"Space Events". For Flute, Banjo and Cello

The work Space Events is organized around isolated musical "events" distributed across the page, with significant use of spatial notation. These events are positioned in ways that demand the performer assess distance, density, and proximity—not simply as visual cues, but as parameters of timing and articulation. There is no fixed meter or tempo; instead, the score relies on relational time. Durations are implied through spacing and graphical weight.

The visual format rejects conventional linearity. Each page can be understood as a modular field—an object in which time is mapped laterally, vertically, and occasionally non-sequentially. This non-linear framework invites a reorientation of standard interpretive practices.

From the outset, one notes that the score operates not merely as a transmission of sonic material, but rather as a palimpsestic field in which the material is negotiated, destabilized, and recursively interpreted. Its “events,” as the title implies, are not discrete ontological nodes but liminal torsions in the performative continuum. 

Their spatial distribution is, of course, non-metrical—yet their relationality is far from arbitrary. Smith inscribes each event with an implicit mass, a gravitational pull that draws the performer’s eye and cognition toward temporary centers of interpretive gravity. These centers are inherently unstable.

This instability is not a failure of clarity but a deliberate strategy of saturation. Take, for instance, the simultaneous deployment of gestural graphic elements and standard notehead-based figures. Rather than juxtapose them dialectically, I embed one within the other. The result is a form of notational simultaneity in which the 'readable' and the 'intuitable' are inextricably intertwined—echoing, perhaps, certain tendencies in Derrida’s notion of the pharmakon: that which cures and poisons, reveals and conceals.

Instrumentally, I made a choice in including the banjo—a gesture that forcibly estranges the ensemble from historical acoustic referents. The banjo, neither percussive nor lyrical in the Western classical sense, destabilizes the semiotic anchoring of the trio’s timbral identity. It becomes the pivot through which the other instruments are recontextualized. The cello’s foundational tone is problematized, forced into registral and textural negotiations it would not encounter in conventional contexts. The flute, meanwhile, operates as an acousmatic vector: it traverses the space between pitched materiality and breath-based articulation, refusing stable footing.

Yet it is in the score’s treatment of temporal logic that the intervention is most pronounced. There is no beat here, no sequential derivation of musical discourse. Instead, we are presented with what I would term chronotopological multiplicity—a temporal structure in which multiple possible durations coexist within the same visual plane. The notation neither prohibits nor prescribes; it compels recursive decision-making, a practice of interpretive iteration that is, by design, inexhaustible.

Crucially, one must recognize that Space Events is not a work ‘about’ space, nor even ‘in’ space, but rather through space: the score operates as a mechanism by which space is made audible. Here, the spatialization of notated information is not an aesthetic embellishment but the core epistemological engine of the piece. Each page must be engaged as an architectural document, a schematic for enacting time through spatial traversal.

In Space Events, one does not perform a composition so much as one is inscribed within it. The performer is compelled to inhabit the notational field, not as a transmitter of information but as a co-agent in a distributed epistemology. It is this performative epistemology—restless, incomplete, recursive—that ultimately defines the ontological status of the work.