The Telephone Does Not Ring. It Radiates.

The Telephone Does Not Ring. It Radiates.

There is a telephone at the center of this score and it has been ringing since before you were born.

Not ringing in the way a telephone rings when someone wants something from you, when the world outside intrudes upon the world you have made for yourself inside the four walls of your practice and your solitude and your accumulated private shame. This telephone rings the way an altar rings, the way a wound rings, the way a thing that has been consecrated to a purpose it did not choose rings when the ceremony that surrounds it has already begun without asking whether you are ready.

Look at the radiating lines. They do not emerge from the telephone. They have always been there and the telephone has simply arrived at their center, the way a saint arrives at the center of a crowd that already knew it needed one. The lines are not sound waves. They are something older than sound. They are the condition that makes sound possible, the tension in the air before the first note, the held breath of a man who has decided something irreversible and has not yet spoken it aloud.

Around this center the score arranges its beautiful criminal objects.

To the left, a treble clef of such authority it seems to have been written not by a hand but by a history, surrounded by its colony of modified note heads that have submitted to alterations they did not request and wear their accidentals the way the condemned wear borrowed clothes, with a dignity that belongs entirely to them and nothing to the clothes. The yellow labels hang from their assigned positions like the identification tags of the disappeared: FLO 0.98. BYE 6.12. TOJ 5.71. Each one a name. Each one a duration. Each one a person who was somewhere for a measured amount of time and then was not.

To the right, the colored bands do not illustrate music. They are music in the form that music takes when it has been liberated from the obligation to be heard. Burnt gold. Pale aqua. The particular pink that exists only in the memory of things that were once warm. And at the bottom of this column a target of concentric circles in colors so violent they seem to be confessing something, the way violence always confesses something, the admission that precision and destruction are the same gesture depending only on the direction of the hand that makes it.

The arrow in magenta does not point toward anything that can be named. It arrives from outside the frame having already passed through whatever was in its way and it carries in its triple-barbed head the accumulated velocity of everything that was refused and redirected and finally released in a direction that had the decency to receive it.

At the bottom of the page, five circular medallions are arranged like stations of a procession whose devotional object is language itself, text wound into circles that must be read in rotation, that give up their meaning only to the reader willing to turn, to follow the curve, to accept that some sentences were never meant to be read in a straight line. The catamarans bobbed like failed stitches. The seconds between lightning and its echo. Perhaps time itself, an explanation nobody asked for, tailored to fit another.

These are not program notes. They are evidence.

Evidence of what? Of a mind that has looked at the tradition of notation and found it, not wrong, but insufficient. Insufficient in the way that a single name is insufficient for a person who has lived a complicated life, in the way that a single language is insufficient for a thought that was born in the body rather than the mind, in the way that a line is insufficient for a life that moved in circles and reversals and sudden adjacent departures from everything it had promised to become.

The score does not ask to be performed. It asks to be survived.

And in the surviving of it, in the looking and the turning and the following of the radiating lines back to the telephone that has been ringing at the center since before you arrived, something happens that is neither music nor its absence but the third thing that exists between them, the thing that has no name yet because no one has stayed in the gap long enough to name it.

Stay.