There is a row of pin-up girls at the top of this score.
Each one holds a block of cheese. Each one is accompanied by a sloth.
This is not decoration. This is the piece telling you exactly what kind of attention it requires before you have read a single note.
The notation below is some of the most demanding material I have written for guitar. Four simultaneous staves operating at different logical levels. Time signatures of 08 over 17 and 4000 over 008, which are not errors and not provocations but precise specifications of a temporal experience that conventional meter cannot contain. Tuplet groupings of 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8 in simultaneous deployment across independent voices. Extended techniques rendered in a notational language that borrows from multiple traditions and resolves into none of them. A second clef entry mid-page at 085 over 178, the tempo itself a fraction, the music inside it a further subdivision of something already impossibly subdivided.
And above all of this: women, cheese, and sloths.
The juxtaposition is not ironic. It is not surrealist in the fashionable sense of random image collision. It is a genuine compositional proposition about the relationship between maximum notational complexity and maximum notational absurdity, the idea that the most serious musical demands and the most cheerfully ridiculous imagery belong on the same page because they are both, in the end, asking the same thing of the person who encounters them.
Which is: stay with this. It will not explain itself. But it will reward you.
The sloth knows. The sloth always knows.

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