"ATLAS OF THE FLOODLINE IN THE JUNGLE"
A Speculative Compositional Lexicon
The ATLAS OF THE FLOODLINE IN THE JUNGLE is less a notational system than a pre-architectural mythology. A subtextual cartography rendered in diagrams, it reimagines the musical score not as a neutral transmitter of intention, but as an ideological precinct—part reliquary, part hypothesis. It is both machine and mood, a floodplain of expressive debris awaiting performers who are not merely interpreters but settlers, archeologists, and insurgents.
Developed specifically to interface with the Conn (12A) Wonder Parlor Pocket Cornet—an instrument of ornamental brevity and compact bravura—the lexicon forges a language that acknowledges the instrument's historic sentimentality while deploying it as a node of tactical subversion. The score becomes a form of compressed infrastructure: not just notating what is to be played, but why, where, and in what speculative environmental condition it should occur.
The Lexicon as Construct: Vertical Grammar, Diluvial Syntax
At the heart of the ATLAS is a set of archetypes—call them glyphs, indices, or pressure points—that do not merely point to pitch or time, but represent topographic tensions: surge, saturation, stagnation, and exposure. Each symbol is a miniature edifice, a spatialized ideogram that presumes a certain climatology. Notation is treated here not as an artifact of sound, but of weather. In this regard, we have not merely a system of signs, but a hydraulic epistemology—notation as the map of forces, as an inventory of subsurface sediment.
Lines bleed. Margins flood. Boundaries are traced not with clefs and meters, but with sedimentations of musical precedent and imaginary collapse. One archetype—a series of concentric circles punctuated by jagged verticals—signals “post-sonic liquefaction,” a moment in the score when the performer must enact not a note but the idea of structural failure under acoustic strain. This is not a rupture; it is a cultivated deterioration.
The Jungle as Pretext, The Cornet as Mythology
To speak of the “jungle” in the title is not to evoke a geography but a semiotic thicket—a deliberately overgrown referential field in which signals tangle and drown. The ATLAS does not aim to clarify the jungle but to honor its resistance to monocultural order. The Cornet, small and deceptively playful, is weaponized as a proxy for the explorer's voice: sometimes declaring, other times camouflaging, or simply mirroring the lush, wet disorientation of the surrounding system.
Rather than using traditional dynamics or articulations, performers are instructed through geotemporal directives: play as if beneath a canopy in monsoon; intonate with the weight of sunken architecture; emit tone as if interrupting fungal growth. These are not metaphors, but procedural truths of the new lexicon.
Towards the Future -Isms: Adaptive Musics for Discontinuous Times
The ATLAS does not end with the Cornet. It anticipates future -isms—musical, architectural, and ecological—that it will seed rather than merely predict.
Fossilist Expressionism might arise, where compositions simulate the slow pressure of mineral time upon musical form. Here, the ATLAS’s layered strata of notation could guide performers in mimicking deep compression: phrases fold inward, intervals erode into drone sediment.
Post-Urban Echoism could leverage the ATLAS as a blueprint for soundwalks in decommissioned spaces. With its glyphs serving as ritualized sonifications of forgotten civic plans, the work extends into the spatial politics of acoustic memory—abandoned metros, flooded libraries, brutalist relics used as natural reverb chambers.
Hydrographic Serialism, too, might develop: a compositional mode based entirely on tidal and weather-based cycles, scored with symbols derived from the ATLAS’s floodline index. This -ism would require performers to use NOAA data or speculative climate models to generate musical action.
The Performance as Cartographic Incursion
A performance of a work under the ATLAS rubric is a ritual incursion, a temporary claim staked in the interpretive wilderness. The cornetist must approach the score as an urbanist might a half-sunken city—charting submerged transit lines, listening for reverberations in collapsed concrete halls. Practice becomes excavation, and the page a palimpsest of submerged strategies. There is no singular reading. The ATLAS demands residency in the material. It’s a dwelling score.
Each score is site-specific by default: not to place, but to climate, contour, tension. The player’s breath is not merely air—it is pressurized atmosphere, pushing against the ecology of notation, altering weather patterns on the page.
Concluding Ruins: The Score as Memorial and Prototype
To engage with the ATLAS OF THE FLOODLINE IN THE JUNGLE is to situate oneself in a speculative history that is already decomposing. It is not a map of what music has been, nor what it might be. It is a score of losses, forecasts, and interstitial domains.
The Conn Wonder Parlor Pocket Cornet becomes the instrument of choice not because of its tradition, but because of its ability to sound like memory—compressed, evaporating, almost nostalgic for futures it never had.
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