1. Earlier Map with sign system.
2. Detail of notation undergoing transformation into a topography
Detail – Inaudible/External – Notated/Domestic – Noise/Uninhabitable
Audio: Removed.
Sheet music is a form of clear instruction – or so it is often presented. In reality it is a sketch that a performer breathes life into. Maps, especially, the textbook map that I sought to imitate, have a similar existence. A landmass, with imaginary lines, marking giant invisible and imaginary boundaries that are nothing without external human action. The idea of crossing a border is itself a kind of performance.
This appealed to me to create a false country, through combining a number of lands that I have a connection and then filling it with music that I have written. The music imposes its own forms and imparts that musical element of time to the piece.
The music is augmented by valleys and bumps and crevasses created by making a graph of the intensity of my memories and combining it with the topology of where I have grown and lived. The sea that surrounds my promontory is generated from the audio of that music. This way the entire piece can be aurally experienced. With the notated pieces creating a layered and distorted form of the original piece of music – the distortions taking the form of pitches bending under the strain of the topographies of memory and place – amid the sea of noise generated from the piece.
The only elements not meant to be derived from the interlock of life and music are the “real” map from which the fantasy landmass extends, the text and symbols in the key, and the fantasy heraldry.
Initially I planned a Key – and spent a great deal of time seeking to take the abstract, but highly data-relevant, symbols of music latching them to the hidden narrative I was discussing and then making a key that would translate those symbols into other symbols that have more narrative meanings. For instance ♬ being read every time on the map as ♈.
