The Jubal Notational Initiative: A New Lexicon for Music and Design.

 

The Jubal Notational Initiative: A New Lexicon for Music and Design.

Link to Full Article PDF (19 Pages)

The Jubal Notational Initiative

Bil Smith’s Jubal Notational System is a radical reimagining of musical notation, designed to expand the language available to composers and performers. Introduced in late 2022 as part of Smith’s Jubal Project, this system is “a massive new musical lexicon” at the core of which lies a single, powerful visual motif: the circle. Few projects in contemporary music notation are as ambitious – Smith’s goal is nothing less than to “change the way we think about notation and sound.”  In what follows, we explore the conceptual foundations of the Jubal system, its formal graphic language, the new performer–score relationship it proposes, and the integration of metabolist (and even architectural) principles that inform its design. We will also consider how Smith’s aesthetic strategies set Jubal apart from traditional Western notation, and why this new system matters as a tool for creative exploration in today’s musical landscape.

Conceptual Foundations: Circles, Symbols, and Continuous Sound

At the heart of the Jubal Notational System is the circle – a shape rich with symbolic meaning. Smith chose the circle as the foundational element of his lexicon because of its associations with “totality, wholeness, original perfection, the infinite [and] timelessness.”  In Western music notation, we’re used to seeing circles and ellipses in the form of noteheads, but here the circle is reimagined and elevated to a primary symbol that carries musical significance beyond pitch or rhythm. The circle in Jubal notation represents sound in a flexible, dynamic way, not as a fixed point on a staff, but as an evolving form. In Smith’s words, “by using circles to represent sound, The Jubal Project offers a new way of thinking about musical notation, one that is both flexible and dynamic.” Each notational gesture in the system is built around circular forms, sometimes alone and sometimes in complex nested arrangements, conveying musical information through shape, color, and spatial arrangement rather than traditional note values.

Crucially, the Jubal system is not just about one symbol but about how symbols behave and transform. Smith describes his notation as an archetype that can oscillate between different representational modes – it can function as an index, a symbol, or even a sensory prompt. In practical terms, this means a marking in a Jubal score might simultaneously indicate a concrete musical action (indexical registration), an abstract force or gesture (a “symbol of forces in flux”), and a visual cue that stimulates the performer’s interpretive imagination (sensory stimulus).  Rather than prescribing a single outcome, the notation creates “a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities”– a musical space that is alive, fluid, and not oriented toward a fixed endpoint or climax. This concept aligns with contemporary ideas of open-form and process-oriented music: the score outlines a field of possibilities rather than a predetermined path.

One of the most important conceptual innovations of the Jubal Notational System is its capacity for transformation and variation. The system is designed so that musical material can be generated and regenerated in multiple forms. Smith emphasizes the “ability to yield aftereffects that empower the composer and performer, allowing for multiple transformations and variants of sound creation.”  In other words, a single notated idea in Jubal language can be taken by a performer or composer and morphed into new shapes and sounds. The notation itself encourages iteration; patterns can repeat with variation, branch into new patterns, or be recombined in novel ways. This makes the Jubal lexicon not static but generative – it behaves almost like a living language, where words (or musical symbols, in this case) can spawn new meanings and phrases. For composers, this means a vast playground of forms to explore; for performers, it means each encounter with the score can be unique and creative.

 

It’s telling that Smith named the project after Jubal, a figure from the Bible (Genesis 4:21) traditionally regarded as the “inventor of music.”  By invoking Jubal, Smith signals a foundational re-invention of musical language itself. Just as the mythic Jubal was said to have originated music-making, Smith’s Jubal Project aims to reinvent how music is represented and communicated. The conceptual foundation here is one of origin and possibility: establishing a new origin point (a new notation system) from which countless musical ideas can flow. This foundation is also deeply philosophical – the use of circles and the avoidance of a single culmination point reflect a worldview in which wholeness and process take precedence over linear progress or finality. Smith summarizes the ethos succinctly: “The Jubal Project offers a new way of thinking about music, one that is rooted in the power of form and pattern.”  By focusing on fundamental forms (like the circle) and their patterns of transformation, the Jubal Notational System provides a fertile ground for musical thought to evolve in fresh directions.

Formal Graphic Language: Visual Lexicon and Aesthetic Design

Smith’s aesthetic approach in Jubal draws from the world of visual art and architecture, reflecting a multimodal design sensibility. He cites inspiration from Italian avant-garde artist Enrico Castellani, known for his explorations of dimensional surfaces, and composer Morton Feldman’s famous affinity for the slight irregularities in handmade Persian rugs.  These references are telling: Castellani’s art involves repetitive patterns with subtle three-dimensional shifts, and Feldman’s late music often features repeating motifs with gentle, unpredictable deviations. Smith “embraces the work of Enrico Castellani” in the way his notation employs repeated visual elements that create texture and depth on the page.  Likewise, he channels Feldman’s rug-inspired approach by allowing repeat patterns in the music notation to have irregular variations, preventing mechanical repetition and imbuing the visual score with a kind of organic variation. This results in a notation that is formally repetitive yet never exactly the same twice, much like a geometric pattern that is hand-drawn anew each time. The aesthetic strategy here is to balance consistency and surprise: the performer sees recurring shapes (consistency) but with evolving details (surprise), which mirrors the musical outcome—repeated gestures that never sound exactly alike.

Another key aspect of the Jubal system’s design is its embrace of multimodality in communication. Smith explicitly frames the project around “the theme of multimodality”, referring to the coexistence of multiple modes of conveying meaning (visual, textual, sonic, gestural) in a single context.  Traditional scores are mostly unimodal (visual symbols interpreted into sound), but Jubal notation is created with the understanding that modern creative work often spans several media. The score itself is a visual artwork, the performance is an audible and possibly physical experience, and the two are intertwined. In a Jubal score, images and symbols carry as much weight as written instructions, and performers might respond to the color, shape, or spatial layout of a symbol as much as they would to a dynamic marking or verbal tempo indication in a conventional score. This resonates with the 21st-century reality that “we experience the world through multiple senses and modes of communication.”  By integrating a strong visual aesthetic into the musical script, the Jubal system ensures that the act of reading music is not purely analytical (decoding pitch and rhythm), but also sensory and interpretive. It engages the performer’s visual imagination and invites a more holistic form of musical thinking, linking sight, sound, and even kinesthetic sense (as the performer imagines how to physically realize the shapes in sound).

An excerpt from Bil Smith’s “Propaganda Fly” for B♭ Trumpet, realized in the Jubal Notational System. The score is rendered as an undulating flow of shapes and circular icons rather than traditional notes. Each colored circle and waveform-like contour represents musical material or gestures for the performer to interpret. The connected dots and arcs suggest pathways or relationships between events, highlighting the system’s non-linear and multimodal design.”

 

In the example above (from Smith’s composition “Propaganda Fly”), we can see how the Jubal notation translates a piece of music into a graphic experience. Instead of a left-to-right sequence of notes on a staff, the score unfolds as a continuum of curved lines, nodes, and vividly colored circles. Time and musical structure are suggested by the horizontal sweep of the image and the connecting arcs (the grey numbered bubbles act like waypoints or structural markers), but there is no single linear path—rather, the piece appears as a network of musical ideas. The circular icons of different designs (concentric rings, radial patterns, textured disks) are spaced along a flowing black-and-white wavy line that might indicate the main thread of the trumpet’s sound. These icons correspond to motifs or sonic events, each with its own character. The performer’s task is to navigate this visual field, translating it into sound by understanding what each symbol implies (in terms of technique, timbre, pitch collection, or musical gesture). Notably, the score has an architectural quality on the page: it looks almost like a schematic or a map, with structural relationships drawn out graphically. This is a deliberate aspect of Jubal’s formal language—the score can depict musical relationships spatially (above, below, connected by curves, etc.), something traditional notation only does in a very abstract way. Through such design, Smith’s system rethinks what a score can look like and how information can be embedded in visual form. The result is not only musically instructive but also “immersive and sensual” for the performer blurring the line between score as a technical document and score as visual art.

Rethinking the Performer’s Interaction with the Score

Perhaps the most profound shift that the Jubal Notational System introduces is in the role of the performer. In classical Western notation, the performer’s job is to interpret and execute the composer’s instructions as faithfully as possible; the notation is a fixed script. In the Jubal system, by contrast, the performer becomes a kind of co-creator, navigating a score that is dynamic, open-ended, and responsive. Smith explicitly states that in this new notational vernacular, “the performer is charged with adapting patterns to fluctuating desires and contingencies”, making performance an “ongoing process.”  Rather than a one-way transmission from composer to performer, the Jubal score sets up a dialogue: the performer responds to the notated material in real time, and because the notation provides possibilities rather than absolute dictates, the performer’s choices can influence the course of the music.

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The Jubal Notational Initiative