The Sign That Comes Before

Most notes in the Clarion pages are preceded by an accidental. Before each notehead sits a small mark telling you how the pitch is bent, by a quarter tone, by a comma, by some fraction of a cent, up or down, and the marks are not the five or six accidentals you learned. There are dozens. Some are borrowed from the microtonal traditions that already exist, the Helmholtz-Ellis arrows, the Sagittal flags, the Johnston pluses and minuses. Many are not borrowed from anywhere. They were made for these pages, and they exist nowhere else.

This has become the thing people ask about once they have exhausted the tuplets. What are these symbols. Who is supposed to read them. And underneath both questions, unspoken but audible: by what right does a composer invent a sign and expect it to mean something.

It is a fair challenge, and answering it means saying what an accidental actually is, which turns out to be stranger than the word suggests.

An accidental is a correction. That is its history and its humility. The staff gives you seven pitches per octave, the white keys, the diatonic set, and everything outside that set has to be flagged as a deviation from it. Sharp: raise it. Flat: lower it. Natural: never mind, put it back. The accidental exists because the notation it corrects is inadequate to the music it carries. It is an apology the staff makes for its own coarseness. Every sharp is the system admitting it cannot say what it means without a patch.

Hold that thought, because it reframes the whole enterprise. If the accidental is the staff apologizing for its coarseness, then a music finer than the semitone will need finer apologies, and more of them. The twelve-tone grid is a coarse instrument. It rounds every pitch to the nearest of twelve boxes and throws away the remainder, and for most of the music ever written the remainder did not matter, because the music lived in the boxes. But the moment you become interested in the remainder, in the space between the boxes, the space where intonation actually lives, the standard accidentals run out almost immediately. Sharp and flat can only move you from one box to another. They cannot place you between. For that you need a sign the tradition never made, because the tradition never needed it.

So the invented accidentals are not decoration and they are not provocation. They are the continuation of the oldest function in notation, the correction of the grid, carried to the point where the grid corrects almost everything. On these pages the accidental is no longer the exception. It is the rule. There is one before every note because every note is between the boxes. A pitch that landed cleanly on a named degree would be the anomaly, and it would need no sign, and its absence of a sign would itself be information. The accidentals are dense because the music is nowhere near the white keys, and it is nowhere near them on purpose.

But why invent new signs at all, when the microtonal systems already exist. Why not simply use Helmholtz-Ellis throughout and be legible to the people who have learned it. This is the sharper version of the objection and it deserves the sharper answer. The existing systems are magnificent and I use them where they serve. But each of them was built around a particular theory of intonation, just intonation, a specific comma structure, a fixed set of prime limits. They are notations with commitments. They carry an argument about which pitches are the real ones. And there are inflections I want that none of them was designed to name, because they do not belong to any single tuning theory. They belong to the trajectory of a particular gesture, the exact bend a particular phrase requires at a particular speed. For those I have had to make the sign, because the sign is the only place that pitch has ever existed. It was never a degree in a system. It was a decision, and the mark is the record of the decision.

This is the point at which the earlier arguments in these pages converge. If the notation is the work, and not a set of instructions awaiting sound, then inventing a notation is not a convenience to be justified by legibility. It is composition itself. The sign that comes before the note is not a label pointing at a pitch that exists independently of it. The pitch does not exist independently of it. The mark brings the pitch into being as a specified thing, at a resolution no keyboard and no ear invented before it was written down. To make the accidental is to make the note. There is no prior pitch waiting to be transcribed. There is the decision, and its record, and they are the same act.

Which returns the objection to its senders, gently. By what right does a composer invent a sign. By the same right anyone ever inscribed a mark and asked it to hold a meaning, which is the only right there has ever been in notation, and the right by which the sharp itself was once a novelty that someone had to explain to a skeptical room. Every accidental was invented. The familiar ones simply had their arguments won so long ago that we mistake them for nature. The staff is not nature. The twelve boxes are not nature. They are a settled convention, and the settling was once exactly as strange as this.

There is one more thing the density of these signs does, and it is the part I find myself least able to argue and most sure of. A page where every note carries its own correction is a page that refuses to round anything off. It insists that each pitch is exactly itself and nothing near it, that there is no such thing as close enough, that the space between the boxes is not a margin of error but the field of the music. The forest of accidentals is a moral position stated in ink. It says: attend to the remainder. Everything you were trained to discard is where the piece is.

You will not play these signs perfectly. No one will. That was true of the sharp too, once, when it was new and the room was skeptical and the pitch it named sat a little beyond what the hand could reliably find. The signs go on the page anyway, at the resolution the music needs and not the resolution the hand can guarantee, because the page is where the pitch lives, and the mark that comes before the note is not describing the music. It is the music, deciding, in the only place it ever gets to decide.