"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.