In the shifting terrain of contemporary score-based performance, the role of the score itself—once a sovereign edifice of musical authority—has become more nomadic, unstable, and conceptually porous.
My Ready-Made Compositions do not simply respond to this condition—they intensify it, drawing in deliberately jarring elements: the antique, the banal, and the iconographically enigmatic gazing ball. These ingredients are not stylistic gestures. They are philosophical intrusions, demanding that the performer reassess what it means to read, to reflect, to witness, and to enact.
The Score as Relic: Antiquity without Context
Antiquity, in this curatorial frame, does not enter the score as reverence or revival. It arrives fractured—unmoored from chronology. Classical statuary, inscriptions, and pseudo-epigraphic glyphs are layered into the score like found debris from a civilization only half-remembered. These elements resist function. They do not serve as ciphers to be translated; they are there to haunt. The performer, confronting these symbols, experiences an archaeological imperative—an urge not to interpret as in music, but to excavate.
The presence of antiquity invokes remainder: not history as clarity, but as ghost. The score becomes a ruin in the Benjaminian sense, in which the past flashes up in fragments—never whole, never resolved. Thus, the performer’s role is not unlike that of a forensic archaeologist attempting to reconstruct a ritual from incomplete bones and ceremonial ash. What sound could emerge from a silent sarcophagus? What gesture from a broken frieze?
The Banal Interrupts the Sacred
If antiquity brings gravitas, banality is its corroding counteragent. Product packaging, grocery lists, JPEG artifacts, amateur typography, instructional signage—these too populate the score, unapologetically. They arrive not to be mocked or ironized, but to rupture expectations. Banality is deployed as a critical decoy, a way to draw the performer’s attention to the assumed value hierarchies in reading. Why should one glyph feel “sacred” while another is dismissed as background noise?
This juxtaposition forces a collision between the revered and the discarded, between formality and detritus. The performative act becomes one of ethical navigation: what does it mean to give sonic or gestural weight to the mundane? Can the banal be exalted by the framing of a score? And if so, who holds the authority to exalt it?
In this regard, my scores function as notation-as-collage, where value is constantly in flux, and where the performer’s selections—conscious or intuitive—constitute a critique of canon, of prestige, of musical decorum. Banality is not a joke in this context; it is the terrain of truth.
The Gazing Ball: Mirror as Instrument
The most enigmatic of these inserted objects is the gazing ball—an orb that is both ornamental and oracular. Borrowed from garden kitsch, from Koonsian irony, and from 18th-century landscape design, the gazing ball’s role in the score is not symbolic alone—it is performative. Its inclusion becomes a site of self-reference, a reflection machine that implicates the performer, the audience, and the surrounding space in the act of reading.
Placed within or beside the score, the gazing ball disrupts the flatness of the page. It reflects not content but presence—the performer’s own body, distorted. The audience, too, appears within its curved logic. The gazing ball transforms the score into a three-dimensional ritual zone, one that contains the image of the performance as it happens. It is both mirror and memento, creating a feedback loop where interpretation reflects interpretation, and no act of reading remains private.
In this sense, the gazing ball is not merely visual; it is philosophical. It calls into question the ontology of observation: who is watching, and who is being watched? Who performs, and who interprets? The ball becomes a literal beholder’s narrative—not embedded in the score but refracted through it.
Imperatives in the Field
Introducing these dissonant materials—antiquity, banality, and the gazing ball—into the field of performative composition brings with it a series of imperatives:
Reject Notational Totality: These scores dismantle the illusion that notation can fully encode intention. They require the performer to function as a critical subject, not a conduit.
Affirm the Interpretive Body: Interpretation is not secondary. It is generative. These works demand not technical precision, but perceptual reckoning.
Reconfigure Temporality: Antiquity and banality alter time in the score—one stretching it backward, the other flattening it. The performer must navigate these collapsed temporalities, creating a new temporality through gesture and sound.
Accept the Score as Object: The gazing ball resists dematerialization. It insists on the objecthood of the score, on its presence as thing—not just instruction.
In this conceptual constellation, Ready-Made Compositions become more than frameworks for sound. They become ritual objects, activating space, memory, materiality, and presence. Each score is not a piece to be played, but a situation to be embodied. The performer, as beholder, becomes composer anew—caught in the loop between looking and sounding, reflecting and being reflected, reading and being read.
The gaze is no longer one-way. It returns. It distorts. It implicates. It begins again.
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