When a score stops pretending that the page is flat.

I want to talk about what happens when a score stops pretending that the page is flat.

This is a page from my new score for trumpet. Before you ask what any specific symbol means, I want you to look at something more fundamental. Look at the shape the notation is contained within.

The staves do not run from left to right and stop at a margin. They are encircled. They are held inside a form that curves back on itself, that routes the musical material through a closed architectural system before releasing it into the open white space of the page. The score is not a road. It is a circuit. And a circuit implies something that a road does not: that what travels through it returns changed by the journey.

There are three staves visible on this page. They do not occupy the same logical plane. Stave one runs through the upper register of the encircling form at full notational density, a hyper-chromatic field of material so compressed that the tuplet groupings, 4, 6, 7, 9, 14, begin to function less as rhythmic specifications and more as pressure readings, measurements of how much material is being forced through a given unit of time. At tuplet 14 the notation is doing something I have never seen another score ask a brass player to do: it is specifying a density of simultaneous events that exceeds what a single instrument can produce, which means the score is not describing what the trumpet will play. It is describing what the trumpet will attempt.

The attempt is the performance.

Stave two occupies the middle register with a different logic entirely, its material sparser and its notation incorporating a parallelogram, a geometric object with no conventional meaning in any notational tradition I am aware of. It is not a rest. It is not a dynamic marking. It is a shape that the performer must interpret as a durational and timbral instruction without any legend to guide them. The interpretation is the composition.

Stave four, at the bottom, is the one that keeps me awake. It opens with a time signature of 5 over 24 and closes with 11 over 24. These are not unusual time signatures in the sense that they represent unusual rhythmic groupings. They are unusual in a more fundamental sense: they specify a relationship between a numerator and a denominator that produces a beat unit no human body has a natural pulse correspondence for. The score is not asking the trumpeter to count. It is asking the trumpeter to find a relationship to time that cannot be felt, only calculated, and then to perform as if it were felt.

The yellow form in the upper left is the element I want to leave you with. It is not a dynamic marking. It is not a key signature. It is not an illustration of the trumpet's bell or its sound wave or any other representational object. It is a form that exists in the score the way a weather system exists in a landscape: as a condition rather than an instruction, as something the performer must pass through rather than execute. It precedes the notation. It frames the notation. It is the first thing the eye encounters and the last thing the mind resolves.

I designed it to be unresolvable.

The camera object in the lower right corner is there for a reason I am not going to explain. But I will say this: the score knows it is being watched. And it is performing for the camera as much as for the trumpet.

What does notation owe a performer? I used to think the answer was clarity. I no longer think that. I think the answer is a problem worth solving. This page is that.