Imperial Catechism

For Piccolo and Corno da Caccia

Bil Smith
Published by LNM Editions (Laboratorie New Music)

There is something faintly bureaucratic about Imperial Catechism. Its title suggests a prescribed sequence of questions and answers, an authorized language through which belief is rehearsed until it becomes obedience. Yet the score refuses anything resembling obedient reading. Symbols appear to have escaped their conventional duties. Musical objects are displaced, partially erased, enlarged, repeated, stranded outside the staff, or crowded into territories where their identity becomes uncertain. The page seems to know the grammar of Western notation while deliberately misremembering it.

That distinction matters. This is not graphic notation in the familiar sense of replacing musical notation with pictures. Much of Imperial Catechism retains the archaeological remains of conventional notation: five-line staves, clefs, accidentals, beams, slurs, tremolo indications, rests, noteheads, dynamics, brackets. The instability comes from what happens to them. Familiar signs coexist with geometric forms, black rectangles, isolated points, cipher-like inscriptions, extended horizontal rules and fragments whose musical status is never entirely secure. A sign may begin as notation and end as an object.

The opening page makes the proposition particularly clear. The piccolo occupies four isolated systems surrounded by enormous amounts of white paper. Against this emptiness, tiny incidents acquire peculiar authority. A heavy horizontal bar can dominate an entire phrase. A conventional pitch suddenly looks provisional beside a black square or a displaced vertical stroke. The eye repeatedly encounters things that seem meaningful before it has determined what kind of meaning they possess.

This produces one of the score's central tensions: information is plentiful, but certainty is scarce.

As the corno da caccia enters, the visual situation becomes more complicated. The two instruments do not simply form a conventional duo. They inhabit the page differently. Lines travel between registers and across otherwise empty territories. Events accumulate above and below the staff. Parenthetical objects appear. Long trajectories coexist with microscopic interruptions. The vertical relationship between the instruments sometimes implies coordination, at other moments proximity seems almost accidental.

The performer therefore encounters the score as a field of competing authorities. Pitch has authority. So does contour. Density has authority. Duration, typography, spatial position, repetition and graphic weight all make claims upon the reading. None can simply be discarded as decoration.

This is where the word catechism begins to exert pressure on the music.

A catechism establishes an authorized relationship between question and answer. Its effectiveness depends upon repeatability. The same question should yield the same response. Musical notation traditionally makes a related promise, however imperfectly: the mark establishes a sufficiently stable instruction that another musician can reproduce something recognizable as the same work.

Imperial Catechism interferes with that contract. It gives the performer an unusually dense collection of instructions while simultaneously destabilizing the hierarchy through which those instructions would normally be understood. The score does not abandon authority. It proliferates it.

That proliferation is visible everywhere. Some passages become almost compulsively active, with tightly beamed figures, clustered pitches and overlapping articulations compressed into small spaces. Elsewhere a single line stretches across much of the page. An isolated black object can suddenly outweigh dozens of conventional notes simply because of its scale or placement. Silence itself becomes material because the surrounding white space has been made so conspicuous.

The piece moves between surplus and subjugation. At one extreme there is too much information, too many signs, too many possible relationships. At the other there are severe restrictions: a line, a sustained condition, an isolated event, a narrow register, an almost emptied page. Neither state feels neutral. Abundance becomes oppressive; scarcity becomes equally controlling.

This gives the score a strange relationship to the contemporary visual economy. We live among images that have been reproduced so often that their original force has largely evaporated. Icons, symbols, diagrams, typographic gestures and fragments of institutional language circulate continuously. Their abundance reduces their value. Something can be instantly recognizable and almost meaningless at the same time.

Imperial Catechism exploits this exhaustion.

A familiar musical sign is extracted from its habitual environment and made conspicuous again. The notehead becomes a shape. The beam becomes architecture. The staff becomes a measuring device. A bracket can resemble an enclosure. A heavy rule begins to suggest a barrier, horizon, censor's stroke or structural support. Repetition no longer merely repeats musical information; it exposes the sign itself as an artifact.

There is humor in this, although it is a rather dry humor. The page occasionally seems to have become overzealous in its own administration. Symbols multiply, annotations intrude, objects accumulate around events that might otherwise have been perfectly straightforward. One has the impression of a musical bureaucracy continuing to produce documentation after the thing being documented has disappeared.

The piccolo is especially suited to this environment. Its historical identity carries associations of brilliance, penetration, military signaling and orchestral extremity. The corno da caccia brings another genealogy: hunting, ceremony, distance, command. Their pairing is already theatrical before either instrument produces a sound. These are instruments capable of announcing things.

Yet what they announce here is uncertain.

The title's imperial dimension consequently need not be understood as a literal political narrative. It is more interesting as a condition of organization. Empire categorizes. It assigns positions, establishes hierarchies, reproduces symbols, standardizes language and decides which signs possess legitimacy. The score creates such systems and then continually contaminates them.

This is why the piece can be considered sculptural without treating that word metaphorically. Its notation has mass. Graphic elements occupy space with different apparent weights. Some objects seem suspended. Others press downward or extend laterally. Dense regions behave differently from empty ones. A long curved line spanning a system can feel less like phrasing than tensile structure. The page becomes a shallow relief assembled from musical debris.

By the later pages, conventional notation has not disappeared. In some respects it becomes more insistent. Rapid piccolo figures and extended horn gestures establish recognizable instrumental behavior, only to be interrupted by the score's other vocabularies. The conventional and the anomalous cease to function as opposites. They contaminate one another. After enough exposure to the displaced signs, even an ordinary note begins to look suspicious.

That perceptual change may be one of the work's more important operations.

There is a tendency to discuss unconventional notation according to the freedom it grants performers. Imperial Catechism suggests something less comfortable. Interpretation can itself become a form of constraint. Faced with an unstable sign, the performer must decide what counts, what relates to what, which visual difference is consequential, and which apparent instruction has precedence. Freedom brings responsibility for constructing the very hierarchy that conventional notation normally supplies.

The performers consequently become participants in the manufacture of the work's authority.

This also complicates the idea of site-specificity. The relevant site is not simply the concert hall. It is the page, the music stand, the institutional history of notation and the accumulated habits through which musicians have learned to convert marks into actions. Imperial Catechism operates inside that institution. Its critique would lose much of its force if the staves, clefs, notes and familiar remnants were removed altogether. It needs the institution sufficiently intact to interfere with it.

The score therefore belongs to a peculiar category of contextual work. Its material is piccolo and corno da caccia, certainly, but its other material is notation itself: notation as language, artifact, architecture, commodity and disciplinary apparatus.

There are passages where the visual density approaches saturation, followed by territories that seem almost impoverished. That oscillation gives the work its peculiar economy. Nothing retains a stable value. A tiny mark can become decisive because almost nothing surrounds it. A large accumulation can become strangely weak because there is simply too much to process. Scarcity inflates significance; abundance destroys it.

And somewhere inside all of this, two musicians still have to play.

That fact prevents Imperial Catechism from becoming a purely visual proposition. Every cipher eventually confronts breath, embouchure, fingers, resistance, fatigue and time. The page can propose impossible precision, but the body must negotiate it. Graphic abundance becomes physical expenditure. A sustained line becomes air. A dense field becomes muscular coordination. An abstract relationship between symbols becomes an encounter between two people attempting to occupy the same temporal space.

Perhaps that is where the catechism finally fails. The score can prescribe, classify, repeat, displace and insist, but performance introduces the unruly thing that systems of signs can never entirely contain: an event.