"Some Remarks on the Notational Archetypes of Detonated Modernism" by Robert Castillo

Some Remarks on the Notational Archetypes of Detonated Modernism (as evidenced in the Scores of Bil Smith Composer)

by Robert Castillo

It would be neither precise nor helpful to say that Detonated Modernism is a notational “style.” It is not.

What Bil Smith has constructed—through some mix of patentable madness, Dadaist engineering, and a deep if mostly misanthropic regard for post-Boulezian compositional ambition—is better described as a recursive framework for symbolic implosion.

The scores themselves resemble something you might find rolled up in a tube at an abandoned space agency, labeled “Classified—Temporal Folding Experiments / Music.”³ They exhibit the graphic residue of high-modernist architecture (Corbusian grids, constructivist diagonals), only interrupted—sometimes violently—by obliterative overprinting, typographic sabotage, and diagrammatic seizures.

Glyphic Overload and the Semiotic Failstate

What distinguishes Detonated Modernism from its historical predecessor (i.e., Modernism before the detonation, let’s call it) is the deliberate weaponization of notation’s authority. These scores present themselves with the visual grammar of institutional control—e.g., clean staff systems, vectorized symbols, occasional appearances of F-clefs that behave like bureaucrats—but then sabotage that structure with delaminated syntax.

Archetypes emerge:

The Unanchored Ledgerline — A note floats far above or below the staff, tethered to nothing.

The Redacted Measure — Bars that contain only erasure marks or slashed diagonals.

The Scriptive Grenade — Bursts of dense verbal instruction interrupting a passage that otherwise looks playable until it suddenly isn’t (e.g., “Initiate sustained timbral contradiction at the point of mnemonic failure”).

The Speculative Clef — A mutated clef symbol of Smith's own design that may or may not signify transposition.

Performers trained on standard repertory encounter in these archetypes the sensation of being lied to by a typeface. The notation, while graphically consistent, withholds musical stability—it promises form but delivers semiotic volatility.

Temporal Instability and Notational Compression

One particularly destabilizing aspect is the temporal compression-rift phenomenon. Time, in Detonated Modernist scores, is not indexed linearly but compressed like coal: durations are nested within spatial metaphors (folds, coils, inflection points). As a result, performers must interpret chronological density as a spatial function, e.g.:

“If a down-bow gesture intersects a topographical ridge, accelerate through three notated systems simultaneously until pitch dissolves into a referential echo.”

This does not mean anything until you try to do it—and then, horrifyingly, it does. Performers don’t so much follow time as fall through it.

The Paradox of Instruction

In Detonated Modernism, the instruction itself becomes the performance. One of Smith’s notorious pieces for euphonium and three granulated carbon sheets, Scordatura Compendium (Torsion-B), includes a 17-page legend explaining the various types of circle overlays, hyphenated commands, and spatial interruptors.⁵ By the time one finishes reading the performance directives, the score feels less like music and more like a cryptographic war document.

Some instructions are brutally literal (“Detach the notehead at this point and reassign it to the dominant non-pitched resonance field”). Others are profoundly useless (“play this phrase as if it had just been refused citizenship”). Yet somehow the result—when performed—elicits a sonic field so charged with tension that one senses the paper itself is trying to exhale.

What Smith’s Detonated Modernism does, whether we like it or not, is rescue notation from its utility. It blows apart the presumption that music is something that flows in straight lines, obeys logic, or behaves itself in public. His scores are both maps and mutinies—impossible until they’re attempted, profound because they fail productively.

You don't play them. You occupy them.

Which is perhaps the whole point: a score that refuses to be a score, a modernism that has already detonated but hasn’t stopped resonating.