"Wisp of Time on Borrowed Sands" for Solo Voice

 

Ornamental Systems and Speculative Corporeality in "Wisp of Time on Borrowed Sands" for Solo Voice

"Wisp of Time on Borrowed Sands" for Solo Voice(2025) is a 34-image series for solo voice executed in ink, metallic gel, graphite oil, gallium, and gilding wax on Hahnemühle FineArt Baryta paper, the work synthesizes abstract anatomical figuration, topological staff deformation, and circular iconographic coding into a non-verbal, non-linear performative map. Through its visual systems and material vocabulary, the piece reconceptualizes the solo voice as an ornamented agency, dispersing vocality across speculative anatomical vectors and diagrammatic signal fields. The result is a performative cartography of embodied ornament, executed through speculative figuration and symbolic constraint.

Material and Format

Each image is rendered at 10” × 14” (25.4 × 35.6 cm) on archival Baryta paper, selected for its luminous ink absorption and photographic-grade clarity. Materials include gilding wax and gallium—a reference not only to metallic reflectivity, but also to a chemical volatility appropriate to the work’s theme of borrowed temporality and unstable embodiment.

The use of graphite oil and metallic gel embeds a tactile sheen that alters under light, invoking a temporal variability in the viewing experience—mirroring the piece’s titular preoccupation with the ephemerality of time and the instability of vocal inscription.

Structural Visual Logic

Each of the 34 images follows a tripartite spatial logic:

• A central contour-drawn figure (typically feminine, non-specific in identity, and variably posed),

• A fragmented, waveform-like notational staff wrapping horizontally around the figure’s torso,

• Three colored, multi-ringed circular icons connected to anatomical sites via fine vector lines.

These orbits form a radial logic of ornamentation, mapping vocal gestures onto speculative somatic centers. The ringed circles are glyphic reservoirs, resembling both ocular retinas and hypnotic spirals—thus functioning simultaneously as symbols of perception and of hypnotic constraint.

The Vocal Staff as Anatomical Distortion

The musical staff in each image is rendered not as linear notation but as a topological waveform, undulating around the midsection of the figure. The clef is present, often traditional, but no pitch or rhythm follows in conventional order. Instead, the staff bends, folds, and inverts itself, producing disrupted notation-as-flesh—a symbolic binding of musical instruction to the corporeal.

This subversion denies the voice a singular channel of expression. The score becomes an affective corset, a sonic binding that simultaneously restricts and dramatizes.

Iconography and the Radical Reinscription of Ornament

The color-ringed icons are central to the system. Each is composed of concentric layers of color, texture, and embedded glyph. These rings never repeat exactly, forming a unique symbolic signature for each image. These icons behave not as notes, but as encapsulated directives—graphic phonemes or affective syllables to be interpreted vocally.

The vertical or diagonal lines connecting them to limbs, hands, or heads form a map of resonance zones. These are not anatomical in the medical sense, but in the imaginary sense: symbolic territories of vocal inflection, breath pressure, or performative gesture.

They operate within an ornamental lexicon, where the voice is not projected outward but refracted internally—an act of voicing as self-infolding.

Gendered Figuration and the Performance of Disintegration

The silhouetted figures are uniformly feminine in posture—hips forward, arms aloft, or standing in contrapposto. However, the contours are not sexualized but diagrammatic: contour as code. The performer is asked to engage these figures not as portraits but as templates of affective topology.

Importantly, in several panels the figures are erased, partial, or rendered in negative space. This visual erosion reinforces the work’s logic of dissolution, of borrowed bodily temporality—aligning directly with the work’s title.

The voice, then, is not merely disembodied—it is abstractly re-embodied through this visual system. The performance becomes an act of tracing absence, filling in ornamental voids with phonetic ambiguity.

Linguistic Anomalies and Nomenclature as Code

Each panel is titled using a vertically rendered, consonant-heavy invented word (e.g., ADREMITY, RYRTNIV, PFXIV/F, N7NFINFRA). These names function like encrypted signals—phonetic placeholders for vocal events. They are non-pronounceable yet structurally suggestive, inviting the performer to extract syllabic gesture from visual noise.

These names behave as scores within the score—lexical events that must be voiced despite their resistance to speech. The solo voice is thereby made into a decoder, tasked with transforming typographic friction into vocal output.

WISP OF TIME ON BORROWED SANDS functions not as a traditional solo vocal score, but as a cartography of ornamental rupture. It is a system in which:

• the voice is diagrammed across speculative bodies,

• notation is replaced by symbolic choreography,

• and ornament becomes epistemology—a way of knowing through aesthetic layering and formal irreducibility.

The work does not produce song, aria, or monody—it generates a speculative vocal field, wherein phonation is dispersed across the fragile, gilded, borrowed terrain of disappearing anatomical constructs.

As a visual composition and performative framework, it stands not only as a score, but as a counter-map of vocal subjectivity, where every note is a residue and every figure a topology of vanishing breath.

“Index Lacuna & Fictive Ledger: Typography as Ontology in the Ready-Made Score”

 

“Index Lacuna & Fictive Ledger: Typography as Ontology in the Ready-Made Score”

 

In the domain of contemporary notation, where the score has moved far beyond a neutral medium into a charged field of conceptual engagement, the introduction of two new fonts—Index Lacuna and Fictive Ledger—signals a profound shift in how notation operates, not just as instruction, but as philosophy in form. Designed expressly for a new score grounded in the entangled notions of archaism, banality, antiquity, and the ready-made, these fonts do not merely convey; they perform. They shape the internal architecture of the composition while undermining the very conventions of legibility and historical authority.

Typography as Internal Structure: Not Letters, but Artifacts

Both Index Lacuna and Fictive Ledger are not simply aesthetic choices—they are structural necessities. Where most scores use typography to support a given system, here the typefaces themselves constitute the system’s skeletal memory. They are the very bones through which the performer must read, misread, and reconstruct intention.

These are not fonts to be read in passing. They are to be inhabited, navigated, excavated.

Index Lacuna: Typographic Erosion as Signifier

Index Lacuna is a font born from absence. Its very name evokes the gaps left in damaged manuscripts, the lacunae that speak louder than the text around them. Each glyph appears as though scraped from a deteriorating surface—partially erased, semi-lithic, and uneven in pressure. Inspired by inscriptions found on temple walls long lost to sand and re-engraved centuries later, its forms are fractured, porous.

The spacing is erratic. Some letters appear to sink into the background, while others seem to float above it—echoing the unstable temporality of archaeological recovery. Diacritical marks behave like phantom traces. Ligatures are absent, as though deliberately forgotten.

The font introduces interpretive uncertainty. What is an "E" might be an "F." A fermata could double as a fragmented rune. This deliberate slipperiness allows Index Lacuna to manifest semantic ambiguity as material presence. In the score, it functions as a cryptic invitation: a half-remembered language only the performer’s gesture can resurrect.

Fictive Ledger: The Bureaucratic Script of the Unreal

If Index Lacuna speaks to the spectral erosion of history, Fictive Ledger counters with an entirely different fiction—the illusion of order. Borrowing visual cues from obsolete business forms, municipal ledgers, and epistolary records of the 19th century, Fictive Ledger is a font of deception. It mimics clarity while embodying falsehood.

Its serifs are upright and self-assured. Its alignment is suspiciously perfect. And yet, beneath its clerical confidence lies a system of subtle mutations: numerals that change form mid-page, glyphs that tilt just enough to hint at forgery, and punctuation marks that seem borrowed from non-Latin scripts. A ledger that never existed for a civilization that never kept accounts.

When used in the score, Fictive Ledger becomes the notation of bureaucratized imagination. Performance directives appear as if excerpted from an invented state archive. Breath marks resemble tax stamps. Dynamics take on the flavor of censored communications. In this way, the performer is not so much interpreting as fabricating an archive in real time.

The Score as Double Exposure: When Fonts Behave Like Systems

Together, Index Lacuna and Fictive Ledger create a tension that reflects the broader conceptual tension of the score itself. Where one font disappears, the other imposes. Where one enshrines the gap, the other pretends to fill it. And this is precisely the paradox at the heart of the ready-made: the collision of found form and fractured meaning.

The score that houses these fonts is no longer a visual document of sound. It is a palimpsest of systems, a double exposure of contradiction. The fonts destabilize each other, much like the symbols of antiquity jostle against the iconography of banality. The performer is no longer merely deciphering—they are held in the act of critical witnessing. The fonts are their terrain.

Implications for the Field

By embedding philosophy into the glyph itself, Index Lacuna and Fictive Ledger reassert the performative weight of typographic decisions. These are not just visual accents; they are conceptual provocateurs. Their function exceeds readability—they become the residue of imagined histories and unreliable futures.

In doing so, your score resists the standardization of musical time and textual truth. Instead, it constructs an ontology of practice, a ritual zone where meaning is precarious and performance is speculative archaeology. These fonts are artifacts and agents, collapsing distance between the notated and the beholder.

In the end, the performer must confront what these fonts have inscribed not on the page, but into the act of interpretation itself: the impossibility of neutral reading, the pressure of invented histories, and the strange resonance of the banal made sacred by its frame.

These are not fonts. They are fictions etched in stone—and the music is what grows in their cracks.

"Primexa" A WET Score for Oboe, Soubrette, Lyric Soprano, Spinto and Contralto Tessitura

Interdisciplinary Palimpsests: Scores as Layered Maps of Cinematic, Architectural, and Musical Meaning

 

Interdisciplinary Palimpsests: Scores as Layered Maps of Cinematic, Architectural, and Musical Meaning

In the evolving landscape of experimental music notation, a growing number of composer-artists are embracing what might be called interdisciplinary palimpsests: scores that function as densely layered cartographies, in which the structural features of Western musical notation intersect with the aesthetics of architectural blueprints, cinematic storyboarding, and abstract visual systems. These scores are not static documents but dynamic terrains, replete with visual, spatial, and temporal ambiguities. At their most radical, they operate not simply as instructions for sound production but as multi-referential maps—simultaneously interpretive, generative, and performative.

Distorted Notation as Spatial Architecture

Traditional Western notation, with its staff lines and rhythmic regularity, provides a linear grammar for musical time. However, in these palimpsestic scores, that grammar is warped, disoriented, and layered. Staff systems may drift across the page, rotate, or collapse into architectural renderings—grids that resemble floor plans or sections of urban infrastructure. Composer-artists employ these disruptions to propose a new ontology for the score: no longer a temporal conveyor of information, but a spatial artifact that insists on navigation.

These architectural insertions often mirror the density of built environments: fragmented stairwells, exploded isometrics, scaffolding metaphors—all drawn onto or embedded within the notational grid. The result is a conceptual hybrid: notation becomes blueprint, and performance becomes a kind of spatial enactment, wherein the musician must navigate zones rather than read measures.

Cinematic Frames and Narrative Polyphony

In tandem with architectural motifs, cinematic references proliferate within these works. Frames, stills, and fragments of storyboard sequences interrupt or replace traditional notation. These images are not ornamental; they are signifying elements within a multilayered performance script. Much like a film editor’s storyboard, they provide moments of affective, gestural, or rhythmic guidance, cuing the performer toward psychological states or dramatic timings.

The cinematic logic also manifests structurally. Just as films jump between timelines or intercut narratives, palimpsestic scores juxtapose non-continuous segments—split frames, montages, and asynchronous cues that imply simultaneity without synchrony. This narrative fragmentation demands a non-linear approach to both interpretation and realization. The performer becomes an editor as much as a player, assembling meaning from discontinuous parts.

Semiotic Overload: Performing the Palimpsest

To engage with such a score is to enter a semiotic labyrinth. Performers must decode multiple registers: musical, architectural, cinematic, and visual-textual. Each layer speaks its own language, yet all contribute to the emergent behavior of the piece. A dashed architectural line might imply phrasing; a film still might suggest pacing or dynamic intensity; a notated glissando could trace the path of a building’s contour.

This multiplicity places significant interpretive burden on the performer, but it also enables a form of radical subjectivity. Rather than being a passive conduit, the performer becomes an active interlocutor with the score’s multilayered signs. They must select which layer to prioritize, which axis to follow, and how to translate conflicting cues into cohesive action. In this sense, the score becomes a map not only of the work but of its own performance.

Toward a Polymorphic Ontology of the Score

These interdisciplinary palimpsests challenge the idea of a score as a transparent transmission device. Instead, they assert the score as a polymorphic object—simultaneously text, image, map, and diagram. It is a field of contested meanings rather than a fixed set of instructions. The performer’s labor is one of excavation: unearthing layers, resolving contradictions, and rendering the invisible legible.

Such works exist at the threshold of disciplines: they are at once music, visual art, architecture, and cinema. They participate in what could be called semiotic synthesis, wherein each mode of representation amplifies and distorts the others. For composers working within this framework, the goal is not clarity but richness; not legibility, but multiplicity.

In this emergent field, the score itself becomes a performative space—an artifact that performs, provokes, and resists. It is a site where the act of reading becomes interpretive choreography, and where sound emerges from the collision of media. Interdisciplinary palimpsests ask us to rethink not only how music is written, but how it is imagined, embodied, and ultimately lived.

"Instructions for Assembling a God from Found Materials" for B Flat Trumpet

"Instructions for Assembling a God from Found Materials"

For B Flat Trumpet

30" X 14"

Ink. Acrylic, Graphite, Aerogel Tiles (Silica-Based), Reclaimed Radiograph Film, Oil, Milled Tyvek Fibers, Gunpowder, Ballistics Gelatin,  Thermochromic Sheet Film on Hahnemühle Photo Rag® 308 gsm

Link To PDF

https://drive.google.com/file/d/10muc253i-PBL7fxnz_34YFJxQuhp8TQh/view?usp=sharing

 

"LevelLore" for Guitar

Threading the Fragment: On the Score of LeveLore for Guitar

 LeveLore for Guitar exists as an act of quiet but radical provocation. It is not a score in the traditional sense—it is a memorial architecture, a body plan, and a wound sewn back together. Through it, I mobilize the guitar not as a mere vessel for music, but as a mnemonic organ. The composition becomes the site of reconstitution: a precarious stitching together of memory, gesture, and spatial logic.

Visual Ambiguity and the Blur of Instruction

The score for LeveLore resists semantic anchoring. At first glance, it suggests a schema—a vaguely familiar grid or diagrammatic space. But closer inspection dissolves that order. Its notations refuse fixity: arrows arc with no clear direction, partial shapes interrupt themselves, and fragments of words break into ligatures without resolution. Symbols—some architectural, others anatomical, many entirely invented—float across the page like motes in a half-lit vault.

There is no stasis here. The eye is never allowed to settle. Each reading produces new alignments, each interpretation reveals occlusions. The ambiguity is not a flaw, but a foundational strategy. It destabilizes hierarchies of instruction: there are no bar lines, no clefs, no temporal grid to guide the player into orthodoxy. Instead, Smith offers a topology of memory, where notational elements behave like ghosts—present, but unfixed. It is a score designed to be forgotten and remembered simultaneously, demanding from the performer not just fidelity, but attunement.

Structural Morphism: The Score as Body, Frame, and Memory Palace

To play LeveLore is to inhabit a mutable form. The score operates as a morphic skeleton, subtly echoing the blueprint of both architectural elevations and human anatomy. Arches, cavities, tendon-like curves, scaffolded voids—these forms emerge and recede within the notational layout, constructing a kind of corporeal architecture. Here, the body of the performer is drawn into correspondence with the architecture of the score. Fingering decisions become acts of spatial navigation; sonorities are mapped like interior volumes; silences behave like negative space.

Structurally, LeveLore refuses to settle into linear development. Instead, the piece is organized through nodal morphologies—clusters of material that transform not through variation, but through accumulative memory. That is, one cluster (or visual module) doesn’t evolve from the previous in the traditional musical sense. Rather, it remembers it. It “mends” the prior module’s rupture by offering a rethreading of shapes, orientations, or gestures, suggesting that the act of composing—and performing—is fundamentally an act of repair.

The Thread as Symbol: Fragility, Repair, and Wholeness

Perhaps the most resonant metaphor in LeveLore is that of the thread. Notationally and conceptually, the score is sutured rather than assembled. Visual elements are connected via filaments—lines that resemble stitches, strands of hair, or sutures in a body or garment. In this way, the act of performance mirrors the act of mending: the guitarist is tasked not with mastering the piece, but with healing it, tracing each ambiguous marking as one might trace a scar, not to erase it but to acknowledge it as a site of history.

The thread is more than a linear connector. It is a symbol of fragility, a time-bearing medium. Its very nature implies tension, pull, unraveling. To follow the thread through the score is to witness time fraying and folding upon itself. There is something deeply personal here—a nod perhaps to the way memory works: never complete, always patchworked, often tender and raw. In this sense, LeveLore is not just a guitar piece, but a ritual of interior restoration.

Toward an Inner Piece

LeveLore is, ultimately, a work about interiority. Its visual ambiguity, structural morphism, and use of the thread as both motif and method all point toward a music that is not expressive in the outward, declarative sense, but inwardly excavative. This is not a score to be decoded; it is a site to be inhabited, lived in, and slowly remembered into sound.

"Codex, Capsule, Cadence: On Notation as Spatial Artifact" by Richard Towns

 

Codex, Capsule, Cadence: On Notation as Spatial Artifact

Refiguring the Score as Object, Site, and System

by Richard Towns

From Scroll to Structure

Notation, once a linear device for transmitting sonic intent, has fractured. In the wake of 20th-century experimentalism and 21st-century post-disciplinary hybridity, the score no longer behaves as a servant to sound, nor a silent intermediary between composer and performer. Today, it often asserts itself as an autonomous spatial artifact—a codex, a capsule, a cadence frozen in sculptural stasis.

To treat notation spatially is to relinquish fidelity to traditional temporality. The staff becomes scaffolding. The page becomes a site. And the composer, no longer a drafter of symbols alone, becomes a builder, archivist, and spatial tactician.

Codex: The Score as Encyclopedic Lexicon

The codex, as form and metaphor, recalls an earlier phase of human inscription—before the industrialized flattening of books, when pages folded and stitched offered sequences that coiled rather than streamed.

Within the compositional context, the codex-score functions as a nonlinear archive, where each page or unit may operate independently or relationally, mirroring the logic of a modular system. We see this in Bil Smith's pharmacological circle lexicon, where each notational unit (or "capsule") is given equal epistemic weight, akin to entries in an apocryphal formulary.

These scores don’t rely on a single temporal thread; rather, they present a field of events—conceptual fragments that resist hierarchy, embracing instead the semantic simultaneity of the codex.

A codex-score thus:

• Denies the primacy of the first page or last.

• Invites reading in reverse, tangents, or spirals.

• Becomes an assemblage of potentials, not a route.

Capsule: The Score as Contained System

Where the codex suggests a flexible architecture, the capsule evokes a self-contained semantic organ—a sealed vessel of intentionality. In Bil Smith's compositional vocabulary, each circle in his pharmacological lexicon acts as a capsule of encoded meaning—visually hermetic but internally complex.

Each circle is marked not merely with aesthetic design, but layered with extramusical metadata: pharmacokinetic attributes, synthetic procedures, and routes of administration. These capsules perform dual functions:

• As notation, they direct interpretation.

• As objects, they resist legibility.

The capsule-score challenges the performer to decode rather than read, to confront a dense object whose musical outcome is not transparent but induced—administered like a drug, released slowly through interpretive labor.

This aligns with a broader trend in visual notation that seeks to:

• Encapsulate musical gesture in visual or material form.

• Encode external systems (medical, political, historical) into notational devices.

• Prioritize material presence over performative ease.

Cadence: Temporality Rewritten

To introduce cadence into this framework is to reframe musical time as spatial negotiation. Cadence is no longer an aural resolution; it is a moment of spatial arrival, the point where the notational object crystallizes into perceptual action.

Spatial scores redefine cadence through:

• Topographic logic: Time emerges through the performer’s traversal of space—across a table, down a wall, through a folded book.

• Haptic delay: Scores that demand physical manipulation (turning, unfolding, rotating) create tactile cadences, where rhythm is governed by motion, not measure.

• Visual density: The performer's sense of progression is calibrated not by bar lines, but by the saturation of symbol, color, or mass.

Jorinde Voigt’s scores, for instance, blur the boundary between line and phrase—a single curved stroke may embody multiple registers of cadence, depending on how it’s approached. Likewise, in Smith’s Serio-Constructivist works, cadence is sculptural: embedded within visual form, but only perceived once enacted.

Notation as Spatial Resistance

When notation becomes spatial, it becomes political.

Spatial artifacts disrupt the temporal hegemony of linear scores. They resist commodification through unpredictability, through excess, through unreadability. They cannot be easily excerpted or performed without commitment. They do not serve performance—they demand engagement.

This shift from notation-as-instruction to notation-as-object parallels broader trends in contemporary art:

• The artist's book as sculpture.

• The score as document, trace, or instruction set.

• Performance as archaeology—digging through coded objects to extract meaning.

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Toward a New Ontology of the Score

The evolution of the score into codex, capsule, and cadence signals a new ontological space for music-making—one in which the visual and spatial are not decorative, but generative. This is not an abandonment of music but an expansion of what music can be: speculative, sculptural, and lexically charged.

To compose such a score is to engage in architectural writing. To perform it is to inhabit a site. To listen to it is to trace its contours in real time, moving not through time alone, but through form, texture, and space.

The Score Beyond Sound

“Codex, Capsule, Cadence” is not simply a poetic triad—it is a framework for thinking through notation as epistemology. It recognizes that to notate is to build, to enclose, to resonate.

And in that spatial gesture, the score ceases to be transparent.

It becomes visible.

It becomes embodied.

It becomes real.

"Archivist vs. Performer" The Score as Conceptual Inventory Rewriting the Roles of Reader, Interpreter, and Keeper of the Notated Object

 

Archivist vs. Performer: The Score as Conceptual Inventory

Rewriting the Roles of Reader, Interpreter, and Keeper of the Notated Object

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Introduction: The Score as Inventory, Not Instruction

In contemporary composition, the score increasingly resists its traditional role as a prescriptive tool for performance. Instead, it asserts itself as a conceptual inventory—a collection of sonic hypotheses, graphic events, structural propositions, and aesthetic confrontations. In this model, the performer is no longer simply a translator of notation into sound but a participant in a broader ecosystem of curation, selection, and interpretive authorship.

This shift gives rise to a new polarity: the archivist vs. the performer.

• The archivist treats the score as an artifact to be examined, catalogued, and recontextualized.

• The performer, traditionally an enactor, must now grapple with a document that may not want to be enacted at all.

This article explores the tensions and harmonies between these roles, focusing on the score as conceptual inventory, with reference to my compositional practice.

Inventory as Ontology

A traditional musical score is temporal and linear: a trajectory from silence to sound, mapped across measures and staves. A conceptual inventory, by contrast, is non-linear, open, and non-hierarchical. It does not impose a fixed path, but instead offers a field of possibilities—like a drawer of scattered relics or a shelf of unlabeled bottles.

In my pharmacological circle lexicon, each notational unit behaves like a self-contained object, replete with its own visual structure, encoded logic, and conceptual metadata. These orbs are not just musical symbols; they are ingredients, part of a broader compound sonic system that begs to be diagnosed, not simply performed.

The score here is not a sentence—it’s a catalogue, an invitation to assemble meaning rather than receive it.

The Archivist’s Stance

The archivist engages the score not through performance, but through study, curation, and documentation. They ask:

• What are the internal logics of this system?

• What world does this score imply?

• What metadata is hidden within these forms?

• How does this notation relate to past works, medical language, or architectural models?

In this role, the score is not a pre-performance document. It is a closed object, like a fossil, whose value lies in its preserved complexity, not its sonic resolution. This is particularly true in the case of hyper-notational scores, such as those in my Serio-Constructivist oeuvre, where overdetermined instructions, impossible geometries, or visual overload make literal performance an act of willful reduction.

The Performer’s Dilemma

Yet to reduce the score to mere artifact is also to risk neglecting its liveness. The performer, however embattled, still seeks access. But now, they must:

• Choose which elements of the inventory to activate.

• Engage in interpretive curation, rather than replication.

• Translate conceptual architecture into gesture.

In this framework, performance becomes archaeological. The performer is no longer a musician alone but also a decoder, mediator, and choreographer of visual syntax.

This raises new questions:

• Can a single performance ever exhaust the score’s archive?

• Is fidelity even possible—or desirable—in this context?

• What is lost when the artifact is translated into time?

Compositional Implications

The rise of the inventory-score also transforms the role of the composer. Rather than designing a timeline, the composer assembles a semantic ecology. Each notational unit is a micro-event, with its own rules and potentialities.

Through  extensive use of extra-musical systems—pharmacology, architecture, semiotic layering—craft scores that operate less like blueprints and more like conceptual museums. Each page is an exhibit, and the performer, in turn, becomes a docent, guiding the listener through an experience that is both sonically interpretive and visually archival.

Toward an Inventory-Based Practice

Embracing the score as conceptual inventory invites a host of new possibilities for performance, analysis, and publication:

• Curated Performances: Not all parts need be played—only those that align with the performer’s selected theme or inquiry.

• Exhibition Scores: Scores mounted as wall works, with performative annotations, audio guides, or interactive mappings.

• Archival Albums: Recordings not of “pieces” but of navigations through the inventory—fragments, processes, samples.

• Para-performative Essays: Companion texts that interpret the score through linguistic performance rather than sound.

The Score as Contested Terrain

To conceive of the score as conceptual inventory is to radically expand its potential and to foreground the performer’s agency as archivist, and the archivist’s role as latent performer. The border blurs. What results is a dynamic space where notation resists reduction, performance resists completion, and meaning becomes the terrain of co-authorship.

Here, the score is not a message, but a site.

Not a line to follow, but a field to explore.

And in that field, the roles of composer, performer, and archivist collapse into a shared act of interpretive excavation.

 

Unplayable but Essential: Designing the Score as Impossible Object

The Score as Ontological Dissonance

In the age of algorithmic music, AI composition, and the relentless demand for performability, the very idea of the unplayable score appears regressive, indulgent—or worse, irrelevant. Yet, within experimental and avant-garde compositional practice, the unplayable score has emerged not as a failure of intent or a breakdown in utility, but as a deliberately designed impossibility—a structural and aesthetic tool that questions what it means to compose, to interpret, and to listen.

The impossible score operates not as a set of instructions, but as a confrontational object, charged with paradox. It demands fidelity to something that cannot be realized, setting up a dialectic between presence and absence, intention and collapse. It is both a provocation and a philosophical artifact, situated precisely at the intersection of music, visual art, semiotics, and performance theory.

Historical Foundations: From Cardew to Ferneyhough

The legacy of the unplayable score owes much to mid-20th-century figures who disrupted the notion of notation as functional communication.

Cardew's Treatise

• Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise (1963–67), with its 193-page visual epic of abstract symbols and graphic geometries, is perhaps the earliest and most canonical invocation of this idea. Treatise was not designed to be “played” in the traditional sense, but rather to generate interpretive behavior—a performance of engagement, not resolution.

• Brian Ferneyhough, often unfairly labeled a “complexist,” introduced unplayability as technical surfeit. His scores, such as Time and Motion Study II (1973–77), are not irrational, but rather hyper-rationalized to the point of ontological implosion. They simulate precision while performing semantic decay.

In both cases, the score ceases to be a transparent medium and becomes an impossible architecture—a structure so dense or abstract that it collapses under the weight of its own intention, leaving the performer in a state of perpetual approximation.

The Function of Failure: Why Write the Unplayable?

To Interrupt Expectation

By foregrounding unreadability or hyper-complexity, the score arrests the interpreter’s conventional assumptions. No longer a vehicle for translation, it becomes a site of confrontation.

To Revalue Performance

Rather than striving for fidelity, performers enter a site-specific relationship with the score—improvising, translating, or responding to its impossible demands through new tactics: gesture, narration, silence, resistance.

To Shift the Ontology of the Work

If a playable score implies a complete musical object, the unplayable score enacts ontological instability. The work exists not in performance but in the attempt, in the behaviors it elicits rather than the sounds it prescribes.

To Collapse Notation and Visual Art

Many unplayable scores are visually seductive—appropriating aesthetics from concrete poetry, conceptual art, or cartography. They do not require performance to function; they operate as autonomous visual texts that suggest music as an absent center.

Typologies of the Impossible Score

The unplayable score can take multiple forms, each invoking impossibility through different strategies:

Hyper-Notational Excess

• Dense rhythmic layers, multiple independent staves, and irrational tuplets (e.g., Ferneyhough, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf)

• Intentionally contradicting performance indications (e.g., pianissimo fortissimo)

Graphic Opacity

• Abstract symbols without legend (e.g., Cardew’s Treatise)

• Scores resembling maps, schematics, or architectural blueprints (e.g., Iannis Xenakis’ Mycenae-Alpha)

Textual Contradiction

• Text scores with recursive or paradoxical instructions: “Play a sound you have never imagined before.”

• Instruction to perform in inaccessible physical locations or imaginary contexts

Material Inaccessibility

• Scores inscribed on fragile, perishable, or unopenable media

• Scores too large to be read in real time, or fragmented across multiple objects

Designing the Impossible: A Praxis

To deliberately create an impossible score is not an act of negation, but a design ethic—a set of tactics for destabilizing control and inviting new forms of engagement.

Spatialization

Use scale and formatting to create distance—scores that cannot be read from a performer’s physical vantage point, forcing spatial memory or relational interpretation.

Semantic Decay

Create systems that begin clearly and then collapse into contradiction or over-encoding—mirroring entropy.

Visual Density vs. Sonic Sparsity

Design scores whose appearance suggests intense activity but result in near silence, or vice versa—disorienting the visual-sonic contract.

Aleatory Absurdity

Introduce randomness or impossible chance operations (e.g., roll a 102-sided die to determine pitch slope).

Transdisciplinary Syntax

Use visual grammar from outside music: anatomical diagrams, botanical classification, circuitry, or pharmaceutical notation—flattening legibility.

The Score as Philosophical Object

What happens when the score is not a prelude to sound, but its own subject?

This is the domain of compositional ontology, where the score exists as a textual fiction, a conceptual sculpture, or a mnemonic trap. It performs thought. It stages paradox. It repositions music not as sonic event, but as epistemological terrain—a way of knowing, not merely hearing.

The unplayable score reveals that music need not always be produced—it can be inferred, imagined, hallucinated, or resisted. It is not a failure of translation, but a generative site of indeterminacy, where meaning hovers, illegibility reigns, and the act of not-playing becomes performative.

Conclusion: Toward the Score as Resistance

In an era of optimization, automation, and hyper-accessibility, the unplayable score offers a necessary gesture of resistance. It reclaims difficulty, ambiguity, and the strange pleasure of not knowing. It tells us that music—like language, like art—is sometimes most alive when it refuses to resolve.

To design the score as an impossible object is to write not for hands, but for consciousness. Not for the orchestra, but for the chamber of contradiction in which the music of failure resounds.