My Compositional Approach: Visual Aesthetics and Morphological Sound in Notation

Introduction

My compositional approach is grounded in the interplay between visual art aesthetics and sonic morphology. Rather than treating musical scores as mere instructions, I see them as conceptual landscapes.  They become spaces where sound and image converge, interact, and transform. This paper expands on the principles of my approach, drawing analogies with visual art, reimagining traditional notational systems, and positioning the performer as both interpreter and co-creator.

Conceptual Foundations

At the core of my compositional philosophy is a rejection of linearity and uniform interpretation. Traditional Western notation often encodes time and pitch in fixed, hierarchically structured ways. My work challenges this by embracing non-linearity, visual abstraction, textual layering, and an open-ended semiotic framework. This aligns more closely with contemporary visual art than with conventional musicology.

Non-linear Structure: Refracting Time and Narrative

Much like the fractured narratives of postmodern visual culture, my scores unfold through fragmentation, simultaneity, and multiplicity. Rather than progressing from left to right or top to bottom, they may:

• Exist in spatial clusters

• Allow for multiple entry and exit points

• Encourage repetition, recursion, or omission based on performer judgment

This reflects a philosophy of perception: time is not fixed, but experienced differently across moments and individuals. My scores invite the performer to navigate these landscapes as one would navigate a gallery installation...non-sequentially, intuitively, and responsively.

Graphic and Abstract Notation: Image as Instruction

Inspired by the works of visual artists such as Locher and Wolfgang Plöger, I incorporate abstract geometries, drawn textures, gestural markings, and photographic overlays. These symbols do not correspond to fixed pitches or durations but instead evoke sonic gestures, densities, intensities, and spatial qualities.

Examples include:

• Thick black lines indicating intense timbral focus

• Diaphanous shapes suggesting ethereal textures

• Intersecting polygons representing polyphonic intersections

Such notation resists immediate translation, requiring the performer to engage in interpretive acts that are both intuitive and analytical.

Lexical Idioms, Textual Material, and Hypo-Neology

Central to my notational language is the incorporation of textual forms: words, fragments, invented idioms, and constructed vocabularies. These serve not merely as annotations but as compositional elements with ontological weight.

• Lexical idioms function as sonic triggers or affective markers, guiding the performer through states of articulation or gesture (e.g., "fracture-breath," "spill-rest").

• Text appears in multiple typographic registers.  It may be handwritten, digital, and/or stenciled with each encoding different semantic pressures.

• Hypo-neology, or the creation of semi-words or almost-words, opens interpretive space while resisting fixed meaning. These hypo-words are meant to be sounded mentally or verbally, offering ambiguity as an invitation to embodied cognition.

Text operates as score, score as text. The visual and verbal coalesce into a singular notational logic, extending the boundaries of music notation into the realms of poetry, concrete language, and conceptual art.

Dynamic Interaction: Performer as Co-Creator

Just as visual art is not passively consumed but actively interpreted, my scores demand an embodied, responsive interaction. The performer becomes an essential co-creator, using the visual cues and textual idioms as springboards for sonic exploration. This involves:

• Moment-to-moment decision-making

• Internalizing visual rhythm and spatial layout

• Embodying the affective state implied by the graphic and textual form

This process resembles performance art as much as it does traditional music-making. It prioritizes presence, risk, and responsiveness.

Score as Object and Space

The score, in my practice, is both an object of contemplation and a space of potentiality. It is simultaneously artwork, map, and temporal script. This triadic identity enables a rich multivalence, offering layers of meaning and interpretation that unfold over time and through performance.

Rather than encoding music in a deterministic way, the score becomes a prompt for phenomenological experience.  It is a a site where sight, sound, and word merge, where performer and material converse.

Theoretical and Artistic Influences

My approach is deeply informed by cross-disciplinary artists and thinkers:

• Hanne Darboven: for her use of textual and numerical structure as both visual rhythm and time code

• Ed Ruscha: for his deadpan use of words as image, and the semantic instability of typographic display

• Tacita Dean: for her visual poetics, erasure, and site-specific temporalities

• Cornelius Cardew: for his revolutionary graphic notation and openness to performer agency

• Enrico Castellani: for his manipulation of surface and dimensionality in spatial rhythm

• Alberto Burri: for his material ruptures and the affective properties of physical textures

These influences help situate my work within a broader intellectual and aesthetic continuum, one that spans sound, text, image, time, and materiality.

Toward a New Syntax of Listening and Reading

My compositional method seeks not to direct but to suggest; not to prescribe but to provoke. By fusing visual art aesthetics with sonic morphology and lexical experimentation, I aim to create a syntax of listening and reading that is open, dynamic, and profoundly human. In this framework, the score is not a barrier but a bridge between disciplines, between senses, between people.