Language as Object: The Sculptural Letterform in Composition

 

Language as Object: The Sculptural Letterform in Composition

"The moment a word appears on the page, its sound detaches and its body begins to act. Not as symbol—but as structure."

In the corpus of my compositional oeuvre, language no longer serves meaning in a linguistic sense. It is not instructive, explanatory, or even illustrative. Instead, I render language as object extracting words from their semantic utility and repositioning them as topological forms, spatial interventions, and performative materialities. This shift marks a decisive ontological turn in contemporary notation: away from meaning, toward presence.

My scores do not use text merely as annotation or auxiliary gesture. Rather, they leverage typography as a site of sculptural density where letterforms bear weight equal to pitches, dynamics, or timbral vectors. To read a score is not to be guided; it is to confront a typographic architecture that resists semantic legibility while asserting material fact.

Consider my "Circular Notational Systems" or pharmacologically annotated diagrams found throughout Sound Morphology. In these works, isolated textual elements such as "VIBRATE," "VOID," "ENDOCYTIC," and "RETRACT" occupy space not as symbols but as performative masses, floating amid vortexes of color and rotational grids. Each word exists not as instruction, but as spatial objecthood, inviting activation, resistance, or passive proximity. The performer must orbit these textual bodies, never sure whether to sound them, avoid them, or use them as temporal anchors.

This ideology bears deep kinship with the typographic aesthetics of Ed Ruscha, wherein the word becomes a visual object flattened, shadowed, silkscreened, but emotionally suspended. For me, however, the page becomes not a site of contemplation, but a performative terrain. Words don’t rest, they protrude. The stenciled glyph, the italicized pharmaceutical, the fractured imperative all function as notation by occupation.

The concept of “letterform as sculpture” emerges most clearly in my use of materialized language: burnished metallic type, Xerox-transfer glyphs, three-dimensional printed text forms, and layered text that visually interrupts staves, curves, and other sonic gestures. Typography here is not a channel for meaning; it is a force field. One might recall Agostino Bonalumi’s extroflected surfaces: pressure made visible. So too are my words: text under tension.

Bonalumi inspired notational element

In works like WET/Words.Events.Text scores or the Crater Series for soprano voice, linguistic units are deployed as collision events. The words refuse to flow. They behave as tonal obstructions, sculptural barriers that ask not to be read, but to be negotiated. This notion destabilizes the performer’s relation to the score, demanding a choreography of proximity, angle, and pressure akin to a site-specific installation. The page becomes a habitat, a textual architecture whose meaning is not deciphered but inhabited.

It is not accidental that many of these scores mimic medical diagrams, regulatory documents, or psycho-pharmaceutical data sheets. These are not metaphors, bute bureaucratic typologies repurposed into musical cartographies. In them, language is no longer expressive but procedural, imposed, and ultimately aestheticized. And yet, in that neutralized body of language, something unsettling happens: it twitches with sonic potential.

This is where my projects intersect most radically with current modes of conceptual notational practice: I do not score music; I score text with all its density, ambiguity, and brutal architectural form.

Words become sonic fossils, embedded in a compositional terrain of contradictions. They are not to be read or even performed, necessarily. They are to be encountered. As forms. As volumes. As aural topographies with the mass of monuments.