Concretions is an iterative composition that was first laid out in 2019 when a friend mailed me a mid-20th century text book and field guide to the Kaibab and Toroweap formations in northern Arizona and southern Utah. These formations began to take structure around 270 million years ago when much of what we now call the Western United States was a shallow sea. In this piece of scientific literature I encountered a diagrammatic illustration that felt musical and para-physical, rather than rationally categorized data. 

 

I reworked the diagram to become a graphic score. I see the composition as geomorphological sounding. Much of western art music has an historical tendency to represent space and place (or emotional states)— this work is attempting to untether itself from such desires. While it is nearly impossible to not see the world through the lens of the human, as a human, this piece should be confronted as animistic, and experiencing the Earth, and its long held growing and collapsing formations, as filled with spirit, filled with the life whose trajectory contains its/their own volition—we merely live amongst, in between, together. 

 

I

Concretions are commonly misunderstood geologic structures. Often mistaken for fossil eggs, turtle shells, or bones, they are actually not fossils at all but a common geologic phenomenon in almost all types of sedimentary rock, including sandstones, shales, siltstones, and limestones. Concretions form early after sediment is deposited. Usually there is some plant or animal that dies and is buried. As it decays, the bacteria eat up the organic matter and respire away the oxygen. Breathing out the spirit. Our bodies grow out of the earth, so surely we experience psychic-somatic concretions. Music can be a form of listening to this world.

 

Ideally, this piece is performed by 16 musicians, however, seeing the difficulty of gathering 16 players together at once it is advantageous to perform with five to eight musicians, each partaking in two or more instrumentations which are grafted onto this score as letter forms. The performers would be placed together from Dogstar’s curation, perhaps local to the region. This is an open graphic composition in that there are no prescribed notes, pitches, or dynamics—each player chooses their instruments or objects, and therefore, each time this piece is performed it may sound radically different than the time before. We are not making things that “sound like rocks”, this is nonrepresentational. The work can be conducted by whomever, including the composer. The conductor does not drive the music, nor ask the musicians to do anything in particular, but rather acts as the primary conduit of listening and delineation of “movements” passing, which there are seventeen. The conductor may choose to guide the players through each movement’s intersection(s). The format of each movement may be studied and discussed prior to a performance. Given normal constraints of performance and event, the piece will last about 45 minutes.

 

Each section, or movement, is buttressed next to the following section, and may be played as such. They may flow into one another, and they may also jut out or against each other. Each movement, may sound nearly the same as the one before or after, its hard to tell what may happen. While there may be times of quietude, there are no “pauses”. There is continuous flow. The sections move from the bottom left (1) flowing up and down and up again to the top right (17). Each section should be imagined as groupings of “things happening” rather than the passage of time. 

 

II

This work, while not being a raga, borrows from concepts of how the Alaap in the performance of a raag can function, in that it is always becoming, the opening, and never something about what has already come to pass, a story retold. We are witness and object to its unfolding. There are no pointed events in this piece. There are no emphasized moments. There is no rise and fall. There is no climax or departure. There is only the constant feeling of becoming through elaboration, each moment is essentially the beginning of time. A trance state may occur.

 

Even while the composition is improvisatory, within the score lies certain restraints. Bedded Action is relief—All performers giving themselves as little focus as possible. Concretionary Action is a compounded blurring of what is currently happening. The performers should melt into the lapse of time. However, these are not to be emphatic moments, but being as water moves across varying stone. Be a river. Be a crevasse. Be a wind.

 

Humans are relational creatures with a tendency in many cultures to place ourselves, hierarchically somewhere within the larger ecosystem. This piece imagines the music as a method of the human dissolving into the spirit and the spirit into the ooze, and the ooze is what moves through all things, including the rock. The formation’s ancientness is in many ways, unknowable, and yet it is inside of our DNA and inside of our spirit; we play the sounds as a way of enlivening that shared spirit of rock-body.

 

Compositionally, the size of the concretion may be related to the permeability of the theme and ambient structure in which the rupture occurs: the more permeable the surrounding form, the larger the concretion. Concretions are inner formations within a theme, an exploded, tonal aberration—an action, or body of actions, that embed within a form and ooze with ambiguous materiality.

 

III

“Concretions”, the composition, grows out of spending extended amounts of time and resources in the field doing creative research in the southwestern region of the United States. As an aspect of this creative research the final work will takes the shape as a sonic recording, artist book, and iterative performance. The goal of "Concretions" is to be presented as group performance for Dogstar, and also a 45-minute LP with an attached artist book that contains a graphic score. The graphic score, which I have provided a private link to share with you, is the basis for the project. The work performed would be recorded on site during Dogstar and produced for vinyl by 2182 Recording Company at a later date. The participating performers would need to consent to being recorded and would be credited, in detail, on the produced album.

 

Concretions are para-sonic artifacts of passing moments that occupy the innards of the composition—phantom soundings—a distant drone, my child eating a bowl of cereal, a dog barking, an orgasmic laugh, a distant cough, a wall creaking, etc. I didn’t place these things here, they aren’t necessarily present at the performance (but maybe they are). They are veiled within the form. Someone plays a note, or a scattering of notes. Something else is tangled and much more complicated below that note. We are forming and compressing and crumbling and evaporating.