I began with a written transcription of Charlie Parker’s Steeplechase. I put a piece of tracing paper over it and attempted to trace the notation in time with a metronome at twenty-six different speeds. I found that if I set the speed on the metronome to its slowest possible setting I could trace perfectly readable notes. I then increased the speed of the metronome little by little, each time making a new tracing, until I was writing at the same tempo that Charlie Parker recorded it: a lightning fast one hundred seventy-six beats per minute. In the end there were twenty-six pages that resulted from this process that were arranged in a line, incrementally from left to right.
In this piece I felt a progressive transformation where one kind of information was replaced by another. At the slower speeds the notated symbols maintain their clarity and legibility, though at about forty-two beats per minute (the sixth of the twenty-six pages) one could see where the breakdown began. Here I found a gradual disappearance of the musical code and, at the same time, a gradual emergence of the line-a line devoid of literal meaning, but that was much closer to music as it passes in time. What would seem at first to be an entropic process was in another sense a rehabilitation of something that gets lost when music is fixed onto a score.
Here are several pages…
