To present the fact that the unpresentable exists. To make visible thatthere is something which can be conceived and which can neither beseen nor made visible'

Iean Francois Lyotard

I use notation itselfto help the performer create and sustain sounds ofa wispy and ambiguous character, rhythmically indeterminate attack,and unevenly broken up duration... I am trying to look at certain soundsfrom a multiple perspective... This, then, is a deliberately paradoxicalendeavor: the notation and bringing into being ofthe unformed, theambiguous, and the unfinished,.. trying to make visible the invisible.

Eric Richards

Without description, without echo: the desire for the intrinsicality of athing, which cannot come to be, unless we give something of ourselves:The Fury of a hermetic language.

Roland Barthes

ERIC RICHARDS:THE COMPOSER AND HIS NOTATION

Music notation is a visual representation of both musical sound and thought. The

relationship between the musical idea and its notation is a reciprocal one. Musical notation

is the means by which the composer projects the musical idea into time. The score is the

means by which musical time is made intelligible. The musical score comprises a system ofboth phonic and graphic notational signs. In the true Saussurean sense, the notational sign

is made up of a "signifier" (a sound-image or its graphic equivalent) and signified (the

musical concept or sound-idea). In Western Music, these signs are spatially situated on an

implied grid-like background-a visual corollary to the vertical (pitch) and horizontal (time)

aspects of music. As a means of communication, music notation acts as both a descriptive

record of musical sound (either imagined or heard) and a prescriptive directive for'performance. As a vehicle of expression, music notation lies suspended between memory

and expectation. In the chain ofmusical meaning, the notational sign functions as the pointofarrival for the composer's musical thought, and the point ofdeparture for the performer's

realization of the work.

The notational sign comes to stand for both a partial presence and partial absence of sound

and, by extension, musical meaning. The musical work cannot be solely represented by the

score alone. The musical score can only approximate all the properties of the performance.

The structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss suggests that both music and mythologyare framed by shadow:

Music and myth bring us face to face with potential objects of which

only the shadows are actualized with conscious approximations (a myth

and a musical score cannot be more) of inevitably unconscious truths,which follow from them.

The score can never fully encompass the multiplicity of interpretative possibilities but

instead opens the way to them. The process of interpretation is set in motion by the score.

The composer Igor Stravinsky addresses the question of the identity of the musical work:

No matter how scrupulously a piece of music is notated, no matter how

carefully it may be insured against every possible ambiguity through

indications of tempo, shading, phrasing, accentuation, and so on, italways contains hidden elements that deff definition.

Roman Ingarden, the Polish phenomenologist and student of Edmund Husserl, views themusical work as "transcendent in still a higher degree than its performances." The musicalscore is a musi'cal "text," and, as such, the score substantiates the transhistorical nature ofthe musical work.

New musical concepts can lead to new forms of notation and new notational forms cangenerate new musical concepts. "lt is difficult to describe," wrote the American composerMorton Feldman, "what characterizes notational imagery. The degree to which a music'snotation is responsible for much of the composition itself, is one of history's best-keptsecrets."

Few composers today in their work explore as poetic and visionary a musical/notationallandscape as the American composer Eric Richards. The innovative nature of his notationalforms parallels the originality of his musical ideas. His passion for sound and the means bywhich he records and gives form to his microscopic observations of sound invest thenotational sign, and by extension, the musical score with an independent objective value initself. His "musical/notational style" compels our attention to the score's own materialqualities (what the linguist Roman Jakobson refened to as the "palpability of the sign") andthe beauty of its imagery*the score as aesthetic object. The composer acknowledgesJakobson's influence on what is one of his most radically original works: The Mouth ofNight, for l2 breathers (l996la work that explores on various levels of sound, rhythm,meaning and metaphor the process of language itself.

The works that are included in this exhibit of scores by the composer Eric Richards employvarious phonic and graphic signs of both the conventional and unconventional kind. Thesescores have been executed both by hand as well as through the use of various print media.Each individual work bears the composer's own personal imprint-something that is sadlymissing from the vast majority of scores today, produced by composers on music notationcomputer software programs.

Full appreciation ofthe scores in this exhibit requires not only keen observation, but close

reading and attentive listening that is both intuitive and critical. The placement of the

notational signs on the page are representative ofpatterns ofsound and rhythm that comprise

the work's "orchestration" in its fullest sense. Through contemplation of the work'sorchestration we, in essence, become what Claude Levi-Strauss has described as the work's"silent performers."

Many of the works in this exhibit explore timbral saturation and, as such, emanate from asingle instrumental sound source (l I oboes, 72 clarinets, l0 double basses, 7 trumpets, l2breathers). These works are best realized by a single performer using multi-track recordingtechniques. These instrumental sounds are subjected to microscopic analysis by the

compoSer, who, in tum, saturates his time canvas with various nuanc€s and shades ofinstrumental color. Many of these compositions depict different perspectives, facets andplanes of instrumental sound as they simultaneously evolve in different time planes. This

is manifested in the simultan€ous layering of contrasting and often unrelated dimensions ofmusical time and memory within a single composition.

The composer compares the notational mapping of this musical landscape to that of thesurveyor or cartographer. In addition, he has noted the critical role his own observations ofAmerica's natural landscape have played in his musical compositions:

I can almost trace the origin of my particular excitement in composition ,,

to my ways of looking at the Western landscape...the way objects at 'l

different distances in the landscape could be indistinct at one momentand come sharply into focus at another.

In this important sense, what the American novelist Henry James observed of the individualswho people the great American novels of the nineteenth century (Natty Bumppo, HestorPrynne, Isabel Archer, Huckleberry Finn, Ishmael, Ahab) could be said of Eric Richards:they "seek to define themselves in a kind of cosmic landscape." I can think of no morepoetic an expression of the "cosmic landscape" than the work of composer Eric Richards.

Paul PaccioneProfessor of Music CompositionWestern Illinois University, Macomb

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