly one register. It is resistance. It is labor exposed. It is friction against a smooth and coercive system. All of that is true, and I have already spent one long response taking that framework seriously on its own terms. But I want to try something different here, because I think the political vocabulary, resistance, domination, care, cruelty, is not the only vocabulary difficulty deserves, and treating it as the only one may be quietly making the music sound grimmer than the actual experience of playing it often is.

So let me borrow from somewhere the original essay never looks. Not critical theory. Game design.

THE THING VIDEO GAMES FIGURED OUT

Anyone who designs games for a living thinks constantly about a specific psychological state, first named clearly by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and studied obsessively ever since, called flow. Flow is what happens when a task's difficulty sits in a narrow, specific band relative to your current skill. Too easy, and you get boredom, your attention drifts, the task stops mattering. Too hard, and you get anxiety, your attention collapses inward toward the fear of failing rather than outward toward the task itself. But in the band between those two states, difficulty stops feeling like an obstacle and starts feeling like the reason you are still in the room.

This is not a minor detail of entertainment design. It is one of the best documented and most consistently replicated findings in the psychology of skilled performance, and it applies with just as much force to a cellist working through a difficult passage as it does to someone navigating a video game's boss fight. The original essay's account of difficulty never mentions this state. It describes difficulty entirely from the outside, as something imposed, negotiated, resisted. It never asks what difficulty feels like from inside a successful rehearsal, at two in the morning, when a passage that was unplayable in September finally starts to move, and the player is not thinking about institutions or governance at all. They are thinking about nothing but the next sixteenth note, and they are, by every definition available to us, happy.

I do not think this happiness is a distraction from the politics. I think it might be the politics, arriving through a different door.

FLOOR AND CEILING

Game designers have a pair of terms worth stealing outright: skill floor and skill ceiling. The skill floor is how quickly a newcomer can get something real out of an activity, some functional competence, some legible success. The skill ceiling is how far mastery can theoretically extend before the activity runs out of new things to teach you. A great game, the design wisdom goes, has a low floor and a high ceiling. Almost anyone can start. Almost no one finishes learning it.

Most difficult contemporary notation, described the way the original essay describes it, only has a ceiling. It is often composed as though difficulty were a plateau reached immediately at the first bar and sustained without relief for the duration of the piece, maximal density from the downbeat, nothing to grow into, nothing gradually revealed. This is a real compositional choice, and it produces a real and specific effect, the essay is right that the effect matters. But it is worth naming clearly that this is only one difficulty curve among many possible ones, and treating it as the paradigmatic case of difficulty flattens a much richer design space.

A score with a low floor and a high ceiling might open in a register a developing performer can meaningfully inhabit on the first read, then unfold new layers of demand as the performer's relationship with the material deepens across a rehearsal period, so that the piece is, in effect, still teaching the performer things in the fortieth hour of contact that it could not have taught them in the fourth. This is not a lesser or more compromising kind of difficulty. It may be a harder one to design, because it requires the composer to think not just about the page but about time, about what a performer is capable of noticing in week one versus week six, and to build the notation so that it rewards that specific unfolding rather than presenting the same wall of demand regardless of how long you have been standing in front of it.

THE FEEDBACK LOOP MUSIC NOTATION FORGOT

Here is something else games do well that scores mostly do not. They tell you, constantly and immediately, how you are doing.

Miss a jump in a platformer and you know instantly, unambiguously, and the game already has you trying again before the frustration has time to calcify into despair. Play a wrong rhythm in a hyper-complex contemporary score and the feedback is far murkier. You might not know you have misjudged the tuplet until a coach or a recording tells you, sometimes days later. The gap between action and feedback in difficult notation is often enormous compared to almost any other domain where humans deliberately practice difficult skills, and I think this gap, not density itself, is responsible for a great deal of the anxiety the original essay treats as an inherent and perhaps even desirable property of difficult music.

Anxiety produced by genuine demand is one thing, the essay is right to value it. Anxiety produced merely by poor feedback design is a different thing entirely, and I do not think it is romantic or productive, I think it is simply bad design wearing the costume of rigor. A performer lost inside a passage with no clear way to check their own accuracy is not having a heightened aesthetic encounter. They are often just stuck, in the least interesting sense of the word, and mistaking that stuckness for depth is one of the quieter ways difficult music can fail the people performing it without ever being accused of failing.

Composers who care about this have started building feedback more directly into their scores. Cue systems that let a performer verify alignment against a click or a partner in real time. Notation that makes its own internal logic checkable, so a player can self-correct rather than waiting for an outside authority to confirm or deny. None of this makes the material easier. It makes the difficulty legible to the person living inside it while they are still living inside it, which is precisely the condition flow requires and precisely the condition the most opaque difficult scores often deny.

SMOOTH IS NOT THE OPPOSITE OF HARD

The original essay sets up a binary I want to gently dismantle. Smooth versus difficult, ease versus friction, consumption versus confrontation. But flow theory suggests something the binary cannot hold. The most absorbing, most demanding, most genuinely difficult experiences available to a human being often feel, from the inside, remarkably smooth. Not smooth because they are easy. Smooth because the difficulty and the skill are moving together, matched, so that the friction the original essay values so highly is present in the task without being present in the experience of doing the task.

This is not a defense of easy listening. It is closer to the opposite. It suggests that the real enemy of difficulty's political value is not smoothness at all. It is mismatch. A score that outstrips every performer who will ever attempt it produces not confrontation but abandonment, the piece performed once, badly, from terror, and then shelved. A score whose difficulty curve is designed with actual care for how a specific kind of skill develops over actual rehearsal time can ask for just as much, sustain resistance to smooth institutional absorption just as effectively, and still, at three in the morning during the fourth week of rehearsal, let the performer feel something the original essay's vocabulary has no room for. Not confrontation. Not labor made visible. Something closer to joy, earned the hard way, which is, after all, the only way flow ever arrives.

A DIFFERENT LAST LINE

The original essay ends by saying a difficult score does not ask to be consumed, it asks to be faced. I want to offer a companion sentence rather than a correction.

A difficult score that has thought carefully about its own difficulty curve does not only ask to be faced. It asks to be returned to. And the performer who returns to it, again and again, across a rehearsal period long enough for the wall to become a door, is not merely enduring the composer's demand. They are, if the difficulty was designed with any care at all, having a genuinely good time getting there.

That should not embarrass anyone. Pleasure earned through real difficulty is not the opposite of critique. It may be one of the only delivery systems critique has that actually works.

"Proctor of The Misconstruction Emporium." A Fanfare for Two Trumpets and Megaphone

"Proctor of The Misconstruction Emporium"

A Fanfare for Two Trumpets and Megaphone

Bil Smith Composer

Large Format Score 22" X 20"

2024

Link to PDF:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tL-YYhdl2uvFg_rhDHPXclru5hhy5R54/view?usp=sharing

The score of "Proctor of The Misconstruction Emporium" recontextualizes the traditional trumpet fanfare within a modernist framework that challenges the historical and ceremonial connotations of the trumpet's sound. Instead of serving as a straightforward call to attention or a marker of significant societal events, this fanfare delves into the realm of the abstract and the introspective, reflecting the complexities of modern narratives and identities.

The incorporation of a megaphone alongside traditional trumpets in this score is particularly noteworthy. This combination not only amplifies the physical sound of the instruments but also metaphorically amplifies the urgency and the contemporary relevance of the fanfare. The megaphone, a tool commonly associated with public announcements and grassroots activism, transforms the fanfare from a symbol of hierarchical or institutional authority into a vehicle for personal expression and public intervention.

Historically, the use of the trumpet fanfare can be traced back to ancient civilizations, where instruments similar to the trumpet were used in religious and military contexts. In the Middle Ages, the trumpet was a staple in courts and battlefields. Its use in fanfares was tightly controlled by guilds, and playing the trumpet was often a right reserved for those belonging to specific societal classes. By the time of the Baroque period, the trumpet had evolved into a key musical instrument in courts across Europe, used both in orchestras and to herald the arrival of monarchs and other dignitaries.

In classical music, fanfares composed by figures like Claudio Monteverdi and Jean-Baptiste Lully incorporated trumpets to emphasize regality and grandeur. The trumpet's role continued to evolve through the Romantic era and into the 20th century, where composers like Aaron Copland used fanfares to evoke feelings of American resilience and unity during challenging times.

This piece, in its refusal to conform to normative musical structures, does not merely exist within the realm of sound but extends its reach into the realm of spatial theory, particularly the "geographical" as an essential component of its composition. This geographical dimension does not refer to physical space alone but to the conceptual and cultural spaces that the music inhabits and invokes.

This score's relationship with location and context underscores a fundamental critique of traditional musicology's reliance on the monocular perspective—the idea that a score must serve as a transparent medium through which the composer's intentions are unproblematically realized by the performer. Instead, "Proctor of The Misconstruction Emporium" subverts this by presenting a score that acts as a site of struggle between the composer's intentions and the performer's interpretation, between the notation's prescriptive authority and the performative act's creative potential.

SCORE DETAIL:

 

Sound Morphology Learning Lab - Inside the Score: Agostino Bonalumi and the Mito-Notational Field

Sound Morphology Learning Lab

Inside the Score: Surface, Pressure, and the Mito-Notational Field

In this score, I am not using the page as a neutral support. I am using it as a pressure field. I want the work to begin acting before it is performed, before the eye organizes the symbols into anything legible, before the performer decides what counts as event and what counts as atmosphere. The score has to function first as a condition.

That is where Agostino Bonalumi matters to me. What I take from him is not simply a visual reference. It is a structural lesson. His relief works turned the surface into an active spatial body. The plane was no longer passive. It was stretched, stressed, pushed outward, made to hold tension. That logic is central to what I am doing here. I want the score to behave the same way. I want it to feel as though it has been forced into visibility from behind.

The matte-black receding relief in the background establishes that immediately. It is not there as backdrop or mood. It is the first layer of behavior. The protrusions make the page feel swollen, pressured, bodily. They interrupt the fantasy of flat readability. Even before notation appears, the score is already telling the performer that this field has depth, resistance, and stored force.

I think of the black relief as compressed energy. It recedes, but it also insists. That contradiction is useful. It makes the eye work. It slows down the act of reading and turns perception into part of the composition.

The Scuduri font in the upper right reinforces that shift. For me, it is not a decorative flourish or a title marker. It acts as a local code block, a signal that the score operates under its own internal law. It announces a notational jurisdiction. Once that font appears, the page makes clear that it may borrow from conventional systems, but it is not governed by them entirely.

That is the role of what I call the mito-notational system. It borrows from Western notation, but it does not remain obedient to it. Staff fragments, noteheads, beams, rhythmic densities, and gestural clusters all appear, but they no longer behave as parts of a continuous linear syntax. I break them apart, suspend them, compress them, and redistribute them so that they begin acting less like instructions and more like charged objects.

This is the essential move. I am not rejecting notation. I am turning notation into material.

Across the score, the fragments do not form a single sentence. They form a dispersed topography. Some are dense and blackened, almost architectural. Some are thin and unstable, more like tremor bands or residues. Some hover as isolated capsules. The performer does not simply read through them. The performer has to move among them. The score becomes archipelagic. Meaning is produced not only by the symbols themselves, but by the tension between them, the distance between them, and the pressure of the relief field underneath.

That is how the score functions. Each element bends the space around it. A compressed cluster thickens the silence beside it. A stretched line changes the temporal character of an empty zone. A suspended fragment may carry less literal instruction than atmospheric or tactile pressure. In this system, notation is not just symbolic. It is topological.

The purple variant makes that even more explicit. The field becomes more synthetic and less recessive. The metallic circular forms read like resonators, valves, apertures, or pressure discs. The staff lines extending outward from the clef create a sense of projection or transmission, as if notation is being routed into a device. At that point the score stops behaving only like a page and starts behaving like an interface.

That shift matters to me because it shows how the work moves between identities without settling. It can be relief painting, score, symbolic artifact, and apparatus at once. I do not see that instability as a problem. It is the engine of the piece.

For the performer, this changes everything. The score does not ask for passive decoding. It asks for navigation. It asks the performer to decide what is foreground and what is field, what is sounded directly and what remains atmospheric, what behaves as rhythm and what behaves as texture. The page distributes pressure, but it does not close off interpretation. That balance is important. I want the work to remain unmistakably itself while still requiring thought, judgment, and risk from the performer.

So when I say this score functions and acts, I mean that quite literally. It functions as a relief system, a hybrid notational script, and a symbolic object. It acts by delaying legibility, by turning surface into force, by making notation tactile, and by forcing performance to begin as interpretation rather than execution.

That is the larger aim for me. I do not want a score that simply tells a performer what to do. I want a score that changes the conditions under which doing becomes possible. I want a page that thinks spatially, a notation that behaves like matter, and a surface that carries its own internal tension into the room.

That is where this work begins. Not as document, but as pressure.

Status Field No. 7 - "A Study in Pressures." For Violin. 2006

Status Field No. 7

"A Study in Pressures"

For Violin

2006