Failing to Arrive Happily: Notes on Confluences

Notes on displacement, resonance, and writing away from the desk

Confluences was written in the wrong place. Not wrong in any dramatic sense. Just not where I had imagined writing it: not at my desk, not with my paper, not inside the slow routine I usually need before a piece starts to become thinkable.

The piece had been commissioned before I travelled to Cambodia and Vietnam, and I had left the deadline tight. The score needed to reach Cellowerken Zutphen two weeks after I got home. The prerequisite was cello ensemble: at first I imagined a quartet. I knew I wanted to write into the resonance of cellos, or rather into what happens when several similar bodies vibrate close together: low strings, beating, warmth, pressure. Beyond that, there was not much. The piece was going to be textural, probably. I had not found its form.

Then, in the last days of the trip, disruption connected to the Iran situation left us stranded in Ho Chi Minh City for another two weeks. The deadline, which had been tight but still somehow elsewhere, became immediate. I had to write the piece there, in hotels and cafés, with stationery, no laptop, no desk, no familiar manuscript paper. I changed the quartet to a trio because I needed the piece to become small enough to hold.

My first feeling was frustration. Not romantic displacement, not freedom. I wanted my room, my desk, my page. I wanted the ordinary arrangement of things that lets me delay decisions until I begin to understand them. I nearly withdrew from the project. I remember thinking: I cannot do this properly in two weeks.

The first act of composition was not particularly elegant or thoughtful. I sat in the hotel and sketched a line quickly, almost just to have done something. It did not survive into the piece. But it mattered as first blood. It punctured the blankness. After that, I was working[1]

Only later did I understand what the interruption had shown me. I had thought of my usual setup as preference: desk, paper, time, quiet, hesitation. In Ho Chi Minh City it appeared as infrastructure.

The practice I lost access to

I usually compose slowly, suspicious of first answers. I like to stay near material before I know what it is. I like the stage before a decision has hardened, when a small event can still be held in uncertainty: listened into, worried over, left alone, returned to. My usual process is non-committal in a useful sense. I let material stay provisional for as long as possible, until it begins to show me where it can and cannot continue.

The physical arrangement matters. I like working on large A3 landscape manuscript because it lets me see curves, arcs, spans of behaviour at once. The size of the page changes the thinking. It lets a line feel like it is travelling across space rather than simply moving through bars. It lets fragments sit beside one another before I know how they relate. It gives me room to ponder visually.

A lot of my recent work comes from that kind of slowness. I follow a sound-world until its capacity to continue starts to change: until it loses pull, becomes fatigued, asks to be abandoned, or returns differently. In the PhD, I have described this through continuation, failure, fatigue, and the limit at which material no longer produces meaningful difference. Form, in that account, does not arrive from a plan. It becomes legible afterwards, through persistence, interruption, and return. In practice, it feels less tidy: staying with something until it stops giving back.

In Ho Chi Minh City, I no longer had the time around the material that usually lets it stay provisional. The language was mine, but the usual delay was gone. I could not sit with a bar for days, or keep returning to a tiny pacing decision until it became familiar. Something was missing: not the language exactly, but the detail around the language.

The piece still felt like me, but as if some layer of detail had been taken away. Only later did I realise that this missing detail had become space for the players.

What are you, what can I do with you?

The work happened in bursts. I mostly worked from midday until early evening. The days became repetitive in a useful way. Inside, the rooms were quiet. Outside, the city was loud, busy, and hot, often around thirty-five degrees. Ho Chi Minh City felt strangely anonymous to me during that period, almost not real: a place of waiting, heat, distraction, and temporary rooms.

I would spend a couple of hours intensely imagining, loosely sketching, trying to find the plane of the movement. Then I would spend several hours asking how that material could actually sit in the final score. Then I would leave, usually run, and come back. The running was not really training. It was a way to clear my head, or at least distract it. The rhythm became strange but workable: pressure, writing, heat, leaving, returning.

Normally, a fragment can stay provisional for a long time. It can remain one possibility among others. In Ho Chi Minh City, every fragment of material arrived under a different demand: this has to be in the piece. There was not enough time to make lots of material and let most of it fall away. I found myself asking each sketch directly: what are you, what can I do with you?

Usually, decisions in my work seem to fall into place gradually. I do not always feel myself deciding; I wait until the material has become familiar enough that the next thing feels available. Here I had to meet decisions earlier. The question was less “where might this eventually lead?” and more “what is this now?” What kind of place is this? What can happen inside it?

I missed my usual pondering at first. Then the compression became exciting. The deadline focused my mind. I was asking the piece to do a few things, and to do them intensely. Instead of wayfaring through many material types, each movement began to settle onto one plane: a field of resonance, a ground-like tuning situation, a line dissolving into timbre. There is constant change in the piece, but it is change on one plane.

The resistant page

Because I could not get the kind of A3 landscape manuscript I normally use, I drew the staves myself. This was annoying, but not incidental. The page was no longer a neutral surface waiting for music. It had to be built before it could receive anything. The staves were not given; they were part of the labour. The uneven lines, pencil pressure, rubbed fibres, and visible work of the page made the score feel inhabited before it was complete.

The score became a kind of screen: not a passive surface, but an intermediate place where projected understanding met the resistance of the page.[2] Each sitting, I projected a version of the piece onto it: what I thought it was, what I thought the last sitting had shown me, what I thought the material wanted. At first this was frankly pretty unorganised. The page could have been all of them: all the possible pieces, all the ways the material might still fail or open. What I projected was not an image of the final sound, but a temporary belief about the movement: its atmosphere, its density, its possible duration, the kind of listening it would ask from the players.

But the page also gave information back. Each time I returned to it after being away from the work for a few hours, the marks were the same but the place they made felt different. Its neutrality was not blank. It answered back. Gradually, between sittings, the mind-image of the piece became clearer. I kept asking: what is this, and how much do I understand it?

The process became a back-and-forth between me and the score. I would arrive with a provisional understanding of the movement, mark the page according to that understanding, then return later to find that the score had reorganised my sense of the material. It was not that the page had changed, but that my relation to it had. Each sitting began from a memory of what I thought the previous sitting had been, and that memory was tested against the thing now in front of me.

This changed the meaning of revision: to rub something out was not simply to erase a note. It risked disturbing the hand-drawn structure of the staves holding the music in place. Each mark felt more final than usual, not because I was more certain, but because the page had become resistant. Hesitation had a kind of physical cost.

I became conscious of making each mark count. The score required care, and I was physically involved with it in a way I do not usually notice. The drawn staves, the pressure of the pencil, the spacing of events, the risk of erasure, the need to preserve the surface while changing it: all of this made composition feel unusually tactile. It made me more decisive, but not in the sense of knowing exactly what the sound would be. I committed more quickly to the situation of each movement, while leaving more of the sonic reality open: grain, pacing, the collective judgement of the players.

The page held the concept firmly enough for the sound to remain unstable. Control had moved. I was not fixing every sonic outcome. I was fixing the conditions in which sound could become unstable.

In front of the water

Before the piece was written, I had spent time at Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples. I arrived with the usual hunger for context. I wanted to know what I was looking at: Hindu histories, Buddhist histories, architectural histories, devotional use, tourist use, the difference between an active religious site, a tourist site, and a ruin. I wanted the place to become intelligible.

But the longer I was there, the more that desire for context began to loosen. The sites did not explain themselves. They seemed to gather time instead. Hindu and Buddhist layers were there, but so were tourist routes, devotional traces, stone, water, heat, bodies, thresholds. Light and shadow. The acrid smell of grilling in the air. None of this gathered into a single story. It felt more like time laid over itself.

One moment stood out especially clearly: looking at the water in front of Angkor Wat in the heat. It was burning, almost too much. Light, water, stone, and temperature did not feel like separate details arranged around a monument; they were the situation itself. I had begun by trying to understand where I was. In that moment, understanding mattered less than standing there in the heat, looking.

The active religious spaces felt different, more visibly held by practice. The ruins had a different quality: they seemed to produce attention without always directing it. One looked around. Attention moved, but it was not directed toward one thing.

What stayed with me was not an image I wanted to translate into sound. I was not trying to compose Angkor Wat, or to make a piece about Cambodia or Vietnam. What stayed with me was a mode of attention. I found myself less interested in what the place meant and more aware of the fact of being there: light on water, shadows moving, human craft meeting natural change, bodies moving through spaces whose purpose was not always immediately clear.

I had come looking for context, but what remained was the feeling of being in the place.

Loosening causality

I was thinking a lot about Buddhism while travelling, probably in a partial and visitor-like way. It was not something I had thought about much before. I do not want to claim Confluences as a Buddhist work, or pretend that Buddhism can simply be applied to a score. What mattered was more modest: a change in attention.

In those spaces, the pressure of causality seemed to relax. Things did not need to justify themselves by pointing elsewhere. They did not have to become arguments. Things were simply together: impermanent, dependent, partially understood, changing as light, weather, and bodies moved through them.[3] Ritual mattered too: the sense of doing something over and over, not because it moves toward an obvious conclusion, but because repetition itself holds attention. Meaning did not seem to come from one thing leading to another. It gathered in the way things were beside one another.

This stayed with me when I began composing. My usual question is often one of continuation: where does this material go, how does it morph, when does it fail, what does its failure make possible? In Confluences, the question became simpler and stranger: what is it?

Not where is it going, but what is this field? What is this vibration? What kind of being-together does this sound make possible?

This is where the title began to matter. A confluence is not a development. It is a meeting. Things arrive together without needing to become one thing. They alter one another by proximity. They produce consequence without becoming a single argument.

Failing to arrive happily

This also unsettled something in my PhD thinking. Much of the PhD has been grounded in continuation: how material persists without a destination, how it reaches fatigue, and how that fatigue can become structurally meaningful. Failure there is not error. It is the point where going on no longer produces anything new.

In Confluences, failure felt different. The music still does not arrive. It still does not become more than it is. But this no longer felt like a problem. It did not feel like a crisis of continuation.

Let us fail to arrive anywhere happily.

That sentence became useful afterwards. The music does not need to go elsewhere in order to justify itself. It can remain on one plane and allow that plane to become unstable from within. Failure does not always have to produce a cut, a boundary, or an abandonment. It can become a way of staying with sound without asking it to become an argument.

The emotional temperature of the work changed. It felt stranger and more relaxed at the same time, Obscure yet direct. The language was not radically different from my other music, but the piece did fewer things and asked those things to carry more weight.

One plane per movement

Because the piece had to be for cellos, I began from resonance: similar instruments vibrating close together, beating between close pitches, tuning as a living surface. Three cellos can make harmony feel physical. A pitch becomes less like a point than a field of unstable partials.

Moving from quartet to trio was practical, but it also clarified the piece. It became more concentrated. Each movement stays close to one plane of material. This was unusual for me. In other pieces, I often move through several material types, allowing one condition to lead into another. Here, the movements do not travel in that way. They remain inside a field and ask what can happen there.

Duration is also unsettled. Movements I and III can continue through cycles of setups and readings, almost like installations. Movement II uses free-time notation, so one performance may stretch or compress the material very differently from another.

The first movement stays close to a low C string and the spectral instability around it. I was imagining a gauze of harmonics, a surface where tones collide, shimmer, and partially obscure one another. The sound-world is spacious, intense, and rich: less a progression than a surface one looks into. The players move through an overtone field without quite settling inside it. There is no clear line to articulate, only fragile densities forming, interfering, dissolving.

The second movement is more like a resonance field or ground. The open G became a fixed point, and the other pitches are pulled downward from it, as if the tuning were cloth tugged against something that refuses to move. There is tension in this, almost the feeling of fabric falling apart while still being held. The music travels more than the first movement, but not toward arrival. The ensemble moves through a closed harmonic field, allowing sonorities to rotate, collide, and change density.

The third movement begins from a line, but the line is not allowed to behave securely as melody. It came partly from material connected to Passerelle, a solo harp piece of mine, stretched and retuned so that it became less stable. I needed to work quickly, so I found a plane of material I could trust. The line becomes something to lose: a voice becoming environment, being pulled into the field around it. It drifts between pitch, timbre, resonance, and air, while the other cellos form a mobile environment around it. The melody is absorbed and refracted by the tuning and by the materials around it.

In all three movements, the material is deliberately restricted. The intensity comes from remaining, not from departing. There is constant change, but it is change on one plane.

Controlled instability

The performers shape the form by deciding how long to stay with things, when to move on, and how to inhabit the instability of the material. I wanted them to listen and judge. But this was not simply me giving up control.

I was still controlling the situation carefully: pitch fields, kinds of resonance, flexible lengths, the ways the ensemble can be together or separate. What I was controlling was their inability to control collectively. I wanted them to be responsible for the sound without being able to fully possess it.

The score makes a stable object difficult. It asks the players to coordinate through listening, but gives them conditions that cannot quite settle: beating patterns, unstable tuning, flexible durations. The sound changes with bow pressure, contact point, and the behaviour of the room.

Sometimes the three cellos become one vibrating body. Sometimes they separate into individual bodies occupying the same field. In both cases, what matters is not execution in the usual sense, but judgement: when to move, when to remain, when to let a sound become other than what it was.

The players listen to beating and vibration, to the composite sound rather than to a single line. No one part is simply foreground. No one part owns the form. I spoke with the players a lot because the score needs that judgement. There is freedom here, but it is not casual. It asks them to search, decide, and stay sensitive to the behaviour of the sound rather than simply execute a fixed object.

I want to keep this from the piece: the searching, the making of environments, the fragility of a sound-world that depends on players listening into it together. That shared attention cannot be fully stabilised in the score. It has to be made in performance.

Afterward

When I finished the score, I was uncertain. It did and did not feel like my work. The language was not radically different, but the object felt more opaque. It had less of my usual passage between ideas, less of the detailed wayfaring through changing materials. It was more direct, perhaps stronger for that reason, but also stranger to me. I had made something that did fewer things and asked those things to carry more weight.

The piece had not become simpler exactly. Its complexity had moved. It was no longer in the abundance of material types, or in the gradual shaping of transitions, but in the instability of a field the performers had to hold open.

I began by thinking that I had to make a piece despite being stranded. In hindsight, the piece did come from being stranded, though not as a subject or image. It came from the interruption itself: from losing the conditions through which I normally compose. I had thought those things were just how I liked to work: slowness, desk, page, hesitation. They were more than that. They were the way I usually make causality feel possible.

Away from them, and after the temples, causality loosened.

Confluences is not a piece about Cambodia or Vietnam. It is a piece made after being altered by being there, and by having to compose away from the place where I usually know how to compose.

It became less a path through material than a place where materials could be together: vibrating, interfering, failing to arrive, happily.

[1] This initiating mark has some affinity with Gilles Deleuze’s account of Bacon’s “diagram”: a mark that disrupts the prepared or clichéd surface and opens the possibility of work rather than representing something already known. See Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensa­tion, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2003), especially “The Diagram.” See also David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, rev. ed. (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987).

[2] I use “screen” here less in the strict Freudian sense of screen memory than as a practical description of an intermediate surface between inner image and external object. This has some affinity with D. W. Winnicott’s account of transitional phenomena and the “potential space” between subjective experience and external reality. See D. W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” in Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971), 1–25.

[3] I use these terms cautiously and experientially rather than doctrinally. “Impermanence” and “dependent” refer here to modes of attention encountered in Buddhist spaces: the perception of things as changing, relational, and conditionally arising, rather than as fixed entities or linear causes. See Rupert Gethin, The Foundations of Buddhism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), especially chapters 2–3.