The process of interpreting Mislead Cowboy started before my research and lessons in the Six Viewpoints began. From feburary to april 2021 I participated in a workshop by Deborah Black on Mary Overlie’s Six Viewpoints. During this period I resumed work on Iris de Boer’s Mislead Cowboy, Timeless, and SeaTree. Iris sent me these beautiful custom scores in May 2020. The recordings I listened to for research on Mislead Cowboy included graphic scores by Cornelius Cardew and Frederic Rzewski. I also listened heavily to Philip Glass, Grouper, and Mary Lattimore at the time.
The angular structure of the score struck me as an opportunity. I studied the angles of the blue teardrop shapes in Iris’ score. Eventually I worked out that an angle could be expressed as a vector with one component being the size of the angle (distance in time to the next note) and the other component being the saturation of the shape’s color (dynamics of the note pattern). I used the composer’s initials (IR) for a musical cipher which formed a dyad at times.
Celia van den Bogert, harp
recorded by Dave Schall at The Laundromat April 2021
St. Clair-Superior, Cleveland, OH