This collection of text scores is a survey and a re-formatting of my work in prose and text scoring between 2019 and 2024. While not comprehensive, several of these pieces are from my Grid Series and a few have never been presented publicly or privately. In most cases, my commitment to harmony and a specific harmonic grammar meant that these scores were presented with attached pitch material. However, the text always came first and, in this volume, these works present themselves as poems, elegies, fragments of memory, and private addresses, but they are, of course, scores.

I find that an overwhelming number of scores in the prose-scoring “tradition,” even the more poetic pieces in the corpus, tend to be written in the imperative mood and give commands or describe processes: “play a note.” It has been a long-term goal of mine to find new ways of making text scores—and one that seems to be unending. Still, the scores in this book are an attempt expand what a musical instruction can be and how language and poetry can be explored as the primary impetus for musical expression. I too use the imperative mood in some of these scores, but these pieces rarely dictate pitches or rhythms as much as they define presence. A performer may be asked to wait, to listen, to sound a faint tone, to hold a vowel, to measure silence, to affirm another’s existence without expectation of return. The concerto becomes an ethics of attention; the ensemble becomes a congregation; the soloist may play or may simply be. 

The prose sections can be trusted as performative structures that allow interiority and self-consciousness into the performance. Some pieces unfold in dense prose, staging and circling questions of ego, distance, affirmation, and collapse. Yet even in the most diaristic passages, these texts do not confess so much as they frame: they construct a context in which attention becomes the primary instrument. Each page establishes a condition, and the most interior reflections operate as rehearsals of identity in public, maps of how to inhabit a room, and blueprints for listening when nothing seems to happen.

At its core, this is a cycle of scores about relation: between sounds, between bodies, between selves, and between language and sound. Silence is never empty here. It is patient, charged, and waiting, and it carries with it the full weight of attention: an affirmation that in sounding, and in listening, and in reading, we are here. This collection is not the end of this journey, but by presenting these pieces in this format, organized like a book of poetry, it is my hope that the exploration continues and that some folks may find resonance with these ideas as well.