STANFORD, CA.- The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University announces the newest project in the Faculty Choice series, which continues this year with an acoustic twist. Mark Applebaum, associate professor of composition and theory in Stanford's Department of Music, composed "The Metaphysics of Notation" specifically for installation at the Cantor Arts Center. The score, on display beginning March 18, will remain on view for 11 months during museum hours, and it will be performed weekly.

This unusual work hangs around the Center's Geballe Family Balcony, concluding in the Rowland K. Rebele Gallery. Musicians -- Stanford students, faculty, and visiting artists -- interpret and perform the work on site at noon each Friday while the work is on view. Admission to the Cantor Arts Center and to the performances is free.

"Applebaum's score is a unique work of visual art teeming with evocative glyphs and densely arranged pictographs. The meaning of these visual figures is deliberately left undefined by the composer," explained Patience Young, who is the Cantor Arts Center's curator for education. "Each performer is invited to make a sonic realization of the score by articulating its signs according to a personal interpretation."

Faculty Choice provides a forum for the exchange of ideas among Cantor Arts Center curators, Stanford University faculty, the university community, and the general public. Individual faculty members are invited to conceive a project or program in any format to engage museum visitors. Presentation of "The Metaphysics of Notation" is a collaboration that represents the Center's goal to involve Stanford faculty and students in ways meaningful to their own work and studies and to bring their work to the attention of the visiting public.

Faculty Choice is supported by the Barbara Silverman Fund. The associated Friday music series is supported by the Joan and John Jay Corley Fund for Performance.

Applebaum's solo, chamber, orchestral, choral, operatic, and electroacoustic music has been performed throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa, with notable premieres at the Darmstadt Summer Sessions. Applebaum is active as a jazz pianist and especially as a designer of new, experimental instruments, which he calls "soundsculptures." These instruments -- tangles of junk, found objects, and hardware mounted on electroacoustic soundboards -- illustrate his current preoccupation with visually arresting music notation, leading to "The Metaphysics of Notation."