In the evolving landscape of contemporary composition, where the boundaries between visual art, linguistic play, and sonic event are deliberately destabilized, I introduce a provocative conceptual framework: Pelippopism. As a term coined from the concatenation of visual, onomatopoetic, and pseudo-Hellenistic fragments, Pelippopism proposes a multi-modal ideology that situates the musical score not only as a site of instruction or sonic coding, but as a poly-referential object of cognition, rupture, and performative agency.
Defining Pelippopism
At its core, Pelippopism asserts that a musical score, particularly within Smith's oeuvre, is not an antecedent to sound, but a non-hierarchical parallel to sound, language, and architectural form. The term itself, with its recursive loops of plosive and sibilant sounds, evokes the vibrational logic of both semiotic interference and kinetic movement—sound as a glyphic vibration, notation as optical residue.
In my compositions, such as Effluvium and Retro-Gradient Lustration, or A Game of Curtains, Glass Door, Twice Closed, Pelippopism reveals itself through the layering of modular symbol-sets, syntactic disobedience, and a rejection of stasis. Scores become "anarchival zones" in which the functions of notation are subjected to erasure, overwriting, and distortion—gestures that enact Pelippopist refusal.
Materiality and the Pelippopist Score
Pelippopist works often begin as corrupted vectors—post-architectural blueprints infected by linguistic spores and pharmacological diagrammatics. On the page, this takes the form of compositional glyphs that recall industrial design patents, histological charts, or circuit board overlays. The typographic elements, often modeled after extralinguistic scripts or proprietary fonts, function not as legible carriers of meaning but as disrupted conduits—subject to failure, re-appropriation, and misreading.
In this framework, Pelippopism is less a doctrine than a behavior. The composer acts not as author, but as cartographer of chaotic fields. The score becomes an event horizon where disciplinary silos collapse: notation as textile, performance as forensic audit, typography as bio-linguistic residue.
The Performative Imperative
Pelippopism demands that performers not interpret, but inhabit the score. Rather than seeking fidelity, the performer becomes a strategic interlocutor between unstable systems. In one example, the presence of transparent euphoniums, spectrographic glyph overlays, and asemic typographies requires the musician to interact with the score as though it were a spatialized hologram—reading not in time, but across layers of opacity, feedback, and contradiction.
Such performative instability is not an error but a core feature of the Pelippopist ontology. The score is not a pre-image of performance, but a provocative partner, oscillating between architecture, image, and ruin.
Pelippopism as Aesthetic Strategy
Conceptually, Pelippopism aligns with para-Futurist sensibilities, Lettrist dérives, and the anti-systemic gestures of Jean Tinguely and Hanne Darboven. However, my embrace of pharmaceutical nomenclature, forensic simulation, and speculative linguistics places Pelippopism within a distinctly post-biotechnological aesthetic. It is a mode that treats the score as a semiotic organ, constantly rewriting itself through contamination, refusal, and breakdown.
In this light, Pelippopism is not merely a neologism. It is a methodological disorder that invites mutation, a radical anti-mnemonic strategy for encoding musical thought in the age of spectral excess and information decay.
Pelippopism offers a new topology for thinking the musical score—not as static artifact, but as a feedback vector, a non-linear libretto, and a semiotic surface infected by language, image, and speculative pharmacology. It serves as both aesthetic provocation and conceptual scaffolding—a refusal to resolve, a demand to reconceive.
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