"Bil Smith’s Bonalumian Archetype and the Emergence of Tactile Notation" by Richard Powers

Agostino Bonalumi

Embossed Frequencies: Bil Smith’s Bonalumian Archetype and the Emergence of Tactile Notation

by Richard Powers

In the lexicon of contemporary musical practice, notation is most often assumed to be a flat affair: a two-dimensional architecture of signs arrayed across a silent visual field. But in the radical notational inventions of Bil Smith, this planar assumption is overturned. His work begins not with the staff but with the surface, and more importantly, with the interruption of that surface. Smith’s recent notational diagrams, particularly those emerging from his pharmacological and architectural series, point toward a new Bonalumian archetype.  This is a model of musical notation drawn not from semiotic traditions but from the visual and philosophical strategies of Agostino Bonalumi, whose sculptural paintings transformed canvas into living relief.

Page from the Score "Zeno's Classified Free Will."  Bil Smith Composer

In Bonalumi’s work, the canvas does not depict. It deforms. Through the application of wooden supports, geometric prostheses, or metal structures beneath the canvas, the painting becomes topological, bulging from within, suggesting inner pressure, tension, and haptic intent. Smith’s notation evolves in this very spirit. These are not scores in the classical sense.  They are zones of torsion, notation-as-contour, sound organized through extrusion. They do not ask to be read. They demand to be navigated.

Agostino Bonalumi in his Studio

The Score as Embodied Topology

The archetype Smith develops in these notations is neither visual nor strictly auditory.  It is spatial. In the first attached image of a sleek, blue sculptural extrusion, we see the foundational gesture of this Bonalumian model: a tactile bulge, a concentric terrain with no linear entrance, and no exit. The eye slides across the smooth ridges as it might trace the spiral of an inner ear or the volute of a shell. The score no longer asks “what pitch” or “what rhythm,” but instead: where is the density? where is the silence? where does the topography crest and where does it collapse inward?

Each form contains within it an implicit logic of pressure and release. This is not notation that codes discrete events; it is notation-as-potential-energy, a physical field in which sonic possibilities lie latent, to be activated by touch, interpretation, and spatial proximity. In this way, Smith’s Bonalumian notation becomes less a representation and more a resonant object—an instrument in itself.

Excerpt from "Barb's Invisible Chimera." Bil Smith Composer

Diagrammatic Plasticity: From Grid to Fold

What is striking in the subsequent images, especially those that hybridize Smith’s pharmacological structures with chromatic grids, oblique architectural planes, and new glyphic languages is the hybridity of notation and sculpture, of lexicon and object. The second and third images display a remarkable integration of micrographic fragments, pharmacological iconography, and extruded reliefs, suggesting that the entire score has ceased to be a prescription and has become instead a semantic terrain.

Like Bonalumi, who emphasized the canvas as both skin and prosthesis, Smith’s grid is not a system to regulate pitch and time, but a membrane.It becomes a  permeable field that hosts not only notation but insertion, curvature, and event-horizons. The chromatic palettes along the top edges mirror pharmaceutical blister packs or color-based treatment codes, while the central sculptural forms (like a molten, folded helix or a tectonic diagram) serve as volume indicators, not of decibel, but of massive affect.

One might imagine these scores being interpreted through touch-based performance; instrumentalists trained to respond to relief rather than symbol; performers navigating the topological depth of sound, rather than the Cartesian axis of linear time.

Agostino Bonalumi, “Ambiente bianco (White Environment)”

The Bonalumian Gesture: Extrusion as Signification

At the core of this archetype is the Bonalumian act of extrusion. In Bonalumi’s work, the support pushes forward, breaking the passive role of the picture plane. In Smith’s notation, this same movement becomes sonic syntax. A bulge is a crescendo; a recess is a delay. The radial deformation of the score’s center, seen in the lilac and silver concavity of the second image, reads not as decoration but as prescription for time dilation.

In this context, Smith’s notational archetype does not communicate information; it embodies a musical condition. It acts. It radiates. It distorts legibility. It compels performance not through dictation, but through spatial seduction. In this way, Smith’s approach aligns with Bonalumi’s belief that art should no longer be a window to look through but a space to walk into, or in this case, to listen from within.

Toward a Theory of Embossed Music

If Smith’s diagrams are to be taken seriously as a new notational archetype, then they require a corresponding performative theory.  A theory that accounts for the spatial, sculptural, and clinical nature of his scores. Let us call this theory Embossed Music.

In Embossed Music:

• Notation is not symbolic, but tactile.

• Interpretation proceeds through material logic, not syntactical reading.

• Scores imply haptic choreography, not just auditory outcome.

• Compositional authority is replaced by topographic contingency which essentially becomes a sculpted site rather than a written command.

• Sound becomes an emergent property of space, not a consequence of linguistic instruction.

This theory suggests that music may no longer begin in the mind, nor on the staff, but in the relief structure...in folds, tensions, rises, and voids. That is, in notation as pressure event.

A Notation for the Unreadable Body

Like Bonalumi, whose canvases could be said to diagnose the surface and then rupture it, Smith proposes that music notation must no longer reflect an invisible structure, but must become visibly injured, permeated, morphologically complex. These scores do not want to be read. They want to be entered, inhabited, interpreted from within the lesion.

In this, they are not unlike the body itself, but a notation we do not read with our eyes, but interpret through sensation, pressure, memory, resistance. The Bonalumian archetype of Smith’s notation is thus not only an aesthetic proposition, but a diagnostic grammar. 

A cartography of forces made audible. A score that no longer demands to be played, but requires that you listen through it.