Assembling The Elements of My Scores

 

Assembling The Elements of My Scores

By Bil Smith

My scores are not merely instructions for music; they are synthetic objects.  They are assemblages of sound, symbol, architecture, and language. They function as performative systems: visual environments saturated with musical, poetic, and semiotic potential. Their construction is not procedural, but material and linguistic, developed through acts of layering, collision, translation, and provocation.

To describe how these scores are put together is to describe an evolving practice of sonic image-making where visual syntax, textual interference, and invented language operate together as compositional matter. In these works, notation is not a code to be deciphered but a living diagram.  They become a  space of negotiation, indeterminacy, and active authorship.

From Pre-Notation to Visual Grammar

The process begins in a pre-notational state.  This occurs before staves, measures, or rhythm where gesture, form, and conceptual impulse guide the creation of visual fields. I often begin with what I call vectorial provocations: drawings, splines, structural schematics, or 3D renderings that behave like sonic catalysts.

These gestures generate a visual grammar, what I call a a proto-score. It is not yet musical in the conventional sense, but it contains the kinetic and affective energy of music. These early constructions consist of curved architectures, broken staves, mechanical arms.  They become the armature upon which notational and textual systems are later anchored.

The Syntactic Scaffold: Building a Score in Layers

Once these vectorial elements are in place, I begin to construct what I call the syntactic scaffold. This is where musical notation, spatial logic, and typographic systems intersect. I embed traditional notational marks such as clefs, accidentals, and rhythmic fragments into distorted staves that collapse linear time and expand spatialized logic.

At this stage, the score functions more like a site than a system. Performers do not read left to right but traverse.  They drift, navigate, dig, orbit. Temporal relationships are encoded through density, contrast, layering, and spatial juxtaposition, not metronomic measure.

This scaffold is also where I integrate non-musical systems.  This may include medical imagery, circuitry, and architectural blueprints which behave like parasitic notations, challenging the performer to read outside of familiarity.

Language and Neologism: Text as Sonic Intervention

Integral to my process is the integration of language and invented text. I treat language not as annotation, but as a compositional material that transforms into a sonic-textual event that generates rhythm, texture, and conceptual dissonance. Words appear not to clarify, but to complicate, confuse, and reorient.

I often use:

• All-caps imperatives ("FREEZE!", "REFREEZE!", "SPILL!") as performative commands or false directives

• Fictional acronyms (e.g., "SZEOC") that echo corporate or technical language without yielding transparency

• Neologisms ("TICTRAP," "AURALAND," "LIMOLELLEOPELLI")—synthetic words that operate as naming mechanisms without fixed meaning, inviting the performer to speculate their purpose

These textual artifacts introduce a linguistic entropy into the score. They create zones of language noise, where the semantics collapse into phonetics, and the performer must decide whether to speak, vocalize, ignore, or sonify the text.

This use of invented language is part of a broader project: to queer the idea of legibility, to dislocate the authority of notation, and to allow language itself to become musical...a visual and sonic irritant embedded in the score’s architecture.

Symbolic Density and Iconographic Assemblage

The next phase involves iconographic integration: the placement of symbolic objects, signs, and rendered textures that introduce non-instructional meaning into the score. These may include:

• Classical sculptures juxtaposed with circuit paths

• Industrial icons adjacent to notated glissandi

• Film strips winding through note clusters

• Diagrams of unknown systems bordering musical instructions

These are not narrative symbols, but they are visual agents that destabilize the reading experience, suggesting metaphor, critique, or satire without prescribing a single interpretation.

Here, the visual density serves a performative purpose. It creates zones of friction, asking the performer to navigate complexity rather than decode clarity. Notation becomes relational and atmospheric, not absolute.

Temporal Distortion and Sonic Topography

Despite their architectural stillness, these scores are deeply concerned with time.  I am not referring to not measured time, but experienced time, disrupted time, and synthetic duration.

I achieve this through:

• Graphic compression (tight clusters of micro-notation) to suggest intensification

• Visual rupture (large gaps, overlapping layers, jarring shifts) to imply interruption or spillover

• Repeated neologisms or visual motifs (e.g., “SPILL” appearing amid expanding glyphs) to reinforce time-as-affect, time-as-collapse

These operations replace tempo with topology. The performer doesn't just “play through” time, but they encounter it, shaped by the score’s material architecture and textual disruptions.

Final Assembly and Performativity

The final stage of building the score is not print layout or PDF formatting.   It is the construction of a total encounter. The image must operate on multiple levels:

• As a standalone visual artifact

• As a performative script

• As a semiotic labyrinth

• As a linguistic playground

• As a conceptual critique of notation itself

The performer becomes the final assembler who is tasked not with executing instructions, but with translating, embodying, resisting, and resonating the score’s material.

It is in this moment between score and body, between symbol and gesture that the assemblage becomes alive.

 Toward a Post-Notational Poetics

How are these scores put together? Through graphic architecture, linguistic invention, and semiotic layering. Through the deliberate use of interference, opacity, rupture, and fiction. Through the belief that a score is not a map to be followed but a site to be performed.  One to be read as an object, not as a message.

By integrating text, language, and neologism alongside notation, I aim to produce scores that think.  These scores  refuse transparency, reward curiosity, and demand a creative reading of the world and its signs.

These works are not merely visual music. They are epistemological performances, designed to be as rich in silence as they are in sound, as much about reading and misreading as about playing.

In a world where meaning is always mediated, I want the score to be the place where that mediation is made visible, audible, and unstable.