Forensic Theatrics, Minus the Footnotes.

 

What happens when a score reads like a toxicology report.

Let me save you some time. If you open one of my scores hoping to find a melody, you're going to be disappointed. If you open it hoping to find out what happened, you're in the right place.

I don't really write music to be played. I write music to be examined. My scores look less like sheet music and more like something you'd find in a case file: lab results, dosage charts, symbols that look like they came off a pill bottle, layers of ink so dense they start to look like evidence photos. I call this forensic theatrics. It sounds grand, I know, but in new-music circles nearly everything does. What it really means is that I treat the page as a crime scene and invite everyone in the room to help work out what went on there.

That changes everybody's job. The performer becomes the examiner. The person staring at the score on a gallery wall becomes a witness. And the audience? You become the jury. Let me explain.

So what is "forensic theatrics," actually?

Think about how evidence gets presented on a true-crime show. It's laid out cleanly, labelled and photographed under hard light, all to look objective. But anyone who's watched enough of those shows knows that evidence never speaks for itself. Somebody always has to interpret it, and that's where things get interesting.

I put that tension straight onto the page.

• My Circle Lexicon works like a toxicology report. Each symbol is precise, coded and official-looking, and still open to argument about what it means.
• The layering of ink, saturated symbols and overexposed areas does what crime-scene photography does. It gives you more information than you can comfortably take in, and makes you choose where to look.
• The language is clinical on purpose. My scores talk about dosage, contraindication, administration and something I call narrative valence. That isn't how a composer usually speaks. It's how a pharmacist or a pathologist speaks.

Put those together and you get a score that doesn't say "play me." It says "figure me out." Performing it is less like giving a concert and more like conducting an autopsy, though I promise it's more fun than that sounds, and a good deal more fun than most program notes about this kind of music would suggest.

If you're the performer: congratulations, you're the examiner

I'll be honest with my performers. These scores are a lot. They're dense, a bit intimidating, and in places they are deliberately hard to read. That's not me being difficult for the sake of it. It's the point.

When you can't read every mark, you have to make decisions. You translate on the fly, decode clusters of symbols, and work out what you think a passage is trying to tell you. Somewhere in there you hit a question most sheet music never asks: how much should I pull out of a document that maybe doesn't want to be heard?

If I had to put the performer's side in a sentence, it would be this: "I'm being asked to perform something that won't resolve. I have to sound what's already decayed."

It's physical, too. Some pieces ask you to rotate the score, take it apart or rebuild it mid-performance. Some pages are layered so heavily they feel fragile in your hands, like handling evidence you're afraid to damage. And performers often step into a role: the examiner, the patient, the witness, the analyst. You stop asking "How do I express this?" and start asking "What happened here?"

If you're looking at it on a wall: you're a witness

Plenty of people meet my scores in a gallery rather than a concert hall. They're often shown in vitrines, behind plexiglass, or hung in space. Look at a display like that for a moment and it starts to feel like a museum, an archive, or, if I'm being dark about it, a morgue. Those are all places where something is kept but no longer moving.

You get a pile-up of music, medicine and typography, and no key. So you do what anyone does at a crime scene: you look closer and start building a theory.

I'm not trying to make you feel something on cue. I'm asking you to witness something. It's a different kind of attention, more like a juror than a fan, and I think it's a more honest one.

If you're in the audience: welcome to procedural listening

Here's the fair warning I give every audience. There will be no big build-up and no satisfying climax. Nobody will hand you a story with a beginning, middle and end. If you've sat through a few contemporary music concerts, you may already be braced for that. The difference here is that the missing story is the story.

What you get instead is fragments, coded gestures, and silences that are there on purpose. Sometimes you'll hear only part of the score. Sometimes several performers "read" it at once, and it feels more like a hearing or an examination than a concert. And sometimes, and this is the one that annoys people most, the score is shown and never performed at all. You listen to it in your head, as something imagined.

Time gets slippery, too. A piece might sound like the aftermath of something that's already happened, or like a diagnosis you haven't received yet. Either way, you're listening across a gap. I call that procedural listening. You aren't just receiving the music. You're helping to piece it together.

"Okay, but why would anyone do this?"

Fair question. I get it a lot, usually from someone who wanted a tune. It's also a question my field tends to answer with forty footnotes and a perfectly straight face. I'll try to use fewer of both.

Here's my answer. Traditional notation is a set of instructions: play this note, this loud, for this long. It's a map. My scores are closer to sediment. They're what's left behind when gesture, loss and control settle onto a page. I think of the page as a reliquary, a container for what someone meant, rather than directions for getting there.

I'm also not interested in what I'd call sonic optimism, the comforting idea that music always resolves and that every tension gets its happy cadence. Some things don't get fixed. Sometimes making a sound is just an attempt to get back something the body already knows it has lost. I'd rather be honest about that than pretend otherwise.

And yes, there's a political edge. When I borrow the language of medicine, the formatting of a pharmaceutical label, the cool distance of a clinical report, I'm pointing at things that bother me: how language gets medicalized, how bureaucracy runs on control, and how trauma gets packaged and sold. Performing one of my scores means stepping inside that system for a while, using its codes, finding its cracks, and living with its contradictions.

The bottom line

My scores don't just borrow the look of forensics. They work that way. Performing them is less a performance than a reenactment, an audit, a kind of ghost story told through symbols.

The performer examines. The audience witnesses. And the score itself is the evidence: the record of a world that tried to say something and broke a little in the process.

So come to the next performance. Bring your curiosity, leave your expectations of a big finish at the door, and be ready to take part.

Because a forensic score doesn't ask to be performed.

It asks for testimony.