Cuts, Cans, and Calendars: Why I Study Painters to Write Music
I hold two degrees in music, a B.M. and an M.M., and I took the full sequence. I analyzed Du Fay's isorhythmic motets and the mensuration canons of Ockeghem's Missa prolationum. I traced Stravinsky's blocks and Scriabin's mystic chord, and I spent a long, productive year inside Ferneyhough's rhythmic architecture before moving on to the materiality of Rebecca Saunders and the bodily, ritual instrumental writing of Pierluigi Billone. I don't regret any of it. But when I sit down to compose now, the books open on my desk are more likely to be catalogues of Hanne Darboven, Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Holzer, and Jeff Koons than scores.
This isn't a pose, and it isn't a rejection of my training. It's a response to a problem my training revealed.
Music theory, as it's taught, is a discipline of retrospection. It takes finished works and extracts their grammar: the voice-leading rules, the pitch-class sets, the formal schemes. That's valuable, and it builds real craft. But a grammar extracted from the past is, by definition, a description of what has already been done. Students who internalize it learn to produce sentences that the grammar recognizes as correct. Correct is the enemy here. Convention is self-replicating: you study the conventions, you absorb them, you reproduce them with small variations, and your students analyze your variations. The loop tightens.
The composers I admire most broke that loop, and they rarely did it by studying other composers more closely. Ockeghem wrote a Missa cuiusvis toni, a mass that can be sung in any mode. That's a conceptual work in the strictest sense, a piece whose identity lies in a rule rather than a fixed sound, written more than five centuries before anyone used the word "conceptual." Morton Feldman famously spent more of his formative time among the New York painters than among composers, and his music sounds like it: the scale, the flatness, the refusal of development. John Cage got more from Duchamp than from Schoenberg. Our tradition, at its best, has always been fed from outside itself.
So what do I actually take from painters and sculptors? Not their imagery. I'm not interested in program music about canvases. What I take are their operations: the verbs that define their work.
Fontana cuts. His Concetti spaziali, the slashed and punctured monochromes, aren't pictures of anything. They're acts performed on a surface, and the surface's response to the act is the work. When I treat a sustained sonority as a membrane and then rupture it, with a single attack, a sudden cutoff, or an extended technique that tears the tone, I'm not quoting Fontana. I'm borrowing his question: what is on the other side of the surface, and what does the cut reveal?
Burri burns and stitches. He worked with burlap sacks, charred plastic, and cracked earth, and in Gibellina he poured white concrete over the ruins of a town destroyed by an earthquake, preserving the street plan as a landscape of fissures. Burri taught me that degraded material has a dignity polished material lacks. A sound that is distressed, overblown, or made from a damaged or detuned instrument can carry history in its grain. Saunders and Billone know this too; Burri simply showed it to me first, and more bluntly.
Manzoni seals. His Merda d'artista cans, the Linee rolled and sealed in cylinders, the Achromes drained of color: these are works about containment, value, and the impossibility of verifying what's inside. A notated score is also a sealed container. It promises a sound it doesn't contain. Manzoni pushes me to make that gap part of the composition, to write scores whose visual life is not fully redeemable in performance.
Darboven counts. She filled thousands of sheets with calendar arithmetic, handwritten numbers, and quasi-script, and she translated those number systems into actual music. Her work is the clearest proof that a visual artist can arrive at musical structure from an entirely different direction: not through harmony but through time-keeping itself. She treats duration as something to be written out by hand, day by day, which is what composers do, except that she does it without pretending the result must please.
Ruscha and Holzer state. Ruscha paints words in deadpan typography and photographs Twentysix Gasoline Stations with no commentary. Holzer's Truisms and LED texts put flat declaratives into public space, where their authority becomes suspect. Both have shaped how I use text in scores: not as poetry to be set, but as signage. Language as an object, as typography, as instruction, sometimes legible and sometimes degraded into noise.
Koons polishes. He is the hardest case and the most instructive. His surfaces are so finished that they become a kind of aggression; the banal object, made perfect, stops being banal. I'm drawn to the uncomfortable question he raises about craft. When does technical perfection become the content? A flawlessly executed passage can be the most hollow moment in a piece, and I'd rather compose that hollowness on purpose than produce it by accident.
What are the ramifications of working this way?
The first is that the score becomes an object in its own right. My score Proproxasant; Indicated for Brugada Syndrome layers notation with typography, rendered imagery, and invented pharmaceutical language. A theory class would ask what the pitches are doing. That's a fair question, but it's not the only one, and it may not be the first.
The second is that the vocabulary of evaluation changes. If the operations come from visual art, then the relevant criteria include material, surface, scale, seriality, and context, alongside harmony and form. That makes some musicians uncomfortable, and it should. Discomfort usually means the frame is being tested.
The third ramification is a risk, and I want to be honest about it. Borrowing from other disciplines can produce dilettantism: works that gesture toward a painter's name without understanding the painter. The defense against that is the same rigor my music training gave me. I study these artists the way I studied Ockeghem: closely, chronologically, and with attention to how each decision was made. The discipline transfers. The conventions don't have to.
This brings me to the point I most want to make. My conservatory training isn't the opposite of this approach; it's what makes it possible. I can hear what Fontana's cut might mean in sound because I know what a sustained sonority has meant from Du Fay to Billone. The tradition gives me the fluency. The painters give me permission, and a set of tools, to say something the tradition hasn't already said.
Studying only within the discipline produces more of the discipline. That's how convention works. Without disruption, there is no innovation, and disruption rarely comes from inside the room. It comes from a slashed canvas, a sealed can, a sheet of handwritten numbers, a sign that says PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT. I've found that the best way to honor Ockeghem's restless intelligence is not to imitate his counterpoint, but to look where he would have looked if he were alive now: everywhere except the place he was told to look.
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