Today, a period in which notation has already decayed past utility and entered an era of alchemical semiotics, Bil Smith, that cartographer of disintegrated instruction, produced a score titled Cake. The subtitle—For Dunnett Snare Drum—is a misleading whisper, for the piece is less about percussion than it is about the collapse of clarity in the face of excess articulation.
It is not a piece. It is a fetish.
It is not a score. It is a documentation of conceptual torment.
The performer (here reduced to a ceremonial actuary) is given a paper to decipher. The paper—call it parchment, call it a wound—contains not instructions but inscriptions. High glyphs. Seismograph lines masquerading as meter. Peaks and valleys of what appears to be frequency, amplitude, or perhaps the fever chart of a dissociative trance.
Let us note: each segment of the score is adorned (contaminated? adored?) by the silhouette of a girl.
Blue Girl (upper left quadrant): Standing, full-breasted, hips poised in a lyrical slant suggesting proto-disco or code-switching. This figure—rendered in pure cyan, no gradients—does not instruct, but surveils. She is the Oracle. The prelude.
Hot Pink Girl: Reclined. A recumbent succubus among time signatures. One leg raised, perhaps in invitation, perhaps surrender. She is embedded midway through the graphic cluster, between frenetic verticalities that resemble either drum roll simulation or seismic trauma.
Gold Girl (right side): A muse or mocker. Staring across from a plateau of irrational tempo changes and nullified phrasing. Her silhouette reads like advertising. Her inclusion is protest or pornography.
Green Girl (bottom right): Collapsed. Dreamlike. The descent figure. Rendered in a sage-like moss, she is situated at the edge of the page—the metaphysical edge of the event horizon where notation cannot survive.
Functionally, the piece is impossible. And so it is irresistible. It is architecture that defies habitation. Music not to be played, but to be witnessed. The drum itself (Dunnett, a brand known for sharp shells and a ghostly over-ring) becomes a phallus, a quill, a ritual object. Its tautness contradicts the chaos.
And yet it flutters. The score itself slouches down the page, dragging its legs like a wounded soldier in an information war. The notation—once confident—now pleads with gravity, bleeding toward the footer. This descent may be aesthetic, or may be existential. In either case, the page is falling. Not the performer. Not the drum. The page.
There is no literal cake in Cake. Or perhaps the girls are the cake. Or perhaps we are. The treat that is consumed by interpretation, devoured by a performer desperate for resolution, chewing on symbols that will never yield flavor.
The tempo markings are either lies or confessions.
To play this score is to become a victim of it.
To study it is to be made complicit in its seduction.
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