“Disruptive Inheritances: The Beholder’s Narrative in Ready-Made Compositions”

“Disruptive Inheritances: The Beholder’s Narrative in Ready-Made Compositions”

In the realm of experimental music and visual notation, the notion of authorship, authority, and agency has often centered on the composer’s inscription—a dominion of encoded intention. In contrast,  “Ready-Made Compositions” present a compelling reversal: they are works that engage deliberately with relinquishment, curation rather than creation, and a refined confusion of codes. These compositions reject traditional authorship in favor of an interpretive ecology shaped by the performer—the “beholder”—whose agency is activated not through the deciphering of a singular authorial voice, but through confrontation with contradiction, displacement, and semantic detritus.

The Ready-Made as Compositional Core

Borrowing conceptual ground from Duchampian logic, my ready-made works do not merely repurpose found objects, but instead deploy pre-existing visual or structural forms (archival documents, pharmaceutical leaflets, obsolete topographies, semantic charts, etc.) as if they were scores awaiting interpretation. Here, the “score” is no longer a vessel of musical information, but a provocation—a condition for encountering. This subversion retools the very idea of composition as an act of spontaneous authorship, instead positioning it as the act of aesthetic juxtaposition, with its provocations amplified by the performer’s interpretive narrative.

This mechanism transforms the act of performance from realization to speculation. The score is not a blueprint, but a site, and the performer’s role shifts from that of an executor to that of a reader-of-contradictions. The composer sets the stage for an interpretive improvisation that is both physical and cognitive, semiotic and embodied.

The Beholder’s Narrative: From Gaze to Gesture

At the heart of my method is the analogy to “The Beholder’s Narrative”—a term more often invoked in visual and philosophical aesthetics, but here reassigned to the performer. In this context, the beholder is not a passive recipient of an aesthetic experience, but its co-author. The narrative unfolds not through linear storytelling, but through performative presence, shaped by the performer's interpretive actions as they negotiate the unresolved logics of the score.

The “beholder” in my works is offered not a map but a cartographic failure—a disruption in notational grammar that demands improvisational literacy. Performers, then, are not playing from the score; they are playing with it—dragged into a dramaturgy of interpretive uncertainty. The score becomes an instrument of exposure rather than guidance. Their behaviors, decisions, hesitations, and refusals all become part of the composition’s narrative structure.

Contradiction as System: The Perverse Function of Notation

Central to this performative ecology is a deployment of contradiction as structure, not deviation. Unexpected elements—corporate branding fragments, forensic diagrams, defunct linguistic glyphs, even digital ephemera—pose as if they were part of a formal notational system. They seduce with the suggestion of an underlying order, while simultaneously defying translation. These symbols operate parasitically, feeding on the performer's desire to make sense, only to collapse that logic into absurdity or irreverence.

This is not the chaos of randomness but the precision of intentional interference. The contradiction is staged to force recognition of interpretive labor. It is a score that refuses to resolve, that insists upon the performer's discomfort as a meaningful state. This tactic is reminiscent of Derrida’s notion of différance: a delay in meaning that cannot be pinned down, only inhabited.

In this contradiction, there is a slow erosion of the belief in systematization itself. And yet, paradoxically, it is this very collapse that invites the performer deeper. They must construct sense from senselessness. The result is not mere performance but beholding—a reflective, embodied, aesthetic intervention. The music exists not just in the sound, but in the gesture of trying.

Toward a Poetics of Friction

My Ready-Made Compositions are not documents; they are devices. They perform a frictional relationship with conventional notation, functioning as a philosophical inquiry into the unstable role of the score. And perhaps more radically, they imagine music not as a sequence of sonorities, but as a distributed event between text, body, history, and the failure of communication.

In this light, the contradiction posed by unexpected notational elements becomes a kind of aesthetic ethics. It asks the performer not to resolve, but to risk—to improvise within an impossibility, to inhabit the debris of authority. To be, in other words, the beholder: the one who sees and simultaneously must invent what is seen.

Thus, the Ready-Made Composition becomes both object and mirror, score and trapdoor. Its success is measured not in fidelity, but in the interpretive stretch it demands—a poetics of resistance that both disorients and activates.