FLOODESIGN

16 | PEAKPERFS.ORG My scores are highly notated and carefully structured; the musicians work from a nuanced, specific text. Yet I like my music to feel organic, self-propelled — as if we listeners are overhearing (capturing) an un-notated, spontaneously embodied improvisation. Music must be alive; it has to jump off the page and out of the instrument as if something big is at stake. At every level, I'm concerned with transformations and connections. And so it is with "The Auditions," a 26-minute score that grew out of my collaboration with the choreographer Troy Schumacher. I wanted to make something agile and energized, a composition whose flexibility would allow for a continually evolving braid of harmonic, rhythmic and contrapuntal elements. The ballet takes place in two imaginative worlds, one ethereal, one grounded, closely following a cyclical musical framework. Troy and I have been referring to these sonic and dramatic worlds as ethereal landscape or landscape paradise, and the audition room or waiting room for the audition. And we've been playing with the image of dancers as beads on an abacus — starting on the bottom frame and sliding upward to the top … and beyond. In order to communicate to my collaborators some of the many layers at work in my scores, I have gotten into the habit of creating illuminated manuscripts like "The Map of Form." The map's central element is an illustrated timeline, accompanied by annotations in brightly colored inks relating to various elements of the work, including instrumentation, dynamics, tempi and harmonic concepts. These ideas are developed through written instructions, including such idiosyncratic directives as "Resonant, elegant, spacious," "Fanfare-like; blazing," "Various characters and materials are kaleidoscopically blending." Bands of color extend along the timeline, paralleling specific tempo markings and performance directives; additional graphic elements include wavy lines, dots and dashes, and a text block containing the autograph notation "Formal Concerns: Slow, Fast, Slow, Fast, Slow, Fast, Slow." —AUGUSTA READ THOMAS THE MAP OF FORM

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