“What I Call a Sound”: Anthony Braxton’s Synaesthetic Ideal and Notations for Improvisers

By Graham Lock

“See deeply enough, and you see musically.” - Thomas Carlyle

“Tuned to its grandest level, music, like light, reminds us that everything that matters, even in this world, is reducible to spirit.” - Al Young

Flick through the pages of Anthony Braxton’s Composition Notes and you’ll soon encounter some striking visual imagery. In Composition #32, for example, “Giant dark chords are stacked together in an abyss of darkness” (CN-B 375); Composition #75 will take you “’from one room to the next’—as if in a hall of mirrors (‘with lights in the mirrors’)” (CN-D 118); in Composition #77D slap tongue dynamics “can be viewed [as] sound ‘sparks’ that dance ‘in the wind’ of the music” (189); enter the “universe” of Composition #101 and you’ll discover “a field of tall long trees (of glass)” (CN-E 142).¹ While it is not unusual for composers to employ visual images when discussing their work, Braxton’s descriptions are clearly not illustrative in the sense of, say, Vivaldi’s poems for La Quattro Stagioni or Ellington’s droll explanations of his song titles. Rather than describe scenes that the music supposedly evokes, Braxton appears instead to offer extremely personal visualisations of the musical events and processes that are taking place in his compositions.

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