This blog is not a portfolio.
It is not a promotional tool, a professional diary, or a pedagogical platform.
It is a philosophical project—unfolding slowly, essay by essay—about how we think through, with, and against music.
The Core Method: Contradiction as Lens
Each essay begins from a structural tension in the act of music-making:
- The score is not the music.
- Writing for the body distorts the idea.
- Tempo lives in conflict with time.
- Gesture exceeds symbol.
- Notation simplifies what must remain complex.
Rather than resolving these contradictions, I explore what they reveal. They are not bugs in the system—they are the system. In performance, in interpretation, in composition, we live inside unresolved forces. That tension is what gives the work its necessity.
Who This Is For
This blog is for performers who feel that scores lie.
For composers who doubt the usefulness of clarity.
For thinkers who believe that form can carry thought.
Whether you’re a musician, philosopher, educator, or simply someone trying to feel your way through a culture of over-explanation, Music as Thinking offers a slower, stranger kind of signal—less didactic, more atmospheric. This is a place for cultivating ideas that exceed their containers.
How to Navigate
If you’re new here, begin with the two essays that have quietly anchored this project:
- The Score Is the Map, the Music the Terrain
On the fundamental gap between symbol and sound, and the impossibility of fidelity. - The Impossible Line: Writing for Solo Violin
On the tension between physicality and idea in composing for the body.
A full index of essays, organized by theme and contradiction, is available here (→ Under Construction).
Each piece stands alone. Taken together, they form a slowly growing philosophy of artistic action.
What’s Coming
Over time, this blog will house:
- Essays
- Marginalia and sketches
- Field reports from rehearsals and recording sessions
- Frameworks for thinking through interpretation, gesture, form
- Experiments in notational aesthetics and philosophical fiction
Some of this will be highly structured. Some will drift. That’s by design.
Why This Exists
I believe music is not just a medium but a thinking practice—a way of staging problems, of inhabiting contradictions without dissolving them. This blog is an attempt to write through that practice in real time.
It exists because the work doesn’t end when the score does.
Because we need language equal to our sound.
Because sometimes the most musical thing is to write.
Thank you for reading.
You’re not late. The project has only just begun.