"Clarity is not Kind". (Under Construction)

 

Mitre, Emit, Mite for Piano

This composition stages a collision between notation, typography, and image memory. The central wireframe structure behaves like a latent score or schematic axis, giving the piece an architectural spine that resists the exuberance of the surrounding text. Around it, the words “G,” “MITRE,” “EMIT,” and “TIME” do not simply read as language. They operate as rotational variants, semantic near-mirrors, and temporal dislocations. The work turns lexical permutation into a visual event.

What makes the piece compelling is the tension between control and saturation. The gray linear grid in the center is cool, serial, nearly forensic. By contrast, the letterforms are stuffed with image fragments, pop color, ornament, and figuration. This produces a split field: one side proposes structure, measure, and system, while the other proposes memory, spectacle, and associative overflow. The eye moves between these two regimes without ever fully reconciling them.

The oversized “G” is especially important. It acts almost like a clef, a portal, or an initial condition. Its internal musical notation links the work to score logic, while the adjacent vertical “PIANO” literalizes that musical frame without letting it settle into illustration. Instead, music becomes one semiotic layer among others: typography, portraiture, decorative pattern, and spatial drafting all compete for authority.

“EMIT” and “TIME” are the strongest conceptual pair. Their near-anagrammatic relation creates a reversible logic, but not a perfect one. That imperfection matters. It suggests that time is not simply emitted, nor emission merely temporal, but that both are bound up in transmission, delay, broadcast, and repetition. “MITRE” at the top introduces a harder, more ceremonial or ecclesiastical note, giving the piece a strange vertical hierarchy. The words feel less chosen for narrative meaning than for their ability to generate visual and phonetic pressure against one another.

Overall, the composition reads like a hybrid of score, poster, and conceptual language painting. It is analytic in its structure but theatrical in its surfaces. Its real subject may be how meaning is routed: through sound, through image, through typographic mutation, and through the rigid systems that try to contain them.

 

The Composer as Interrogator of Expression

The Composer as Interrogator of Expression

To speak of expression today is already to step into compromised terrain. Expression presumes sincerity, assumes transparency, imagines a direct passage between inner state and outward form. The work under consideration rejects this passage entirely. It proposes instead a different role for the composer: not as facilitator of expression, nor as architect of affect, but as interrogator. What is staged is not feeling, but suspicion. Not communication, but friction.

“I do not ask the performer to interpret the face. I ask them to interrogate it.”

This distinction is not rhetorical. Interpretation presumes goodwill. Interrogation presumes deceit.

The portrait, once placed on the page, is stripped of its human alibi. It ceases to function as likeness and becomes object. Instrument. Evidence. The face does not represent a person; it performs as a proxy for identity itself, a stand-in that must be treated as unreliable. Assume it lies. Assume it is not what it claims to be. Assume, finally, that it is you. Not as autobiography, but as structural condition.

Here the composer does not offer expressive content to be realized. Instead, they install a situation. A face is positioned, not explained. No backstory, no dramaturgical reassurance. The performer is left alone with the image, and the image refuses to stabilize. It watches without responding. It accuses without speaking. It invites projection while withholding consent.

This is where the work begins.

Once embedded in the score, the portrait becomes a functional device. It does not decorate the notation; it contaminates it. It alters the phenomenology of reading. The performer is no longer alone with symbols and gestures, but with a gaze that interrupts neutrality. The page becomes a site of exposure. The score ceases to be an abstract field and becomes a room in which someone is already present.

Responses vary, and these variations are not incidental; they are diagnostic. Some performers weep. Others ask if the image can be removed. They describe discomfort, distraction, an uncanny sensation of being observed by someone they failed to understand, or worse, someone who understands them too well. The request for removal is telling. It is not the difficulty of execution that troubles them, but the collapse of distance. The performer can no longer retreat into technique, into professionalism, into the safety of interpretation.

They are implicated.

“I tell them that’s the point.”

The composer’s refusal to mitigate this discomfort is not cruelty; it is precision. The work insists that expression is not something one safely produces, but something one risks being undone by. By withholding instructions, the composer denies the performer the familiar scaffolding of intention. There is no guidance on how to feel, what to convey, or who the image is supposed to be. This absence is not a lack; it is an active pressure.

There are no instructions. Only placement.

Placement, here, functions as compositional force. The image is not explained because explanation would domesticate it. Instead, it is situated, framed, allowed to exert its gravity. The score does not tell the performer what to do with the portrait; it forces them to decide whether they can proceed at all. The act of performance becomes an ethical negotiation rather than an expressive one.

This is why the score is not a map. A map reassures. A map promises arrival. This score stages collisions.

Sound against silence.

Identity against absence.

Legibility against suggestion.

Each collision is unresolved. Sound does not conquer silence; it exposes it. Identity does not assert itself; it fractures against the realization that the face might be empty, might be a mask, might be an echo. Legibility does not clarify meaning; it destabilizes it by suggesting that what can be read is precisely what should not be trusted.

In this framework, the performer is no longer an interpreter but a participant in an experiment on expression itself. What happens when expression is no longer authorized by intention? What happens when the face on the page does not ask to be understood, but demands to be questioned? What happens when the performer recognizes their own strategies of avoidance, projection, and control reflected back at them?

The composer, then, is not offering a language, but setting a trap. Not a trap designed to catch the performer, but one designed to catch habits: the habit of sincerity, the habit of empathy, the habit of assuming that expression is a virtue rather than a problem.

This is curatorial composition. The work curates conditions under which meaning misbehaves. It arranges objects, images, and absences so that the performer cannot simply pass through them unchanged. The portrait is not there to humanize the score; it is there to estrange it. To remind the performer that every act of expression is also an act of substitution, displacement, and possible falsification.

In this sense, the work does not ask, “What does this mean?”

It asks, “What are you doing when you try to make it mean?”

The answer is never stable. And that instability is the work’s most precise achievement.

Broke and Broken Cogito

 

Broke and Broken Cogito

2024

40” X 30”; 101.6 X 76.2 cm

Ink, Graphite Pen, Charcoal, Ash, Color Ink on C-Print

Edition of 5 with 2 APs

The Telephone Does Not Ring. It Radiates.

The Telephone Does Not Ring. It Radiates.

There is a telephone at the center of this score and it has been ringing since before you were born.

Not ringing in the way a telephone rings when someone wants something from you, when the world outside intrudes upon the world you have made for yourself inside the four walls of your practice and your solitude and your accumulated private shame. This telephone rings the way an altar rings, the way a wound rings, the way a thing that has been consecrated to a purpose it did not choose rings when the ceremony that surrounds it has already begun without asking whether you are ready.

Look at the radiating lines. They do not emerge from the telephone. They have always been there and the telephone has simply arrived at their center, the way a saint arrives at the center of a crowd that already knew it needed one. The lines are not sound waves. They are something older than sound. They are the condition that makes sound possible, the tension in the air before the first note, the held breath of a man who has decided something irreversible and has not yet spoken it aloud.

Around this center the score arranges its beautiful criminal objects.

To the left, a treble clef of such authority it seems to have been written not by a hand but by a history, surrounded by its colony of modified note heads that have submitted to alterations they did not request and wear their accidentals the way the condemned wear borrowed clothes, with a dignity that belongs entirely to them and nothing to the clothes. The yellow labels hang from their assigned positions like the identification tags of the disappeared: FLO 0.98. BYE 6.12. TOJ 5.71. Each one a name. Each one a duration. Each one a person who was somewhere for a measured amount of time and then was not.

To the right, the colored bands do not illustrate music. They are music in the form that music takes when it has been liberated from the obligation to be heard. Burnt gold. Pale aqua. The particular pink that exists only in the memory of things that were once warm. And at the bottom of this column a target of concentric circles in colors so violent they seem to be confessing something, the way violence always confesses something, the admission that precision and destruction are the same gesture depending only on the direction of the hand that makes it.

The arrow in magenta does not point toward anything that can be named. It arrives from outside the frame having already passed through whatever was in its way and it carries in its triple-barbed head the accumulated velocity of everything that was refused and redirected and finally released in a direction that had the decency to receive it.

At the bottom of the page, five circular medallions are arranged like stations of a procession whose devotional object is language itself, text wound into circles that must be read in rotation, that give up their meaning only to the reader willing to turn, to follow the curve, to accept that some sentences were never meant to be read in a straight line. The catamarans bobbed like failed stitches. The seconds between lightning and its echo. Perhaps time itself, an explanation nobody asked for, tailored to fit another.

These are not program notes. They are evidence.

Evidence of what? Of a mind that has looked at the tradition of notation and found it, not wrong, but insufficient. Insufficient in the way that a single name is insufficient for a person who has lived a complicated life, in the way that a single language is insufficient for a thought that was born in the body rather than the mind, in the way that a line is insufficient for a life that moved in circles and reversals and sudden adjacent departures from everything it had promised to become.

The score does not ask to be performed. It asks to be survived.

And in the surviving of it, in the looking and the turning and the following of the radiating lines back to the telephone that has been ringing at the center since before you arrived, something happens that is neither music nor its absence but the third thing that exists between them, the thing that has no name yet because no one has stayed in the gap long enough to name it.

Stay.

 

Praxitecture - Wrapped

 

"Photonic Notation"

 

Photonic Notation

In Tolaprinit, I am exploring what I call Photonic Notation, a scoring system in which photographic space, image fragments, and optical memory operate as active notational material.

Rather than treating photography as illustration or documentation, Photonic Notation allows the image to function as a compositional field. The photograph becomes a site of instruction. Light becomes a carrier of musical behavior. Figures, shadows, borders, objects, architectural space, and visual artifacts are not decorative additions to the score. They are part of the score’s grammar.

In the first example, conventional musical symbols collide with image-objects, red trajectory lines, floating medical abbreviations, diagrams, and photographic fragments. The notation does not simply move left to right. It radiates, doubles back, interrupts itself, and asks the performer to read across planes of optical pressure. The eye becomes a performer before the instrument does.

In the second example, the gallery-like photographic space becomes a kind of silent theater. A suspended figure, a physical bundle on the floor, film-strip borders, metallic typography, and a pair of dice are all embedded into the score’s logic. The page behaves less like a flat surface and more like an installation that has been compressed into notation.

Photonic Notation is concerned with the moment when a score stops being only a map of sound and begins to behave like a light-sensitive object. It asks: What does an image sound like before it is interpreted? What happens when photographic evidence becomes musical instruction? Can a score be read as exposure, residue, apparition, architecture, and event?

For me, Tolaprinit is not a score with images added to it. It is a score in which the image has become one of the instruments.

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