B Flat trumpet. Pedal Tones.

 

This is a score for B Flat Trumpet. Pedal tones only.

Let that sit for a moment.

Pedal tones are the notes a trumpet is not supposed to produce. They live below the instrument's practical range, in the register where the physics of the brass tube and the physics of the human body negotiate an agreement that neither party is fully comfortable with. They are not extended technique in the fashionable sense. They are extended existence. The trumpet playing a pedal tone is not performing. It is confessing.

This page is where that confession happens.

Look at what the notation is doing to the single stave running through the center of the page. It is not supporting the notation. It is barely surviving it. The stave is a horizon line across which five extraordinary events are occurring simultaneously above and below, each one orbiting the line the way weather systems orbit a pressure front, each one named.

Intra by ColloSurria. The first event cloud, rendered in burnt orange and deep blue, is not a chord cluster or a multiphonic. It is an atmospheric condition. ColloSurria is a word I coined through my Brand Acumen's https://brandacumen.co/ neological process for exactly this phenomenon: the state of colliding tonal atmospheres that cannot be separately identified because their boundaries have dissolved into each other before the ear can locate them. The notation inside the cloud is real. The cloud is also real. Both are instructions. Neither is metaphor.

Abtoxicalleraphy. The second event above the stave is the one that required the longest naming process. Abtoxicalleraphy describes the specific somatic condition of a brass player producing a pedal tone in the extreme low register while simultaneously maintaining embouchure control sufficient for the notated pitch content inside the event. It is toxic to the body in the way that any act of sustained physical extremity is toxic. It is also therapeutic in the way that sustained physical extremity always is. The word needed to hold both truths without resolving the contradiction and it does.

PISTO, RELECTIO, NEVITerseo. This vertical text cluster, rotating around its own axis in the lower center of the page, is the score's pharmacopeia in concentrated form. These are not performance instructions. They are not dynamics. They are states of being that the performer must inhabit before the notation can be executed. PISTO: the compressed interior pressure of the breath before release. RELECTIO: the act of reading something you wrote and no longer recognizing it as yours. NEVITerseo: the specific dizziness that arrives approximately forty seconds into a sustained pedal tone when the oxygen balance in the blood has shifted enough to alter perception without yet altering consciousness. Every trumpeter who has played in this register knows this state. This is the first score that names it.

WHOLE. The black rectangle at the lower right contains a single word in white. Not a note name. Not a duration. Not a dynamic. WHOLE. In the tradition of Ruscha's word paintings this is the score at its most reduced and most complete: the entire instruction for the final event compressed into a single word that is simultaneously a note value, a philosophical proposition, a demand, and a joke. The notation that follows it to the right, the cluster of accidentals and note heads accumulating around an open whole note, is the elaboration of that single word into something playable. But WHOLE came first. The notation is the footnote.

AnsevR and DisceRna-Poli-T. The two event clouds at the lower center and upper right are the score's Carson moments, the typography refusing to hold still, the letters rotating and fragmenting and partially dissolving the way David Carson dissolved type when he understood that legibility was a convention rather than a requirement, and that breaking it produced not confusion but a different and more honest kind of reading. AnsevR names the specific quality of resonance that a pedal tone produces in a large acoustic space, the sound returning altered, as if the room has edited it. DisceRna-Poli-T describes the perceptual condition of the listener rather than the performer, the moment when a sustained very low frequency ceases to be heard as pitch and begins to be felt as pressure, the threshold where music becomes weather.

And then there is the Thomas Demand dimension of this page.

Demand builds architectural models of real spaces and then photographs them, the photograph revealing its own constructedness only slowly, the surfaces too perfect, the shadows too even, the paper grain eventually visible as the wrong kind of grain for the space it is replicating. This score does the same thing. The notational elements are real notation. The stave is a real stave. The clef is a real clef. But the event clouds are not illustrations. They are not generated by any conventional notation software. They are constructions, physical in their own register, that reveal their constructedness only after extended looking. The score is a model of a musical event that has not yet occurred, and the photograph of that model is this page.

The pedal tone is the note the trumpet makes when it stops pretending.

This is the score for that note.