An established language is adapted to its place, like the rest of its native organisms. It lives only in a set of relationships among people, places, and things, and among people, their personal memories, and their common history … Compared to [a] truly communal language, so complexly and intimately referential, a language merely public or standard is a blunt instrument.
—Wendell Berry
Indulge me in an experiment: forget that Wendell Berry’s The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice (2022) is a historical critique of the dispossession of Indigenous people and that violent act’s reverberations in contemporary racial inequality, and rethink the above quote as a fragment from a musical treatise. Replace the word “language” with “score.” Look at the text with fresh eyes. Even with the replacement of its original object, the new statement still contains a ring of truth: like Berry’s communal language, the music score is living “in a set of relationships between people, places, and things,” malleable, and attached to the evolution of the micro-cultures that use it to communicate.
Thinking of the musical score as something more than a mere transmission of a composer’s idea is not as radical as it may seem. The score can be read as a blueprint or explicated like a poem. There are scores hanging behind glass at eye level, removed from any sound-making at all and begging to be recognized as objets d’art. There are others that are innately useful, becoming well-loved maps meant to guide students through a musical geography. Understanding a score may require the translation of an expert, or it may be immediately obvious to an untrained eye; it can exist as a historical document or as a work of science fiction.
This existential blankness fascinates me. A score can be made from a line of text or the contours of a geographical map, not because of our postmodern tendency to make everything signify as a possible work of art, but because it has no stability, no “zero point,” as Fredric Jameson calls the trait that must be present for an idea to identify itself. The score does not need to communicate, nor does it even need to be innately musical. A score can be an idea or a feeling, a fragment of life. And if this is so, then the score can become a site for thinking that moves beyond the musical and into the way society is mediated. It can become an empty site for our daydreams.
Before moving forward, one more indulgence, another experiment in word replacement, this time with a passage from Julia Kristeva’s linguistic primer, The Unknown: An Initiation into Linguistics: “Every era or civilization, in conformity with the whole of its knowledge, its beliefs, and its ideology, has responded differently, and has seen language in relation to the matrices which constitute that civilization.”1 If we once more replace the word “language” with “score,” it reinforces the latter’s malleability, but it also places its possibilities in a new, ideological, light. Unlike Berry’s soft rebuke of standardization and his idea of language (or the score) as naturally communal, here the score acts as a possible mirror of the dominant social structure of the culture that makes it.
With these discursive experiments, I’m proposing that the “traditional score”—which I’m classifying as Western civilization’s collection of staves reading left to right and ordered in a multi-axis grid of instrumentation, duration, and pitch class—mimics many of the primary social relations of modern Western society. And since this is the case, the score can also be a site for building utopian models of what it, the music it engenders, and our society on the whole can be.
I have been committed to failed attempts at writing the “utopian score” for a decade. But before we get personal, there are a few larger ideas that need to be addressed. Firstly, this project is dependent on an exploration of a specific tradition. When I use the term “traditional score,” I think of the work of Mahler and Brahms rather than Wolff and Oliveros. The reason I want to limit myself to this tradition is that these kinds of scores map so neatly onto contemporary late-capitalist culture. The “traditional” score is built around hierarchies at multiple levels, beginning with the generative/reactive relationship between composer as creator and conductor as translator and continuing as their interpretation “trickles down” through the performance of the musicians to a passive public.
This hierarchy from composer to audience reflects metaphors of tiered social order, from religious transmission to corporate organizational charts. But the signification of the score also relates to representations of modern factory labor and mass production. It is designed to facilitate the mass reproduction of an object—in this case, the composer’s organized sound and narrative—within certain acceptable parameters (instrumentation, duration, and so on). In the “traditional” score’s perfect world, the composer’s music could be played at any time and under any conditions and reproduce the same thought-object under relatively narrow conditions of variability. In this sense, the score joins a signifying class with the conveyor belt and the Bessemer process, Henry Ford and quality control: the desire to standardize and duplicate.
A prioritization of reproduction necessarily leads to the subsumption of the individual and the human within mechanical processes. Most scores simply mark each stave with its sound source, making it something akin to a station on the production line: violin I, violin II, oboe, harp, etc. This makes the musicians invisible and interchangeable. (There are exceptions of course, the most famous being Duke Ellington, who put the name of the person playing the part next to their line on the score. This did not, however, mean that if that person left the orchestra, that piece could no longer be played.)
Pages from the autograph manuscript of Mahler's Symphony No. 2, now in the possession of the Cleveland Orchestra. Courtesy of the Cleveland Orchestra.
The score’s conceptual flexibility allows it to absorb these elements of late-capitalist society: hierarchy, subjugation, and results-orientated social organization. But the very function and construction of a score can also work the other way. Anyone who has sat in front of, or within, an orchestra performing Mahler’s Second Symphony (1888–94) knows the sheer organizational miracle contained in that set of staves to focus the actions of many into a singular outpouring of ecstatic sound. A similar awe can wash over us when we witness or are part of a concerted response to catastrophe, a joyous reunion, a protest march. It is this miracle of the score that becomes a launching point for utopian thinking. The score can be anything. Why not something positive?
***
I propose to think of our … utopias … as so many islands: a Utopian archipelago, islands in the net, a constellation of discontinuous centers, themselves internally decentered.
—Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future
Viewing the score as a social microcosm, with all its flaws and benefits and the possibility of it becoming a site for utopian speculation, has been at the center of my compositional practice for years. I have followed the pragmatic programs of Erik Olin Wright and the critical writing on sci-fi by Fredric Jameson with an optimistic cynicism. And it hasn’t taken long for their high-flying ideas to make their way into the pencil-and-paper reality of my scores. I think Jameson makes an important point above: we define our own utopias. Thomas More may have coined the term, but he didn’t imagine my utopia. Nor have Samuel Delany, Olin Wright, Ursula K. LeGuin, or any of the other great tinkerers of alternate societies. And so, when I undertake the resettling of my own “constellation of discontinuous centers,” I am doing it from the following definition, and with the goal of creating the utopia of my own experience: The creation of a utopia is an attempt to translate a perfect version of the world into something tangible, small, and controllable, something like a work of fiction or poetry, a film, or a musical score.
That each attempt at writing a utopia is different doesn’t mean it comes from nowhere. I began thinking of utopia scores around 2010 by looking closely at the artists who were articulating sound in ways that were radically different form the tradition I was used to. Each of them contained some small, resonant idea that I collected for my own work: Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise (1963–67) and Christian Wolff’s Edges (1968) appealed to me because of their disavowal of a “correct” performance; I loved the poetry of Pauline Oliveros’s text scores that use sound to tap into something reptilian in humans; and I was in awe of the sheer audacity of Amnon Wolman’s pieces that are meant to reside inside the performer’s mind with no sound production at all.
Éliane Radigue at work on the ARP 2500 synthesizer, Paris, 1972. Photography by Yves Arman.
But I have been most affected by two composers who bypassed the score-as-object altogether: Éliane Radigue and Annea Lockwood. Radigue’s OCCAM Ocean ecosystem is a touchstone for anyone looking to redefine the hierarchy of the composer/performer/audience relationship. Created in intimate collaboration with their performers, Radigue’s solo pieces are transmitted via conversation and a dialogic experimentation with sound. These “scores” live only as the memories of the two people involved in their making. And OCCAM’s modular aspect—two solos combine to become a duo, three make a trio, etc.—further empowers its performers to take responsibility for the evolution of the music. This sense of the composition’s evolution over (and perhaps beyond) the lifetime of its makers is an idea that continues to inform my attempts at the utopian score.
A more radical version of the communal act of composition, perhaps, is the recent work of Annea Lockwood. Like Radigue, her compositions over the last decade or so exist sans score and are structured by nonhierarchical and improvisational play between composer and performer. Lockwood is committed to the organic life of what she calls “wild sound,” and she prompts the performer to ride the thin line between reproducibility and spontaneity. These pieces, which she classifies as “performer-dependent works,” could be defined more as acts of sustained creative discussion and friendship than objects of technical and compositional virtuosity. Her pledge to honor the small acts of collaboration that generate large works of art, as well as her dedication to spontaneity, have been a guide for my own attempts.
Annea Lockwood, Piano Garden, Photo: Chris Ware.
I’m not sure that Radigue or Lockwood would think of their work in utopian terms, and the above does not imply their endorsement—tacit or otherwise—of my idea or this project of mine. I only include them to ground what follows in a context the reader may be familiar with and to highlight Jameson’s idea of utopias as unique to each of us. My desire is to produce a composition that is not only musically interesting but also emulates an abstract idea of living together that is sustainable and commendable. A utopian structure does not simply rise from primordial music. There must be preplanning, and a lot of it. Thus far, I have identified four ideals that any attempt to create my utopian score must embody. They will seem familiar, as they are almost perfectly negative versions of the features I attributed to the “traditional” score above. The utopian score, my utopian score, must be:
Process-driven: I am looking to create a score based on evolution rather than reproducibility. I want music to exist organically with a demand that it change its form and content over time.
Nonhierarchical: Music is better when the people making it have the opportunity to put themselves into it. If I am a nation-state unto myself, consider the goal of the utopian score to be an international meeting (hopefully for peace, but not always) where each musician represents their own principality on equal footing.
Human: This music must allow for fallible human beings to interact with each other fallibly. The result is a certain kind of messiness, a productive bloodiness. What this humanity “is” can remain shadowy, prone to “you’ll know it when you hear it.” But music that arises from hybrid experiments balancing structure and improvisation has a density, strangeness, and organic warmth that can’t be matched through other means.
Non-dialectical: The problematics created by setting composer versus performer and improvisation versus composition have been exhausted. The utopian score, if it comes from anywhere, will come from a point that exists outside that tug-of-war: either a redefinition of what each of those poles is, a new way of making them interact, or a third process that nullifies their tension altogether.
***
My first attempt at creating a utopian score, Battle Pieces, was commissioned for Anthony Braxton’s 2014 Tri-Centric Festival and was conceived as an homage to his modular compositional Ghost Trance Music (GTM). His compositional structure is built on the concept of plenty—a glut of musical material split into primary, secondary, and tertiary tiers that are manipulated in real time with nonverbal signals and improvisation. It is a brilliant system, wonderfully information-dense and capable of producing deeply moving performances. But it also relies on elements of hierarchy in the way the ensemble is structured into echelons of subgroups. And it also, unintentionally I believe, leans toward the prominence of the composer, as players tend to bend their personal improvisational languages toward the aesthetic of Braxton’s composition. Without dismissing his profound example, I wondered if there was a way to invite the player to improvise away from the strengths of the composition’s material and toward something more personal.
Around the time I was commissioned, I had been listening to a record by saxophonist Stan Getz called Focus. It’s a horn-and-strings date, with Eddie Sauter writing gorgeous arrangements for string quartet. I had read that Getz showed up only for the recording session and improvised his part as first takes while looking at Sauter’s complex string scores. The result is enchanting and a rare document of chamber music that centers the vibrancy of improvisation within the formal rigor of composition. I thought a utopian score might grow from combining Focus’s sense of improvisational urgency with Braxton’s abundance and modularity.
The result was an encyclopedia of sorts—a composition as compendium. Battle Pieces is made up of an evolving series of small and medium-sized compositional fragments that range from “traditionally” scored work to simple text prompts. In performance, the members of the ensemble are instructed to choose one of these compositions at random. They use its material to fashion an improvised “part” in the chamber-music whole. One performer is also chosen to be the “soloist”—think of them as this situation’s Stan Getz—who improvises their part freely and without access to any of the composition’s musical materials. Whether the musician is using the composed material or freely improvising, the goal is not to create something that draws attention to their sound but instead reimagines their role as one interlocking voice within a counterpoint.
This idea worked well for many years, pushing the members of the ensemble to improvise in ways that were well out of our comfort zones while retaining elements of their unique voices. The result was sometimes spotty, but musical perfection (reproduction) was not the goal. Sometimes the music was magical, but was it the answer? While it did level out some of the hierarchies I had felt in Braxton’s GTM, it was still a composition with a well-defined sense of its composer and a process that followed a well-defined set of rules. Input from the players was more limited than I wanted, and, ultimately, playing Battle Pieces became a concretized and repeatable technique.
In hindsight, I believe the amount of material was the problem. Instead of providing inspiration for new directions, the composition led the players to consciously choosing the “perfect” micro-composition that would fix musical problems from the mass of options I had given them, rather than confronting the friction of the performance’s difficulties.
Failure one.
If Battle Pieces was too large, perhaps my next attempt was too small. knknighgh (pronounced “knife”) is a quartet concept based on the minimalist poetry of Aram Saroyan. The concept centered around a very small amount of simple material that the players could memorize and internalize. The entire composition consists of three short melodies and an equal number of one-measure rhythmic cells and bass vamps. There is little to no pre-structuring of a performance. The group improvises freely until a musician feels the need for a change. The musician then plays any of the three melodic ideas as a declaration of their desire to move on, and the rest of the group responds by either joining that player’s melody, moving to one of the rhythms or vamps, or dropping out altogether. The improvisation continues, spiraling out to form a new musical configuration.
It is a simple concept: improvise until you initiate or hear a cue, then change what you’re doing. Rinse and repeat until the piece comes to a natural ending. The band did this very well and the music presented itself at high velocity. The band’s absorption of the material and each musician’s individual virtuosity made for high-intensity music, and our regular gigs in Brooklyn became popular for the music’s excitement and the band’s ESP-like magic as it shifted gears on a dime.
But the success of our concerts highlighted knknighgh’s defects as a utopian score. While it was communal in concept, the construction of the materials and how they worked together presupposed a certain kind of playing: higher, faster, and louder. The group didn’t need to make decisions; the music was focusing them in a single, repeatable direction. The result was the mass production of a certain kind of playing, one that ultimately narrowed the music’s human complexity.
Failure two.
In Battle Pieces and knknighgh, I had relied on jazz musicians, and the scores reflected the language they (and I) were comfortable with. The result ended up being something closer to a new approach to playing jazz. That was enticing, but those scores weren’t achieving the undefinable quality of human complexity I was looking for. I needed a larger palette, one that brought together musicians with vastly different skills, aesthetics, and approaches to making music together. And to accommodate that level of diversity, something in the score itself would have to change.
Mutual Aid Music is, in essence, a combination of elements from Battle Pieces and knknighgh. It focuses the former’s material and the latter’s audible cuing concept using Mikhail Bakunin’s basic tenet of giving what you can share and taking what you need. In performance of Mutual Aid Music, a soloist is chosen beforehand by the group, and the remaining members use a micro-composition to create a part, just as in Battle Pieces. As in knknighgh, the players are listening for audible cues to change their material. For an evening-length performance, the musicians only have an order of soloists, and the music continues without stop until all the soloists have taken their turn. The ensemble members are asked to switch to a different micro-composition every time a new soloist begins. But exactly when this shift from one soloist to the next occurs is not always clear. Even the previous soloist may not realize that the new soloist has started, and the two may be freely improvising their parts simultaneously for a period of time. Players in the ensemble may hear the shift as occurring at different points, so the change of their material may be staggered.
The form of the performance, then, frees itself from anyone’s control, including mine.
The music began to approach the human complexity I sought. As things become messy, the musicians are inspired to create a new sense of order, and their musical answers make the music feel organic and amoebic rather than formal and traditional. Things move slowly, then very quickly. One player may make a singular statement for five seconds while another may repeat the same material for fifteen minutes. A long silence may occur. Diatonic folk-fiddling becomes enmeshed with scratchy cello and clarinet multiphonics in a way that makes no rational sense but is musically moving because it perfectly mirrors the imperfections of being alive.
Mutual Aid Music is, so far, the closest I’ve come to the utopian score. In the last few years, members of the performance group have contributed their own micro-compositions, and we have cleared all composer names from the pieces to give the choice of material a more non-individualistic feel. Spirited discussions before and after performances prove to me that the discursive and communal dynamic of the piece is not only working sonically but socially. The piece is now being played by different ensembles in different countries, usually with the guidance of original ensemble members. The attention to expanding the performance of the composition not by transposing it onto other ensembles but adding new voices to its continued life gives me hope that there is a real quality of intercommunication somewhere within its score.
And yet, imperfections remain.
Unfinished version of The Day Dream (Jane Morris) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, circa 1855. License: Public Domain.
This is the beauty of the utopian attempt: it has to contain cracks and difficulties, things the person who dreamed it up didn’t consider, blind spots in the composer/writer/thinker’s learning, and history that needs to be unlearned. My scores are no different. The satisfaction I get from attempting to construct a utopian score comes not from rewriting its semiotic content, but from redrawing the borders of my perfect world. From redrafting its constitution and reforming its religion. Each piece, regardless of its musical result, begins as a way to address my preferred way of being.
So the question remains, for myself as much as for anyone reading this: What is my utopia? For all my attempts here, I cannot fully define it. And I’ve decided I wouldn’t want to, as that would end my search (the search being where I get my joy). But if you’ve stayed with me this far, it’s not really fair to bail out now, so I will give it a shot.
The closest I’ve come to an explanation of the society I’m trying to dream up in a utopian score is perhaps Sartre’s concept of the serial creation of a group, in which attention and power constantly shift from one of its members to another so that no single voice is heard more often or louder than any other. As I look back over the above attempts to erase hierarchy and increase complexity through collaboration, I think Sartre’s sense of thoughtful but constant motion in and out of focus is a new foundation on which to build my next utopia. But the process is fraught and takes me in new directions constantly: I have begun working on new experiments that do not require prior musical knowledge to read the score, and on pieces in which each player’s interpretation of ideas comes from reading abstract text and relying on individual memory. Perhaps this will be the way I plot a new world to act out my daydreams in. A different, kinder, more egalitarian world. If not, there’s always tomorrow.
Julia Kristeva, The Unknown: An Initiation into Linguistics, trans. Anne M. Menke (Columbia University Press, 1989), 5.
