"Carnogrammics: Scoring as Mass, Trace, and Theatrical Debris"

"Carnogrammics: Scoring as Mass, Trace, and Theatrical Debris"

By Bil Smith

I have long believed that the score is a sculpture disguised as information. If it walks the stage in black ink and intention, I prefer it to limp, to sag, to resist decipherment while insisting on presence rather than transparency. In this new archetype I’ve begun to formulate what I call Carnogrammics where the score disbands the idea of instruction and instead becomes a mass-gesture, an accumulation of objecthood, residue, and contradiction.

New Accidentals - Bil Smith

Here, the graphic protocols of notation are not eroded...they are swollen. Inflamed. Think of Claus Oldenburg's soft sculptures not as ironic artifacts but as models for swollen syntax. Notes droop. Dynamics wrinkle. Time signatures lurch across folds. The score isn’t "read" in the classical sense; it is palpated, like an object found on the street, sticky with interpretive contingency. One encounters a density of tactility; one of vinyl sheeting, reflective gels, burlap text panels, or the carbon scoring of graphite pulled through coarse material. The artifact insists on its sculptural character first. Sound becomes the echo of material confrontation.

Claus Oldenburg Soft Drum

Robert Rauschenberg’s collage sensibility underwrites the internal logic of Carnogrammics. I insert fragments: ticket stubs, anatomical diagrams, grocery lists, degraded floor plans, not as decoration, but as derailments.  They become interruptions that force the performer to lose their place and recalibrate. In Rauschenberg’s terms, this is not about layering, but about interference-as-strategy. The notation is erratic. It wants to be illegible. It wants to create performative crisis.

Robert Rauschenberg

Damien Hirst’s compartmentalization of spectacle influences the framing (not the content) of Carnogrammics. Modular units. Wall-sized triptychs. Series of framed panel scores resembling display cases or institutional signage. The modularity allows for performative reordering. Scores can be stacked, rearranged, played backward or concurrently, depending on the architecture in which the piece is deployed. Carnogrammics is an anti-canonical score architecture. It refuses finality.

Damien Hirst

What about language?

In Carnogrammics, neologism becomes a notational device. Words are invented not for clarity, but for provocation. One might see markings like thresquint, vulpexin, nathar, or clept. They bear no etymological lineage, but they contain gestural DNA. To utter nathar is to sense a downward spiral, a shedding. These invented lexemes operate in place of traditional dynamics or articulation marks. They demand interpretive invention from the performer. Not knowing is essential.

 "Opreach" for Cello - Bil Smith

And sound? It is the last arrival. These scores are not sonic templates. They are triggers for residues of intention. The performer’s gestures are not instructed but exhumed from visual and linguistic density. What results is not "music" as such, but a performed archaeology of marks, folds, gestures, and hesitations. The audience hears the detritus of reading.

Carnogrammics, then, is a score archetype premised not on legibility but on phenomenological weight. The score is heavy. Disorienting. Imposing. It does not wish to help the performer. It wishes to impede, to seduce, to devour.

This is not notation. It is debris. And the performer, not unlike a respondent in a Beckett play or a Rauschenberg tableau, must interpret without guidance, must deliver without understanding, must produce sound in the absence of faith.

To me, that is where the future of notation lies.