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

Notations for Improvisers

Graham Lock

“See deeply enough, and you see musically.”

Thomas Carlyle (qtd. in Palmer 27)

“Tuned to its grandest level, music, like light, reminds us that everything that matters, even in this world, is
reducible to spirit.”
Al Young (132)

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).1While 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.

Further evidence of this highly individual perspective can be found throughout his work. Each of the five volumes
of his Composition Notes begins with a list of “sound classifications”: these are types of sounds that Braxton
identified early in his career and compiled into a basic musical vocabulary. There are nearly 100 classifications,
ranging from “curve sounds” to “gurgle sounds” to “petal sounds,” and he gives each one its own visual
designation. [FIGURE 1.]

Figure 1. Examples of Sound Classifications listed in the Composition Notes.

© Synthesis Music.
More eye-catching, and certainly more remarked upon, are his composition titles, also listed in the Composition
Notes and, of course, reproduced on his CDs and LPs. Instead of using verbal titles, Braxton assigns each work a
visual title: a diagram, comprising a mix of lines, shapes, colours, figures, numbers, and letters, which encodes
both the structural and what he calls the “vibrational” elements of the music. 2 [FIGURE 2.]

Figure 2. Examples of the composition diagram-titles, showing [top row] the use of colour and
perspective (#69Q, left), and figuration (#105A, right), [second row] subtitles (#110D, left) and a story
image (#122, right), [third row] landscape (#142), and [bottom row] photo collages (#184, left, and #187,
right). © Synthesis Music.

Add to these his frequent use of graphic and symbolic notations, his recollection that as a young man he
would draw the solos of his favourite saxophonists, and his striking claim that he actually sees each of his
compositions, “as if it were a three-dimensional painting” (Lock, Forces 99-102, 152), and it is clear that visual
factors play a significant role in Anthony Braxton’s conception of music.

My aim in this essay is to further explore this engagement with the visual, and in particular how it impinges on his
compositional and performance practices via his creation of alternative notations. I have chosen to focus on a
selection of these graphic scores for a number of reasons: one is that they represent the point at which visual
elements impact most directly on the music; a second is that, compared to the much-discussed diagram titles,
they have been rather overlooked; a third is that whereas Braxton has consistently refused to discuss the titles,
saying they concern mystical areas that language is unable to address, his Composition Notes necessarily make
reference to the alternative notations he uses, and so help to elucidate the role of the visual in his music. Braxton
has also been willing to discuss at least some aspects of such scores in greater detail, and I will be including
extracts from an interview I conducted with him in Brussels in February 2003. Finally, I want to consider, albeit
briefly, whether these alternative notations, in drawing on such disparate sources as European Romantic
mysticism and African American improvisational aesthetics, can be said to exemplify Braxton’s statements that his
music is “trans-idiomatic” and cannot be properly understood as belonging within either black or white cultural
traditions.

“It is useful to consider the difference between music and the visual arts as a matter of degree, not of kind.”
Simon Shaw-Miller (4)

First, a slight but necessary digression. Braxton’s 1985 declaration, noted above, that he sees music “as if it were
a three-dimensional painting” raises the possibility that he has a particular form of synaesthetic perception called
chromaesthesia, or colour hearing, which would mean that he does literally see sounds as colours and shapes.
The word “synaesthesia” is, according to consultant psychologist John Harrison, “a blend of the Greek words for
‘sensation’ (aisthesis) and ‘together’ or ‘union’ (syn), implying the experience of two, or more, sensations
occurring together” (3). He adds that, in the majority of cases, the fusion comprises “a visual sensation caused by
auditory stimulation”; this is chromaesthesia, in which a person sees colours and shapes when hearing a sound
(3). (These associations are entirely involuntary; they cannot be evoked at will; they are experienced as normal—
by which I mean as vividly real as any other sensory perception—by the synaesthete; and they remain consistent
throughout a person’s life.) I will say more about synaesthesia below, but first I want to record Braxton’s own
thoughts on the question, which I put to him in 2003, of whether the strong visual component in his musical
thinking might be the result of chromaesthesia or some other kind of synaesthetic perception.

I don’t really know. Your question is complex. There is a ring-post notch past which I don’t try to analyse.
But I would say this—there has never been an inherent separation in perception dynamics between the
actual sound and the image internal reality connected to the sound, including colour, including vibrational
spectra, i.e. radiance, timbre logics . . . I kind of see all of that as one thing.

I have never only heard a sound. If I hear a sound, I hear spectra . . . it’s more three-dimensional than
the actual sound. I did not even realise that until I took ear training in college and I came to see that I
wasn’t exactly hearing what everyone else was hearing. For instance, I looked at some of the notated
Warne Marsh solos and I was totally surprised to realise that, mechanically, some of the information
looked very different to what I had been hearing.

I still feel that way. The attempts to notate the great solos from the masters of improvised music only
capture maybe two-thirds of what actually happened in the music and that difference is part of what
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we’re talking about. I’m thinking of the solo by Warne Marsh on “The Song Is You.” I think as a young
guy what fascinated me . . . I don’t know how to say it . . . Warne has a gravity and a vibrational
presence that’s . . . It’s like the notes are here [waves arm horizontally] but the real logic is in the internal
world [waves arm at lower level]. I was more intrigued by that internal world than by the actual notes, in
terms of how he was able to manipulate internal presence and feeling in his music. It’s not something
that can be written out. It was at that point that I would discover that what I call a sound is not necessarily
what someone else would call a sound.

I think, for instance, that this concept of two-dimensional pitch in the Western music system is a form of
reductionism compared to what is actually happening. And while I celebrate the invention of extended
methodology and I bow to the great men and women who have evolved music science, at the same time
many of the things that attracted me to music were three-dimensional. The attempts to house it, to write
it out, in many ways involved reducing the vibrational spectra of the music. I think the music we call jazz,
so-called jazz, really brings it out, folk music brings it out, all of the musics that are close to the
community and allow for individual presence bring out this dichotomy between the rational system and
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the three-dimensional system.

So the concept of image logics and the connection between acoustic actualisation and visual shapes
and colours has to do with . . . Well, this is what I was naturally hearing and sensing. Later, as I got
older, I would find out that, whoever I am, I’m not actually sick or unhealthy because of the way I hear
music. That, in fact, the more I would understand the wonder and dynamics of actualisation, the more I
would find that in every culture there is a body of information that agrees, or is consistent, with what I’m
saying. Which is not to say I’m right or wrong or anything like that; only that there is a continuum of
information that has always emphasised three-dimensional presences, vibrational presences. (Braxton,
Personal)
I think it is fair to say that Braxton’s experiences of sound, as described above, are certainly unusual and highly
individualistic. But can they be interpreted as evidence of synaesthetic perception? The literature on synaesthesia
seems to offer a few intriguing similarities. For example, while synaesthetic perceptions are classified as mental
images, it is generally acknowledged that synaesthetes do literally see their images (called photisms) outside of
their body, as if projected on a kind of visual field a little in front of the face—perhaps not unlike a three-
dimensional painting appearing before your eyes. According to Kevin T. Dann, synaesthetes “usually describe
their photisms in geometric terms—‘sparks,’ ‘spots,’ ‘lines,’ ‘streaks,’ ‘zigzags’” (72). He reports the case of two
synaesthetes who “saw three-dimensional geometric forms when they heard musical instruments played”: the
examples he lists include “seeing the flute as a thimble shape and as a hollow tube, a bugle as a sphere with an
opening in its upper side, and the piano as quadrangular blocks and spheres” (72). It may be entirely coincidental,
but many of Braxton’s diagram titles, particularly from the 1970s and early 1980s, also resemble irregular three-
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dimensional geometric forms and shapes. [FIGURE 3.]

Figure 3. Examples of unusual geometric shapes in the composition diagram-titles. Top row: #65, left;
#87, right; bottom row: #96, left; #101, right. © Synthesis Music.

Consider too Dann’s description of synaesthesia as a “non-linguistic” experience, difficult to describe in words,
which lends it a quality of “ineffability”; and his suggestion that synaesthesia is as much a conceptual process as it
is a perceptual process, by which he means that synaesthetes not only see their perceptions but experience them
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as “a form of thinking,” or what Dann also calls “felt meaning” (8n 81). Again, it is tempting to draw links between,
for example, synaesthesia’s “quality of ineffability” and Braxton’s frequent criticisms of language as “mono
dimensional”; or between Dann’s notion of “felt meaning” and Braxton’s experience, reported above, of
“vibrational presence.” Yet, while these resemblances are intriguing, they remain highly speculative—and, after
all, musicians have long claimed that language is an inadequate vehicle for explaining and/or understanding their
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relationship to music. So the question of whether Braxton has synaesthetic perception is, as he says, complex
and may be unanswerable. The problem is not simply that a music writer is hardly competent to judge, but that
even those who have the requisite qualifications may not be able to agree. Despite more than a century of
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research, there is still no scientific consensus as to the exact nature and working of synaesthesia. One reason is
that synaesthetic perceptions vary greatly from person to person and may be unique, at least in their specifics, to
each individual. For example, while chromaesthesia may be the commonest form of synaesthetic perception, no
two people with colour hearing will see the same shapes and colours even when listening to the same piece of
music. A second reason is that, as mentioned above, synaesthetic experience is very difficult to communicate, so
that those who have it find it almost impossible to describe and those who don’t find it almost impossible to
comprehend.

Given that the issue of Braxton’s supposed chromaesthetic perception appears to be unresolvable, I propose to
broaden the terms of my inquiry and look instead at the notion that his music embodies and promotes what I will
call a synaesthetic ideal, by which I mean an intellectual construct that has its own cultural history, which I’ll
outline in a moment. To put it simply, whether or not he literally sees sounds as colours and shapes, he certainly
believes that they correspond on some levels and that such correspondences have both an aesthetic and a
spiritual significance that he addresses in his music—as, for example, in his use of graphic and symbolic
notations that attempt to circumvent the limitations of “two-dimensional” pitch. This is how Braxton explained it to
me in 2003:

From the beginning, I’ve been interested in looking for the kind of connections that could make a given
device holistic. By holistic here I mean with respect to mechanics, with respect to experience, and with
respect to connections to other disciplines. In that context, you have sound, image logics (since we’re
talking about colour and painting) and dance. I think that, at the heart of what I’m trying to say, is that my
interests and the work I’ve been pursuing are consistent with world culture. I’m not talking about
something that has never been done before but rather something that we seem to have forgotten about
that already exists.

I think that everything is connected and that the challenge of the next time period is not simply the
advancement of a concept of entertainment or of music as separate from life, but rather the move
towards three-dimensional, holistic experiences with music, image logics and dynamic spirituality all
connected—including physicality, dance, movement. I’m looking for total integration. (Braxton, Personal)

Total integration of the arts, cultural synthesis, is part of what I mean by the synaesthetic ideal and Braxton is right
to say this is nothing new. According to art historian Simon Shaw-Miller, “notions of media purity in modernism are
the historical exception. The conception of fluid boundaries between the sonoric and the visual (and indeed also
9
between the textual) is a closer reflection of artistic practices throughout history” (x). However, there is a
particular mystical element to Braxton’s thinking that we need to consider, not least because it crucially informs
his views on music and the visual. This kind of mystical thinking is not new either: Braxton has often spoken of his
interest in earlier cultures—which he sometimes calls “the ancients”—and has explained that this interest is
related to that fact that many such cultures, from ancient Egypt and China to European Renaissance
Hermeticism, have seen music as part of a network of mystical correspondences that includes not only colours
and shapes but also astrological signs, numbers, times of the day, parts of the body, the elements, the seasons
and the planets (Lock, Forces 294-307). Braxton has occasionally devised alternative notations that refer to these
correspondences, as we will see in the case of Compositions #76 and #82; but before discussing specific scores,
I’d like to try to locate these ancient beliefs in a more recent cultural context, which is also the point at which such
networks first became conflated with synaesthetic art.

In his philosophical Tri-Axium Writings, Braxton argues that an awareness of mystical correspondences has long
been the global norm and that all world musics have respected the notion of “vibrational presence.” However, the
despiritualisation of Western culture since the Enlightenment has, he says, resulted in Western classical music
evolving separately from other world musics and developing according to what he terms “existential” criteria rather
than with regard to spiritual values. This empiricism, which he links to the rise of materialism and mechanistic
science, has, he claims, led to (among many other things) separation and specialisation, including the elevation of
the composer over the performer and an emphasis on technique and “correct” playing at the expense of
improvisation and personal expression. His own music represents an attempt to reverse these trends, or rather to
balance them, not least because he sees the reunification of the arts as a requisite to the advent of a new spiritual
awareness that will, he hopes, lead to global co-operation and peace (Lock, Forces 308-11).

Many of these ideas reiterate beliefs concerning art and spirituality that were integral to strands of European
Romanticism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: in the Theosophical writings of Madam Blavatsky, the
Symbolist poetry of Rimbaud, the Expressionist paintings of Kandinsky, the musical experiments of composers
such as Wagner, Scriabin and Schoenberg. The Wagnerian concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (the total work of
art); the quest for a universal language of colour, shape and sound; the belief in the synthesis of all art forms and
in the transformational power of such a synthesis to usher in a new age of spirituality—all of these ideas, which
were circulating in fin de siècle European salons, are echoed in Braxton’s writings. Lest I be accused of imposing
an unduly Eurocentric perspective here, let me stress that Braxton is certainly well-acquainted with this phase of
European Romantic philosophy and has named several of its artistic progenitors—notably Wagner, Schoenberg
and Kandinsky—among his major influences. (He has also spoken many times of his debt to Karlheinz
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Stockhausen, whose work can be seen as a later extension of the same mystical tradition.)

In relation to the visual, Kandinsky has been of particular significance to Braxton. He has said that, of all painters,
it is Kandinsky whose work most closely resembles the paintings he “sees” in his own music; he dedicated one of
his earliest graphic scores, Composition #10, to Kandinsky; and he has chosen Kandinsky paintings to
accompany four of his recordings: Black Relationship, Looking Back on the Past, To Voice, and Blue
11
Segment. The Belgian music writer Hugo DeCraen has enumerated many similarities between Kandinsky’s
work and Braxton’s, with specific reference to the former’s “experimental colour opera” The Yellow Sound and the
latter’s Trillium operas and series of theatrical “ritual and ceremonial” compositions. The two men, says DeCraen,
share a fascination with colour/sound relationships as well as a belief that colour and sound each possess a
spiritual quality or resonance that lends them a transcendental power (212-24). I would add that in Braxton’s
distinction between the “actual notes” and the “internal presence and feeling” of a Warne Marsh solo, we perhaps
hear an echo of Kandinsky’s belief that “a work of art consists of two elements, the inner and the outer,” the inner
being “the emotion of the artist’s soul” (qtd. in Düchting 57).

Many people, then and now, have assumed that Kandinsky had chromaesthetic perception, although current
12
scientific thinking suggests this was not the case. There is no doubt, however, that he was committed to
affirming synaesthetic ideals in his painting and he played a leading role in the promulgation of these ideals in
artistic circles, in part through his 1911 book Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Dann, in his study of synaesthesia as
a cultural (as opposed to a neurological) phenomenon, notes that the first widespread scientific investigation of
synaesthesia in the later 19th century coincided with its appearance as an artistic ideal in the salons of the avant-
garde (13). He also argues that it was at this time, chiefly through popular misconception, that synaesthesia was
first—and, he insists, erroneously—linked with the mystical correspondences found in earlier cultures, a linking
that transformed it from, in Dann’s words, “a perceptual idiosyncrasy” into a “particularly attractive symbol for
13
disaffected moderns looking for signs that unity might be recovered” (37-42).

Once conflated with the astral and the occult, synaesthesia was acclaimed by many artists as a form of superior
spiritual insight and work based on synaesthetic principles became fashionable. Such views were far from
unanimous, however: cultural conservatives denounced synaesthetic art as decadent, while scientific positivists
regarded synaesthesia itself as a type of mental illness. One result of the ensuing controversy was that
synaesthetic beliefs became sufficiently well-known to attract the barbs of literary satire. In James Huneker’s 1902
story “The Disenchanted Symphony,” the protagonist Pobloff is a composer/conductor who deems colour hearing
an advanced form of artistic perception and believes in the mystical power of music. During a rehearsal of his
“experimental” symphonic poem, “The Abysm,” Pobloff is aghast to see his orchestra suddenly vanish “into a
darkness that freezes the eyeballs” and realises that the mystical forces unleashed by his music have transported
the musicians into the fourth dimension (332-33). Frantic, he eventually manages to bring them back by
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performing “The Abysm” backwards on the organ! I’m not aware of Braxton’s music ever dispatching the
musicians into a different dimension (although some of his scores do include the option of performing the notation
backwards), but given his familiarity with the same European mystical beliefs that Huneker was satirising, we
should not be surprised that Pobloff’s thinking, and even his terminology, can seem on occasion to anticipate
Braxton’s own:

Why should the highly organised brain of a musician be considered abnormal because it could see tone,
hear colour, and out of a mixture of sound and silence, fashion images of awe and sweetness for a
wondering, unbelieving world? If Man is a being afloat in a sea of vibrations, as Maurice de Fleury wrote,
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then any or all vibrations are possible. Why not a synthesis? (329)

What I want to suggest, then, is that in the synaesthetic ideals espoused by fin de siècle artists such as
Kandinsky, Braxton found an inspiration for, or at least an affirmation of, the synaesthetic ideals he was exploring
in his music. (And, possibly, he also found a context in which to make sense of his personal auditory perceptions,
a reassurance that he was “not actually sick or unhealthy because of the way I hear music,” a perceptual
experience that, after all, neither scientific research nor the English language has been able to describe or explain
satisfactorily.) Here was an influential artistic movement that provided a framework both for a synaesthetic
aesthetic and for the mystical correspondences that derived from the ancients. Yet we should be cautious about
situating Braxton’s spiritual beliefs solely in this, or any one, context. In his early years in the AACM, he
researched music’s relationship to mysticism in a number of cultures, and his writings confirm that he is familiar
16
with many different spiritual traditions. There is, of course, a profound and long-standing African American
mystical tradition, which, as outlined by Grey Gundaker, includes a variety of alternatives to “mono dimensional”
language, such as personal codes, graphic scripts and spirit writing. While it may be possible to align some
aspects of Braxton’s work with this tradition, I believe that to do so risks a kind of racial reductiveness, not least
because Braxton himself has rarely mentioned such sources, whereas he has spoken frequently of his admiration
for the work of Kandinsky, Wagner, Schoenberg and Stockhausen, and claimed an affinity with its spiritual
content.

But even if I am right in nominating European Romanticism as a major influence in reference to the visual-cum-
mystical areas in his music, it remains to be seen how he actually employs these factors in his compositional and
performance practices—and it is at this point, I think, that the African American creative music tradition plays a
crucial role. This is the issue I will address in the next part of the essay. As a preparatory step, let me stress that
the conjunction of such apparently disparate influences is in accord with Braxton’s contention that his music is
“trans-idiomatic,” that it cannot be categorised as being either predominantly European-influenced or
predominantly within a jazz/black music tradition. By tracing the relationship between his mystical beliefs and his
music making, and in particular by examining how visual factors work in relation to his uses of notation and
improvisation, my hope is that we can also reach a better understanding of the term “trans-idiomatic” and how it
operates in Braxton’s oeuvre.

“Hear with your eyes, see with your ears.”

Charlie Parker (qtd. in Taylor 248)

In the Tri-Axium Writings, Braxton argues that notation plays a different role in Western classical music than it
does in African American creative music, where improvisation on written material is more highly prized than the
correct execution of it:

Notation as practised in black improvised creativity is not viewed as a factor that only involves the
duplication of a given piece of music [. . .] Rather this consideration [i.e. notation] has been used as both
a recall factor as well as a generating factor to establish improvisational co-ordinates [. . .] Notation in
this context invariably becomes a stabilising factor that functions with the total scheme of the music
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rather than a dominant factor at the expense of the music. (T-AW 3 35-36)

In many black musics, Braxton is saying notation is used as a guide or platform for improvisation—for example, in
the way a written-out ensemble riff might underpin an improvised solo—so that the score is only one component
of the total performance, whereas in the Western classical tradition there is generally more emphasis on a faithful
rendition of the score as being the main focus and purpose of the performance. This insistence on interpretative
accuracy, and the “correct” technique it requires, though adopted by many jazz critics, is, says Braxton, foreign to
the African American understanding of improvisation as a “vibrational continuum that differs from moment to
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moment / person to person” (243):

The fact is, improvisation as practised in the working arena of black creativity is related to many other
factors that are outside the actual ‘doing’ in the music. I am writing of a functional idea that utilizes both a
fixed and open operational scheme—whose ultimate significance has nothing to do with the execution of
its co-ordinates but is instead concerned with how a given participation is able vibrationally to affirm what
is being dealt with. (248)

These ideas cast light on Braxton’s 2003 comments about the necessity of allowing “vibrational spectra” and
“individual presence” into the music. And it is not hard to see how graphic and symbolic notations could facilitate
these processes: they operate as improvisational portals through which vibrational factors such as personal
creativity and “the feeling of the moment” can infuse a performance, thereby ensuring that the score retains the
potential to be relevant to any player (and any community) at any time. While Braxton adheres to the same values
19
in regards to his conventionally notated works, in which he also encourages players to improvise in a variety of
20
different ways, graphic scores allow wider scope for improvisation and have the advantage of undermining
critical notions of “correctness,” since there is no correct way to play, say, a sequence of coloured shapes. They
can also encourage players to explore the full potential of their instruments, going beyond normally prescribed
(because conventionally notated) parameters, so creating a personal sound/style that will better express
“individual presence,” or what Braxton also calls “the whole of their ‘life’ position,” and which he considers an
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absolutely vital element of performance (249-50). When we turn to the Composition Notes in a moment, we will
see that Braxton’s comments therein make clear that his own work is conceived largely (though certainly not
exclusively) in accord with the precepts of “black improvised creativity” that he outlines in the Tri-Axium Writings,
particularly in regard to the central role of improvisation in musical performance and the use of notation, not least
his synaesthetically inspired alternative notations, “as a generating factor to establish improvisational co-
ordinates” (35).

Let’s now look at some examples of Braxton’s graphic and symbolic scores; and so that readers may, if they wish,
listen to the music under discussion, I will try to restrict myself, as far as is possible, to works that have been
released on disc. The first work described in the Composition Notes is Piano Piece 1, aka Composition #1, written
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in 1968. Braxton spells out that the composition “contains many of the ingredients that would come to
preoccupy my attention in creative music,” one of the more crucial being “the interrelationship between functional
tenets and individual expression” (CN-A 1). This relationship is reflected in the score’s mixture of what Braxton
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calls here “visual” and conventional notations. The former, he says, is intended to promote improvisation and
derives from his “desire to encourage more involvement” from the instrumentalist, as well as to explore the
dynamic “between fixed and open structures” (6). As a result, a performance of the work “is an affirmation of
myself as a composer as well as [of] the interpreter—as a creative person in his or her own right” (6).

Already we see here several of the key components in Braxton’s musical thinking. The “affirmation” of the
performer is a recurring theme that runs throughout the Composition Notes (and is a means of enabling
“individual presence”), as is the use of various types of “visual” notation to promote the improvisation that allows
this affirmation to occur. Other salient points, such as the focus on the relationship between structural elements
(“functional tenets”) and personal expression, and the use of both alternative and conventional notations to
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mediate this relationship, also recur throughout the Composition Notes.

Braxton employs various alternative notations in several of his earlier compositions, usually in conjunction with
conventional notation, although occasionally a score is entirely graphic. In Composition #10, for example,
originally for solo piano and dedicated to Kandinsky, the score comprises sixty-eight visual figures, created from
combinations of seven basic shapes that are linked to the seven basic musical components of the
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composition. Initially the figures were grouped together four per page [FIGURE 4.],

Figure 4. Figures from the original graphic score of Composition #10. © Synthesis Music.

but when Braxton revised the score in 1982 he transferred them to individual cards. Register, dynamic and pitch
choices are left open to the performer, as is the duration of the piece and the order in which the figures are
played. Yet this is not free improvisation: each shape corresponds to a particular type of sound, specified by the
composer (these include trills, clusters, rumbles and pedal sounds), and the player is asked to respect both these
associations and the relationships between the shapes in each figure. In his notes, Braxton explains that he had
two major goals with this work: firstly to help “restore our awareness of composite cultural dynamics” (that is, #10
26
aspires to the synaesthetic ideal that he sees in earlier cultures) (174); and then, again, to encourage the
complete participation of the performer. The visual figures, he says, offer the player “a basis for self-examination
and discovery,” such activities being, he adds, “important to our growth as creative musicians” (181).

The intention to reaffirm “composite cultural dynamics” features more prominently in works where Braxton makes
direct reference to the correspondences found in earlier mystical traditions. In Composition #76, for example, he
links the colour notation to astrological signs (while in Composition #82 he relates the colours in the score to both
their astrological and numerological equivalents).27 Braxton has explained how the correspondences work in
Composition #76: according to astrological tradition, each sign is associated with both a colour and a set of
emotional characteristics—Taurus, for example, is linked with green and with feelings of calm and restraint; Aries
is linked with red and with intense, explosive emotions. So, in the score of #76, the colours signal those emotional
correspondences: green indicates play calmly, red indicates play with intensity, etc. Shades of colour mark factors
such as dynamic and tempo: the darker the hue, the faster and/or louder you play. 28 [FIGURE 5.]

Figure 5. Examples of the colour and shape notation used in #76. In this example the shapes indicate
different kinds of improvisation, the numbers adjacent to the shapes refer to phrase-groupings and the
“x” symbol offers the performers the option of singing instead of playing. Brackets signal “change
instruments” (#76 is written for three multi-instrumentalists).
© Synthesis Music.

Composition #76, written in 1977, heralded a new phase in Braxton’s music that saw even greater emphasis on
the use of “visual” notations. Compositions #78, #84 and #90, for instance, are almost entirely graphic scores: #78
is a “workshop forum,” the chief purpose of which is to encourage players to familiarise themselves with the use of
shapes and colours as guides for improvisation; #84, dedicated to Picasso, comprises nine given shapes
arranged in various configurations. [FIGURE 6.]

Figure 6. The nine shapes used in “visual notation” for #84. © Synthesis Music.

Each shape relates to a maximum of four sound-types, chosen by the players from a list of twenty options given in
the score.29 As Mike Heffley has noted, Braxton’s urging of the performers to make their own selection of
sound/shape correspondences suggests that “he’s trying to provoke in the players their own experience of such
visual-audio connection and creativity—even a mystical experience—rather than imposing his own on them”
(394). This further concentration on the visual reflected, in part, Braxton’s developing interest in the visual
elements of performance itself—lighting, costume, set design, choreography—as he embarked upon his series of
highly theatrical “ritual and ceremonial” works, beginning with Compositions #95, #96, #102 and #103, which also
brought increasingly explicit use of mystical associations and aims. (Composition #95, for instance, composed as
“a vehicle to alert the spirit about serious change,” employs both colour and numerological correspondences in
the score.)30 And even in contemporaneous non-ritual works, such as Compositions #94, #98, #100 and #107,
there’s a renewed emphasis on extending the visual parameters of the score to include shapes, symbols and
what Braxton calls “multiple notation.”

Composition #94, for three instrumentalists, features several different kinds of alternative notations that provide
what Braxton describes as “a dynamic context for creative exploration and visual integration” (CN-
D 471).31 Section A’s “symbolic notation,” for example, draws both from the list of “sound classifications” in
the Composition Notes (the players pre-select twenty of these to insert into the score) and from a set of ten
geometric shapes that are specific to #94. These two sets of symbols function, says Braxton, as a “language
texture—or fabric (in the same sense as vertical harmonic directives but from a more subjective basis)” (462); by
which I assume he means that the players can improvise on a sequence of shapes and symbols much as they
would on a series of chord changes, the main difference being that the former offers a greater degree of
interpretative flexibility. This flexibility remains circumscribed, however, because each shape targets certain
conceptual and/or psychological areas for the players to explore, while leaving pitch choices, etc. open to the
individual.

Section B’s “image grouping notation” is even more intriguing, not least because it reappears in several later
compositions. Braxton lists three sub-categories of this notation: “liquid formations,” “shape formations,” and “rigid
formations.” Liquid formations occur when the cloud-like figures intertwine with conventionally notated pitches: the
players are asked to “blur” those notes that fall within the shape and create “clouded mass sound imprints that
form a multiphonic and ‘transformed’ state of sound” (467). [FIGURE 7.]

Figure 7. Examples of “liquid formations” from the score of #94. © Synthesis Music.

(The players have the option of tracing either the upper or lower outline of the shape, or both, or a combination of
the two.) “The challenge of this context,” Braxton avers, “is to breathe a music whose contours respect the line
flow of the shape but whose effect statement affirms the personality of the interpreter” (469).32 Shape formations
are similar to liquid formations, except that the players are asked to give the shapes “harder edges,” while rigid
formations extend this hardening process to “emphasize the composite state of a shape’s formation”
(471).33 [FIGURES 8 and 9]

Figure 8. Examples of “shape formations" from the score of #94. ©Synthesis Music.
 Figure 9. Examples of “rigid formations” from the score of #94. ©Synthesis Music.

Although Braxton’s music has rarely observed the customary divisions between composition and improvisation,
this “image grouping notation”—and similar shapes recur in the scores to Compositions #98, #100 and #107—
collapses the distinction even further. In his notes to Composition #98, he writes that the work is neither “notated
[n]or open but rather a ‘bridge’ between both disciplines” (CN-E 87).34 More recently he has referred to his scores
from this period as marking “the beginning of an improviser’s notation”:

I was seeking to establish models of notation that a) would be open to the new multi-instrumentalism that
had been developed in the AACM; b) would allow the instrumentalists more flexibility as well as
challenge them to stretch their vocabularies; and c) could define particular conceptual, psychological and
correspondence spaces for extended improvisation (qtd. in Lock, “Hearing” 3).

These comments point to the innovatory implications of Braxton’s alternative notations. It’s not only that he is
using these visual elements to urge players towards new areas of personal expression; he is also using them to
integrate composition and improvisation in new ways and to radically revise notions of form. So, whereas
traditional Western classical form tends to be closed to improvisation and traditional jazz form is open chiefly to
what he calls “the separate brilliance” of the extended improvised solo (CN-E 83), works such as Compositions
#94 and #98 represent a kind of porous or non-finished form in which tiny pockets of improvisational space
permeate the musical structure.35 This embedding of space within the formal fabric of the composition, via the
visual “improviser’s notation,” means it is virtually impossible to play these works, even as a straight run-through
of the score, without “individual presence” and the “feeling of the moment” suffusing the performance. 36 Such non-
finished forms present individual improvisers with a fresh kind of challenge (there are no extended solos) and also
call for fresh kinds of ensemble interplay: here the synaesthetic ideal has led to a music that is “trans-idiomatic,”
not only because it synthesizes disparate influences, but especially because it proposes new kinds of formal
logic.37

In Composition #96, Braxton’s synaesthetic ideal prompts another radical experiment with visual stimuli for
improvisation. Written for orchestra and four slide projectors, the work comprises an orchestral score, in
conventional notation, and a photographic score, based on twelve religious symbols from ancient cultures,
including Celt, Christian, Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew, Mycean and Native American. [FIGURE 10.]

Figure 10. The twelve religious symbols that comprise the photographer’s “score” in #96. ©Synthesis
Music.

The photographer is invited to seek out and shoot examples of these symbols in the natural world—“to find the
Star of David in a snowflake or in a texture of trees—or in a reflection in the water”—and the resulting slides are
then synchronised with the musical score in performance (CN-E 46).38 Braxton’s mystical beliefs inform the entire
work, which, he says, is “an affirmation of its numerological equivalent—the number seven” (so it comprises
seven parts, divided into sixteen segments, and employs sixteen different “language strategies” and sixteen
different visual images: in numerology 16 = 1+6 = 7), and is designed “to celebrate the composite interrelationship
between dynamic symbolism and world change” (CN-E 26). This mystical intent clearly lay behind the conception
of the purely visual photographic score, yet it’s worth noting that Braxton employs the score in much the same
way as he uses his graphic music scores: that is, he encourages the photographer to “improvise,” to create his or
her own images in response to the symbols, just as he encourages the musicians to improvise on the colours and
shapes of his alternative notations. Ensuring the “individual presence” of the participants remains a top priority.

To conclude, I’d like to look briefly at one final example of Braxton’s “notation for improvisers,” not least because
we have a detailed account of how it worked in performance. Composition #108B was composed in 1984. It is
one of a set of four “pulse tracks,” a term Braxton devised for pieces he created specifically to be played
concurrently with other compositions (a notion that was, in turn, linked to the idea of “collage forms,” which he
began to explore in the early 1980s).39 The way this worked in his quartet, which was the context in which he
initially developed pulse tracks, was that normally the bassist and percussionist would play the pulse track, while
the other two quartet members played or improvised on other notated material. Three of these early pulse
tracks—Compositions #108A, #108C and #108D—are written in conventional notation, but Composition #108B is
a graphic score that consists entirely of curvy lines and dots, while numbers across the top indicate beats per
section. [FIGURE 11.]

Figure 11. An example of the graphic score for #108B. ©Synthesis Music.

Braxton describes #108B as “a series of possible curve line sounds or curve line dynamic changes” (311),
implying that the lines can indicate pitch and/or volume, and he likens the music first to “a continuum of stresses
and ‘whispers’ (as if a gust of wind has rushed through the sound space of the music and stirred up the mix of its
ingredients)” (314), and later to “a ‘sea’ of ocean waves that contains a continuum of rising and falling vibrational
(and actual) dynamics” (316).40 The intention behind the work, as in earlier examples, is both to implement the
synaesthetic ideal (“to help in the cause of world unification and spiritual growth”) and to extend the improvisatory
possibilities of the creative music tradition (to enable the players to “seek out a new world and feelings (positive
feelings)”) (CN-E 317). Fortunately, we’re able to glean some insight into how these intentions, and the graphic
notation, translated into performance practice because we have a description by Gerry Hemingway, percussionist
in Braxton’s quartet from the early 1980s to the early 1990s, of how he approached the score in concert, initially in
conjunction with bassist John Lindberg, then later with his successor in the quartet, Mark Dresser. 41

108B[. . .] is nothing but numbers and lines that go up and down, with wavy motions to them that suggest
glissandos, dynamics, but could be anything—Anthony didn’t specify, he allowed us to make our
interpretations of what the shapes are. They’re interesting in that they do hold you together, though Mark
and I, as well as John Lindberg and I, developed various ways of interpreting the score.

John Lindberg and I tended to lean towards glissando. We would follow the shapes fairly literally and
we’d try to adhere to the time lapses that were happening. We’d be deliberate, but not too much, so we’d
stretch them out and open them up in certain ways. More recently, Mark and I do a number of other
things within the diagram system. Sometimes I use it as a velocity diagram, so as the line goes up I
increase the velocity of whatever I’m doing: sometimes it gets faster, sometimes faster and louder,
speed and dynamics. Or I’ll do inverse things, so when the line goes up, I slow down. I try to keep
changing the relationship.

The other thing is that these dots also keep appearing in the score. We usually hit them, but sometimes
we mime them, just to keep ourselves connected. I use them sometimes as accents; other times I use
the dots as points of change—where I’m doing one sound that leads down to the dot [. . .] then, from the
dot, I’ll change to a whole other texture, or from glissando to velocity. Mark and I have actually gone
further with this and figured out more things to do, but it’s very open-ended, you can do a lot with it. The
kick of it is we’re usually figuring out how to do these things right on stage. We talked about it when we
first played it, but since then we don’t articulate to each other directly, we’re doing it right there in the
moment, being quick with each other, each understanding what the other is doing (qtd. in
Lock, Forces 261-62).42

Hemingway’s account is, I think, eloquent testimony to the efficacy of Braxton’s alternative notation, at least in
Composition #108B. It did spur the musicians to explore fresh kinds of improvisation and interplay, and—while
retaining certain “functional tenets,” such as keeping them connected—it also offered the players extensive scope
for individual expression (and by means other than the extended solo). It is rather more difficult to gauge how well
#108B has fulfilled Braxton’s aim of promoting “world unification and spiritual growth,” though the fact that it
prompted its performers to improvise new ways of working together can perhaps be seen as a small step along
that road.

“Mystery is a necessary part of process.”

Karlheinz Stockhausen (103)