Excerpt - Gegenlage for Soprillo Saxophone and Viola

 

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.