Ashes, Scores, and Surfaces: Alberto Burri’s Combustion as Compositional Logic

 

Burri at Work with his Blow Torch

Burn as Blueprint

Excerpt from the Score "Explorer, Producer, Stoic After Your Fashion"

Alberto Burri’s scorched canvases, raw with melt, rupture, and searing transformation, remain among the most radical gestures in postwar art. His use of combustion was never mere spectacle; it was a method of erasure-as-creation, a refusal of perfection, and a recasting of control. For me, Burri’s pyro-aesthetic offers not just metaphor but methodology: a model for engaging musical scores as surfaces of trauma, entropy, and structural decay.

Burri’s torched plastics, sutured burlaps, and oxidized surfaces are not postmodern disruptions...they are architectures. They enact a material semiotics in which destruction doesn’t negate form; it is form. This logic translates directly into Smith’s graphic scores and notational lexicons, where the act of combustion becomes a compositional principle, a reductionist code, and a guide for performer interpretation.

Burri’s Combustion as Structural Language

Burri introduced fire into his practice not to symbolize destruction, but to enact it as an aesthetic procedure. The cremated edge, the buckled void, and the contorted surface all became compositional tools. He did not add marks; he removed material. This negative space becomes structure.

For me, this impulse reverberates within the act of composing. Notation becomes an act of recession, a process of removing clarity, removing linearity, removing obedience to sonic prescription. Like Burri’s combusted plastic sheets (Combustione plastiche), my scores often seem wounded, torn from conventional systems.  They appear as liminal zones between control and collapse.

Excerpt from the Score "Explorer, Producer, Stoic After Your Fashion" - Plastic sheet, oil, acrylic, white ink pen, gunpowder, shale and combustion.

Translations to the Score:

• Burn as Gesture → Symbolic deletion of standard rhythmic hierarchies

• Surface deformation → Typographic slippage, layered semiotic strata

• Charred lacunae → Notational absences requiring performer invention

Albert Burri

The Score as a Residual Surface

In Burri’s combustions, what remains is not just residue, but the final image. Similarly, I treat the musical score as a residual surface, something that bears evidence of what has been subtracted. Notation becomes subtractive, ruptured, fragmented.

In several of my works, pages reveal disjointed visual fields where notation that peels away from the staves, that bleeds through vellum, that collapses in upon its own legibility. Just as Burri allowed chance and volatility to participate in his process, I engineer scores that intentionally break, melt, or deteriorate symbolically.  This invites the performer into the post-structural detritus of a system once fixed.

Alberto Burri

Reductionism as Interpretive Demarcation

Combustion is a form of radical reduction—not simplification, but essentialization. Burri’s fire flattens excess, exposes substrate, obliterates surface narrative. I apply this ethos to his compositional mechanics: in the reduction of notation, interpretive agency emerges.

A score reduced to gestures, damaged lexicons, or imploded systems demands that the performer reconstruct meaning, not through imitation but through re-imagination. This is not improvisation. It is forensic recomposition. The performer is no longer interpreting a score, but they are restoring a burned archive.

Performer Implications:

• Forced to read through absence

• Extract sonic logic from visual entropy

• Engage in aesthetic triage, not obedience

Materiality and Temporal Collapse

Burri’s works resist chronology. A burned canvas is not finished...it’s suspended in decay. My scores also operate outside temporal linearity. Circular lexicons, fragmentary symbols, and pharmacological notations function less as instructions and more as temporal anomalies—zones of dislocated time.

The burned edge in Burri is mirrored in my use of:

• Incomplete phrase architecture

• Unstable repetition motifs

• Notation that folds back onto itself

Time becomes ambiguous. Form is spatial, not narrative. The composition exists as a surface of momentary potential, awaiting activation through damage, not direction.

Burri’s Legacy as Compositional Blueprint

The significance of Burri’s influence is not iconographic—it is ontological. Fire, in Burri’s practice, is both agent and outcome. It is a technique of refusal.  It is a refusal of the ornamental, the whole, the complete.

Smith adopts this refusal in the realm of music:

• Refusal of fixed sonic interpretation

• Refusal of performative certainty

• Refusal of the sacredness of notation

In this framework, the score is no longer a set of instructions. It is a burned relic, a site of former clarity, now destabilized. It demands not that we obey it, but that we survive it.

My works reject the modernist compulsion to build in favor of deconstruction as invention. What remains are the ash, glyph, warp, fracture.  It is not ruin. It is code. It is gesture. It is notation.

And from these scorched edges, the performance begins.