“Revolute Syntax: Toward a Compositional Archetype in Motion”

 

“Revolute Syntax: Toward a Compositional Archetype in Motion”

By Bil Smith

There are no lines. No staves. No horizontal compulsions guiding the eye. What I’m assembling is not a score, but a syntax in rotation. It is an event system for performance that mutates in real time, born from the same centrifugal obsession that possessed Liliane Lijn’s poem machines. Where her work spun language into transitory glimpses of sense and fracture, I’m taking that same physicality of reading and applying it to sound through notational machines that don’t ask to be read, but to be revolved.

Lijn didn’t just animate poetry; she transformed it into an orbital experience. I’m applying that same principle to composition. The work, being this emerging structure I call the Revolute Score, is conceived not on a page, but on a chassis. A chassis that moves. Not metaphorically, but literally. These are notated systems that live in orbit: nested dials, rotors, and polymorphic fields that require performer engagement as an act of decoding, translation, and improvisational faith.

The notation is arranged in concentric rings, each encoding performance parameters: tone trajectory, spatial orientation, density bloom, and the vapor-pressure of gesture. They spin independently. That’s crucial. There is no fixed reading. The performer enters the orbit from a point of chance, or intent, or necessity, and what unfolds from there is always singular, unrepeatable. The score becomes something closer to a particle collider for interpretation.

But beyond the rotor mechanics lies the Tachytext Layer. This is a phrase I use to describe the typographic field embedded into the surface of these machines. The text here is neither instruction nor poetry. It’s a pharmacographic hallucination: shards of clinical language, branding refuse, remnants of medical Latin, all half-legible, smeared, gilded, burned into the substrate. This text destabilizes. It’s not there to guide; it’s there to trigger a secondary interpretive pathway, to inflect the music with narrative pollutants and emotional static.

Performers don’t just play this score...they negotiate it. Each element is calibrated to behave like memory: slippery, luminous, context-dependent. Interpretation becomes an act of attunement, not of obedience.

I’ve always believed that notational systems are ideological devices. They encode authority, time discipline, spatial politics. The Revolute Score rejects that. It doesn’t prescribe time, however, it allows time to scatter. It doesn’t quantify, but it suggests. This is not about accuracy. It’s about capturing uncertainty as a performable condition.

The material forms of this work are just as critical. I use shape-memory polymer foam, photothermally reactive inks, and layered resin, all materials that remember, that degrade, that resist flattening. These scores aren’t prints; they are sculptural objects. And like Lijn’s machines, they demand the performer’s presence. They must be touched. Turned. Engaged.

In some instances, I build them with mechanical cranks. In others, I design them to deform under body heat. The medium insists that the act of “scoring” is a situation, not a transcription.

And why do this?

Because music shouldn’t be a reenactment. It should be an accident in progress. A system for generating a never-again.

Because Liliane Lijn didn’t write poems. She engineered them.

And I’m not writing compositions. I’m designing rotational grammars. Sound is no longer a destination. It’s the debris field. And this is how I track it.