vesci l’ordenance
a guide to my composed works
Guillaume de Machaut was the first composer to have organized his works, gathering his pieces and poems and binding them, copying them, and distributing them to friends and supporters.
On this page is the start of my self-curated life; in part a guide to the corpus and the way stones, in part a description of unifying elements of pieces, the threads that, perhaps, bring them together, each a stone in the small chapel that has been my musical effort, here on the web rather than vellum.
There will be a proper index, complete and logical, but first, some thoughts on the shape of the collection, on the praxis that brought it to be, and on the interconnectivity of the works. And as is right and proper for a modern ‘l’ordonnance,’ pretty pages with links to sounds and scores.
a new virtuosity
I work in a community of unprecendented technical capacity; these are performers that have made the transcendental into something every day. and for me, the notable physical demands on the performers are compounded by notable and playful disruptions. the great anxiety of performance: the chance of collective failure, the possibility of a performance coming apart. Individual technics of musicking are reframed to the comity of performance, the contingency of music on shared-being.
resonance
Music is more temporal than sonic; we see that in the coming-together of pulse and time in performance, and in the hermeneutic simultaneity of music across centuries. But music is also connective across disciplines, art forms, and experiences. There is transmission and receipt across languages and logics, metaphysical messages from distant stars, and adjacent (yet orthogonal) worlds. All music brings together the potential of the past and the future, of the visual and the sonic, of the abstract and the immanent. But within my music, these resonances are harder to ignore.
designed aleatory
Composers are generally granted inappropriate authority;- a perfect knowledge of the ‘proper’ performance of their music. But such knowlege would require a perfect understanding of a works historical entailments, of the audience’s aesthetic judgements, and, most challenging of all, of their own interior interests and creative process. My music disrupted this ‘reading’ by allowing and at times requiring performative decisions on the fly, sharing the opportunity for hermeneutic agency with my performing collaborators.
a new historicism
Most framings of the Modern, by artists and critics, too often frame the Now around the new, the cult of the novel. For me, Modernism is the response to the fractured Now, a means of organizing potential futures from the shards of the past. The distinctive simultaneity of the non-simultaneous manifests in my work marks this understanding, as material and techniques from distant pasts, frequently from the Medieval and Renaissance, are metamorphized into the severe aesthetics of the Modern moment in an aesthetic and poesic alloy.
a philosophical mood
Given the tendencies above, in which the contingencies of music on context, historicity, technicity, and comity manifest themselves overtly, inescapably, it might be best said that my music comes from and resides in a philosophical mood, suggesting or even requiring both an engaged fallibilism, and a philosophical generosity. Kant’s ‘sapere aude’ is, in the event, insufficient, as the ‘dare to know’ does not entail a required engagement, of labor to be undertaken by composer, performer, and listener.