Composing the Face: Portraiture, Identity, and the Curated Human Subject in Notational Space

 

The Notation of the Human

In my compositional practice, the portrait is not an accompaniment to the score, but it is a structural and aesthetic force within it. The curated image of a human subject, particularly the face, becomes both site and symbol within the notational field. These individuals, selected, photographed, and woven into the architecture of my scores, are neither merely models nor performers. They are semantic bodies, emotional vectors, and interpretive mirrors.

Inspired by the conceptual manipulations of portraiture in the works of Thomas Ruff, Jeff Wall, and Cindy Sherman, I use the face not for identity affirmation, but for mis-identification, friction, and unstable legibility. These are faces that do not resolve.  They are archetypes, codes, signals. In the visual grammar of my scores, they serve as anchors and variables, architectural glyphs through which sound is imagined, diverted, and embodied.

The Curated Subject: Casting as Compositional Act

The act of selecting the people I photograph for scores is not incidental...it is compositional in nature. Just as instrumentation must be tuned to resonance and timbre, so too must the human subject be chosen for their emotive geometry, relational opacity, or facial resistance.

I approach casting with the following criteria:

• Ambiguous expressiveness: The subject must possess a facial quality that is expressive but not overtly communicative (what Roland Barthes might call a punctum without resolution).

• Visual dissonance: I seek faces that create tension with the surrounding graphic environment, resisting assimilation into any single emotional tone.

• Embodied silence: A presence that projects inward, giving the impression that the subject is not performing for the camera, but being trapped by it.

Here, Jeff Wall’s cinematic tableaux and Sherman’s dislocated personas are critical. Like Wall, I stage “realities” with deliberate artificiality. Like Sherman, I use face and costume as instruments of semiotic collapse where identity is disassembled and reconfigured through repetition and gesture.

The Photographic Score: Thomas Ruff and the Failure of Face

Thomas Ruff’s serial photographic portraits are technically precise, and emotionally blank.  They form a direct visual influence on my approach to the image-score interface. Ruff’s work insists on the unspeakability of the face, despite its hyper-visibility. There is no path inward, only flatness, distance, and standardization.

In my work, this manifests as:

• Gridded arrangements of multiple faces, treated like phonemes in a larger lexicon of expression.

• Manipulated images where clarity is offset by distortion, blurs, enlargements, cuts, and overlays.

• Faces embedded into notation, where the position of an eye or mouth becomes an axis for musical architecture.

The face ceases to be representational as it becomes a topological system, a living glyph, a non-instrumental motivator of sonic decisions.

Mis-Identity and Dispersed Personhood in the Score

One of the most vital conceptual layers of this practice is the notion of mis-identity; the idea that the subject is not who they seem to be, or perhaps not “someone” at all in the conventional sense.

This is derived from Cindy Sherman’s anti-portraiture:

A figure that points to roles, tropes, and distortions rather than interiority.

Within my scores:

• The subject may be photographed in multiple lighting schemes, suggesting a passage through emotional or perceptual states.

• Fragments of the face (a chin, an ear, a wrinkle) may be extracted, abstracted, and used as graphic notation modules.

• Scores may be generated algorithmically from facial vectors using nose-bridge angles, eye spacing, or smile curves as axes for sound-event placement.

This creates a distributed identity, where the person depicted is not fixed, but flickering across visual and auditory registers.

The Performer as Viewer: Activating the Facial Score

Once inserted into the score, the portrait alters the performer’s relationship to the notation.

It asks:

• Am I being watched?

• Is this face instructive or intrusive?

• Is this person a character or a mirror?

The presence of the curated subject in the score decentralizes traditional notation. The performer must negotiate visual empathy, symbolic abstraction, and cognitive mapping. The face becomes an interlocutor, a semantic node, or even an aural gatekeeper.

This dynamic is crucial to my aim: to create scores that are not fully legible, but emotionally magnetic. The face disorients, destabilizes, and reconditions reading as witnessing.

Identity as Notation: Toward a New Lexicon of Embodied Symbols

In this framework, identity becomes notation, not in a biographical sense, but in a morphological one. The facial structure is retooled into rhythm, density, articulation, or even instrumentation.

My process includes:

• Translating photographic metadata (exposure time, lens distortion) into timing schemas.

• Aligning facial structures to architectural templates from graphic notation history.

• Embedding microtext into the iris, the mouth line, the hairline where the score reveals itself at a second or third glance.

This connects with my broader use of hypo-neology (described elsewhere): language fragments, too, are faces of sound.  They present themselves as gestures toward identity that never settle into fixed meaning.

The Portrait as Sonic Catalyst

To photograph a face is to score a silence.

To embed a face into notation is to compose a silence that stares back.

My compositional practice treats the curated human subject as both glyph and ghost, material and metaphor. Their presence in the score is not illustrative, but structural. It becomes a means of rethinking how sound is provoked, framed, and performed.

By integrating portraiture into the notational field, I engage with a corporeal semiotics of sound where identity fractures, syntax liquefies, and the face becomes the space where music is first imagine