Codex, Capsule, Cadence: On Notation as Spatial Artifact
Refiguring the Score as Object, Site, and System
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:
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Denies the primacy of the first page or last.
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Invites reading in reverse, tangents, or spirals.
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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:
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As notation, they direct interpretation.
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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:
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Encapsulate musical gesture in visual or material form.
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Encode external systems (medical, political, historical) into notational devices.
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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:
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Topographic logic: Time emerges through the performer’s traversal of space—across a table, down a wall, through a folded book.
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Haptic delay: Scores that demand physical manipulation (turning, unfolding, rotating) create tactile cadences, where rhythm is governed by motion, not measure.
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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:
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The artist's book as sculpture.
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The score as document, trace, or instruction set.
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Performance as archaeology—digging through coded objects to extract meaning.
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.
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