Conference Agenda

Complex, highly variegated notation has characterized Anthony Braxton’s compositions since the late 1960s. Since that time, a number of scholars have examined Braxton’s neo-notation to varying degrees of depth (Lock 1989 and 2008; Radano 1994; Wooley et al. 2016; Steinbeck 2018; Cauwenberghe 2021). Though detailed in many respects, these treatments fail to fully elaborate a key factor at play in his works: the extent to which his notation’s semantic content and semanticity (itself) serve as sites of compositional creativity, granting Braxton the ability to modulate his works’ agential structures with surprising granularity. In order to more fully describe how Braxton complicates the act of reading, I propose two new higher-order notational phenomena I observe in his works: “fixity traversal” and “graphic/notation hybridity”, concepts informed in part by György Ligeti’s 1965 essay “Neue Notation — Kommunikationsmittel oder Selbstzweck?” Here, Ligeti arrives at two broad categories of musical inscription (notation; graphic) and three subcategories of notation proper (result; action; recipe) whose definitions hinge on inscriptions’ semanticity and function. “Traversal” and “hybridity” occur when well-defined notation is concatenated or Braxton's unique notationined with notation of greater or lesser fixity, or with semantically empty glyphs, leading to scores which demand both reading (in the traditional sense) and ekphrastic interpretation. These structures, though not uncommon in contemporary music, appear with marked density and sophistication in Braxton’s mature writing. As such, this paper will revisit the notation developed for Composition No. 76 and the subsequent Ghost Trance Music series, examining the “combinatory logics” by which Braxton draws together new, well-defined symbolic vocabulary with consciously opaque, half or un-explained musical inducements in service of his greater improvisatory project. By meaningfully describing his notation’s low-level function as well as the way its several configurations shape players’ encounters with his scores, this paper aims to shed light on this poorly-understood facet of Braxton’s work and demonstrate the extent to which these higher-order phenomena might usefully describe complex notations for improvisers.

Chicago-born American composer-improvisor Anthony Braxton has established a long and varied career working with musicians from a variety of backgrounds in different ensembles and artistic projects. As George Lewis noted, his career as a maverick improvisor working within both Eurological and Afrological improvisational frameworks is unique: the exception that proves the rule regarding the acceptance of AACM-associated musicians into a broader "new music" community (Lewis, 2015). But from the beginning Braxton has promoted a wide-ranging approach to influence and homage that refuses all genre boundaries, and his active engagement with his compositions and ideas on multiple fronts—through teaching, lecture, and the 3-volume Tri-Axium Writings (1985)—have inspired dedicated focus among scholars and aficionados. I argue that the stated evolution of Braxton's "restructural" ideas reaches its pinnacle in the roughly 150 works of his Ghost Trance Music series (1995–2006), which have to date primarily been discussed in descriptive terms (Dicker 2016, Kitamura and Rhodes, 2016, Cauwenberghe 2021). Ghost Trance works have been presented as events which summarize his multiple pursuits, while simultaneously interrogating the history of multiple musical traditions whose modern forms have become divorced from their roots in ceremony and community. Braxton describes this process as "both composition and improvisation, a form of meditation that establishes ritual and symbolic connections" inspired by his research into Native American ritual (Braxton and Shoemaker, 1996). I analyze Ghost Trance Composition No. 193 and Composition No. 245 within their recorded performance contexts, to demonstrate how the Ghost Trance works appreciated in their "event" context invite the mediation of both performers and listeners. New audiences and those who have long followed Braxton's evolution will find purchase within a multi-leveled temporality that auto-critiques its own relation to tradition, genre, performance, and the cultural logic of late capitalism.

Anthony Braxton, multi-instrumentalist, composer, philosopher, teacher, and MacArthur Grant recipient, argues that “creative music from the black aesthetic” wields universal spiritual powers. Over the course of his 1,600-page, three-volume Tri-Axium Writings, he outlines Black music’s unique and prescient role in restoring order to the modern world. Music, for Braxton, is the optimal medium for spiritual discourse, cosmic forces, and mystical experience. In order to realign our present global dynamics, one must access the spiritual realm’s ethical dictates. This foundational ontology holds that “music is not about ‘music’ and creativity is not about ‘being creative’ …, but rather music, sculpture, dance, painting are connected to ‘cosmic zones’ and have to do with ‘cosmic matters'." This essay locates the modern paradox of universalism within Braxton’s philosophy as a generative heuristic for coordinating contradictions between racial thought, spirituality, and modernity. In doing so, the Tri-Axium Writings rely on a metaphysical logic in which African Americans—through trauma and struggle—gain privileged access to certain universal truths inaccessible to the hegemony. Black Americans sustain spiritual ties to an Edenic African essence shared by the world group (except the “despiritualized” West). These themes resonate throughout African American letters and reverberate with ever shifting moral valences, setting into relief Braxton’s place in the larger conversation. Through both traumatic cultural memory and a mythologized universal human spirit, Black Americans emerge from slavery with a kind of abstract ethical truth key to progression towards global cultural transformation; so abstract, in fact, that music embodies the ideal medium for this truth. Thus for Braxton creative music from the Black aesthetic manifests an essential restorative energy with universal implications for overcoming global modernity’s ills. Perhaps audacious if not contentious, this central claim of the Tri-Axium derives not from a vacuum but from traditions of syncretic spirituality and Black messianism that advance a redemptive mission for humanity. The following pages seek to excavate this claim’s ideological underpinnings, elucidate some of the Tri-Axium’s highly idiosyncratic language, and animate more vividly Braxton’s paradoxical universalism—a core feature of his philosophy that is both overlooked and resonates across a wider network of writers.