Notes on color as a language, and the score as something you read with your whole body
Josef Albers begins Interaction of Color by warning us that color is "the most relative medium in art." The same red is never the same red twice: it shifts with its neighbors, with the light, with the eye that meets it. Say "red" to fifty people, he writes, and fifty different reds appear in fifty minds. I find this deeply comforting as a musician. It is exactly what happens when a room full of people hears one note.
Albers also draws a line between color and music that I keep wanting to cross. Tones, he says, are placed in time and move only forward; colors sit in space, can be seen in any direction, at any speed, and returned to. For that reason, he argues, a color composition "defies such diagrammatic registration as notation in music." I read that sentence as an invitation. What would a score look like if it behaved like color: something you could enter from any side, linger in, and come back to?
That question is where the prayer-flag scores for Daisies White began.
Before it was a language for painters, color was a language for dyers and weavers. Michael Taussig, in his essay "What Color Is the Sacred?", follows color back through the dye vats: Egyptian blue thread in mummy linen, twelve thousand shellfish crushed for a few grams of Tyrian purple, the stained hands of the dyer, and finally the coal-tar dyes that gave a whole industry its name (Farben, in German, simply means colors). He insists that color is not only seen but lived, "a total bodily activity." Jonathan Crary makes a similar point: our sense of color is continuous with touch, with air, sound and smell.
Sewing runs in my family. My grandmother and many of my aunts were seamstresses, so cloth was a first language for me long before notation was. And the loom has always been a writing machine. Jacquard's punched cards taught a loom to weave a pattern; Babbage borrowed them for his Analytical Engine; Ada Lovelace saw that the engine could weave numbers the way the loom wove flowers. At the Bauhaus, and later at Black Mountain College, Anni Albers treated weaving as a serious structural art, thread by thread, as rigorous as architecture and as open as music. A woven or sewn object is already a set of instructions you can read.
In 1814 a Scottish painter, Patrick Syme, published Werner's Nomenclature of Colours, an attempt to give naturalists a fixed, shared color language. Each color is defined by its ingredients and by where it lives in the world: in an animal, a plant, a mineral. I love its grammar. A color "inclines towards" another, sits "intermediate" between two, or "passes into" its neighbor. Even Werner had to admit defeat with the shimmer of a pigeon's neck or a peacock's tail. And hidden in one entry, Pansy Purple, is "a slight tinge of raven black."
That is the paradox I want a score to hold. We long for a shared language, a standard everyone can read. But color, as the philosopher C. L. Hardin argues, is finally made in the perceiver. Every reading is personal. Prayer flags and yantras work the same way: a shared code, read alone, by each body that stands in front of it.
So the score for Daisies White is a set of hand-sewn silk prayer flags: deep purple wrapped in white gauze, saturated yellow, red bleeding into its own ribbon, acid green, hot pink framed in black lace. Raven moves through them, the trickster who makes a mess and then has to clean it up, and in the cleaning up makes something new. The performers read the flags the way Albers asks us to read color: in relation, in any order, listening for what happens in between. Albers says music lives in "the in-between of the tones." I think the score does too.
Taussig describes a long Western habit of chromophobia, of treating strong color as childish, foreign or dangerous, something to be kept at a distance. Choosing saturated, shining silk is my small refusal of that. These colors are meant to be felt in the body, the way a song is.
In the fall of 2025 I studied color with the photographer James Welling at Princeton, in a class called Notes on Color. The practice was simple and demanding: look at one thing for a long time, then look at it again next to something else, and notice how it changes. That is also the best description I know of score study. Learning to see color attentively has become, for me, a way of learning to listen.