Reflection
The Metaphysics of Notation (2008) is a 72-foot-wide, hand-drawn pictographic score divided into twelve continuous panels.1 It is accompanied by no instruction regarding its interpretation. The work aspires to elicit a musical response from a performer, but despite its profusion of concrete, detailed glyphs it advocates nothing specific about the nature of their aural realization. Furthermore, I heard no sound in my head while composing the piece. This is a radical departure from the approach to composition I was taught, in which the composer’s job is to imagine—preferably with exacting resolution—a sound object, and then, through the deft application of the most relevant notation (whether traditional or invented—but if the latter, surely a defined one) to produce a specification from which a performer (burdened or invigorated by a marginal or essential role as interpreter) can realize this imagined sound....