October 2021
Naarm/Melbourne, Australia

For an artform steeped in the transient and invisible, Western Classical music has a peculiarly immutable dependence on notation. Logical Conclusions surveys the staved score’s role in canonical art-music, problematising both the fixity of notation and the correlations often drawn between a score’s complexity and its conceptual or artistic merit. Throughout the extended performance-art installation, a large canvas bears witness to a gruelling live-scoring process. The work’s 21 discrete movements span a trajectory of increasing musical codification. As the canvas becomes progressively denser, so too does the sonic texture; live electronics combine both incidental environmental noise and recordings of the works referenced by each movement. This audio is fed back into the performance space, à la I Am Sitting In A Room (Alvin Lucier, 1969), creating a complex aural fabric which mimics the visual articulation of increasing notational density. Intermittently, fragments from earlier movements collide dissonantly with the current soundscape. These juxtapositions are eventually homogenised by the disjointed audio introduced during movements referencing the atonal and New-Complexity oeuvres, therein interrogating the function of music so esoteric that its nuances are rendered impenetrable to all but the most highly-trained listeners. The work’s penultimate “black” movement sees a passage from Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise (1963-1967) painted across the canvas in the form of large, unyielding circular forms. These “black holes” then give way to an entirely black void-canvas in Movement 18 (Tutti), realised by pouring paint directly onto the canvas to fill in any remaining white-space. At this point, the audio track comprises mostly white-noise – an equal probabilistic distribution of all frequencies in the audible spectrum. No sonic or visual articulations are now discernible.

A very real element of performance is its demanding physicality; as the notation intensifies, so too do the gestures required of the performer. The Comic Interlude is both a moment of playful respite – take a moment; find the powder-room; go and procure a glass of bubbles! – but also speaks to the sheer relief on the part of the performer. Having been either standing or squatting for nearly sixteen consecutive hours to avoid inadvertent paint-smears, the performer now rolls into the wet surface; they can afford to be blasé about potential smudges, since the canvas could hardly get more black. Consider the musical counterpart of such a gesture: would it be adding another pitch to white noise, or to a cluster-tone? What about subdividing the beat so fractionally that no performer could ever hope to play it accuracy at tempo? And what then does ‘accuracy’ even entail? The Comic Interlude is superficially an instance of humour and pause, yet its flippant rump-wagging in the face of the score belies a more profound challenge to practices of adding infinitely nuanced detail at the stage where no such subtlety can effect identifiable change.

​

The question naturally arising at this point is: where to from here? When we reach the point of notation so complex that it constitutes only an indecipherable mass of dots and lines and arcane symbols, how do we progress? Do we continue trying to glean minutiae within the dense population, or is it time for a paradigm shift, an upheaval? The Minimalists proffered one solution: go back to the beginning. Paint the canvas white, start over with some day-long chords, or with gradual elaborations on skeletal motifs. This certainly seems like a Logical Conclusion…but its adjuvant corollary is that we are only clearing the slate for another inexorable trend towards the same place of notational complexity from whence we just escaped. Sure, we can paint the canvas white – but it’s still flecked with bits of black and grey that peer out from behind its gauzy rebirth. I could even repeat the whole installation again, but I’ll be doing it in clothes that are already besmirched by permanent smears and stains. We can’t forget what’s come before, and why would we want to? There’s plenty of brilliant music located within the historical compositional trajectory. Yet the problem of future progression remains involute. I don’t have a complete solution – anyone who tells you that they do probably hasn’t thought enough about it. But here, sitting to the gradual build-up of environmental sounds as the canvas lies pied and marled beneath the dappled light of my backyard gum-trees, the answer seems oriented more in the direction of my accumulating found-sound than any trite dots and lines I could arrange symmetrically five-fold along a piece of paper. Hey! That magpie just relieved herself on my canvas. How might I play that? Could I ask her to do it in the shape of a minim on F#?

Notation, it seems, can only get us so far.