A Volume of Calls: On the Clarion series for trumpet, six pages becoming fifty-nine

A Volume of Calls

On the Clarion series for trumpet, six pages becoming fifty-nine

Clarion began as one page. I wrote a single sheet for solo trumpet, one centered stave with the whole apparatus climbing up and down from it, a fanfare that stated itself and stopped. Then I wrote five more. Somewhere inside the sixth I understood that I had not written six pieces. I had found a form, and the form wanted a volume. So the six are now the opening of fifty-nine.

The word clarion is not decoration on the title. A clarion is a trumpet, the high clear one, and a clarion call is the thing the instrument was invented to do, to cut through, to announce, to summon across a distance. I wanted works that remembered that the trumpet is a herald before it is anything else, before it is a jazz voice or an orchestral section or a virtuoso vehicle. So each page is a call. Not a movement, not an etude, not a character piece. A call. The trumpet is the one instrument whose entire history is signal, and I wanted a body of work that stood inside that history rather than politely beside it.

Each Clarion is one page and only one page. Nothing spills onto a verso, nothing is marked to be repeated, nothing continues elsewhere. The single page is the complete unit, and I mean complete in the strong sense, that the work is exactly the size of one sheet a player can take in at a glance. The eye receives the whole call before the lips begin it. That is a formal decision every bit as consequential as choosing the instrument, because the page is the form. A call that needed two pages would not be a call. It would be a speech, and a speech is a different genre with different obligations. The discipline of the single sheet is what keeps each of these works honest about what it is.

And each page is dense. One stave, the apparatus growing vertically off it until the stave itself is nearly buried, the trumpet pushed to the ceiling of what a single sheet can hold, tonguing and valve work and mutes and microtones and breath all stacked into one continuous gesture. The brevity of the page is not the brevity of the sketch. It is compression. Every one of these pages is a maximum folded down until it fits inside a single glance, which is the opposite of a miniature. A miniature is small because there is little to say. A Clarion is small because there is too much, and it has been forced into one page on purpose.

But the single page is only half of the form. The other half is the volume, and this is the part that changed when I passed from six to fifty-nine. One call is an event. Fifty-nine calls, ordered and bound, is something else. It is an accumulation, a census of nearly everything the trumpet can be asked to announce, a wall of signals rather than a signal. I keep thinking of Hanne Darboven's walls of dated sheets, where no single page is the work and the seriality itself is the content. The volume is a form in its own right, and no individual page carries it, the way no single day carries a year. The move from six to fifty-nine is the move from a suite to a body. A suite is a handful of related pieces you play together in an evening. A body is a complete population, and the meaning of any one member is partly that it is one of fifty-nine.

This matters for how the pieces are meant to live. You do not have to perform all fifty-nine, and most players never will. A trumpeter can take three of them, or one, and the call still sounds. But all fifty-nine have to exist, because each page is written knowing it belongs to a fixed and finite set, and that knowledge is inside the writing. A call that knows it is one of fifty-nine is composed differently from a call that thinks it is alone. The volume is the context every page is answering to, even when it is performed by itself.

And the volume stops at fifty-nine, not sixty, and the missing round number is deliberate. I do not build systems that come out even, because nothing true comes out even, and the round number is almost always a lie you tell to make a body of work look designed. Fifty-nine is a prime. It cannot be halved or quartered into tidy sub-suites of neat equal length, which is exactly why it is the right size for a volume meant to resist being tidied. It terminates one short of the number you were expecting, and that small refusal is the signature. The same instinct that puts one deliberate flaw in every score puts the whole volume one page short of the round, so that the set as a whole carries the imperfection its individual pages carry.

When it is finished it will be fifty-nine single pages for trumpet. Fifty-nine calls, each complete in a glance, and none of them complete without the other fifty-eight. The six that exist now are not a preview of the volume. They are the first six terms of it, and they already know how many follow. The trumpet has been calling since long before anyone wrote a note down. This is one attempt to write down fifty-nine of the calls it still has left to make.