NOODS is short for NOODLES, of course. The imagery brings to mind nurturing food, sloppy slurping, community, love, shared meals, squabbles, messiness, deliciousness, and family both given by birth and chosen throughout life.

The music is intricate choreography for the hands, often stacked, with fingers weaving between fingers. Like noodles, we’re tangled up together on the fork of life, not always harmoniously coexisting but dissonance has its own poetry, its own beauty. It’s those who clash with us that expand our worldview and fortify our sense of self. And that’s yummy!

Every one of the notes within NOODS appears on the artwork, but with repetitions to fill in odd space. The overlapping noodles around the FORK hold bits of the larger piece already illustrated in the dangling noodles. This piece marked the point when I departed from the art score being something legible to be used in performance, the way that the art scores for HUMAN and HALO SCOPE were made to be. 

The art score became less of a tool for performance the way that the typed score is, and more a visual expression of the music, allowing for artistic license and flexibility in expression from piece to piece. Reading off of an 18 x 24 page at the piano isn’t very practical anyway! I decided here to let go even further of my practical preoccupations, deciding that I would type out a beautiful score of each piece for instrumentalists and let the visual artwork stand on its own.—Thérèse-Marie ChaiX