Notation as Habitat. Further Thoughts on the Score as Cognitive Ecology

 

The Score as Cognitive Ecology: Toward a Morphogenetic Notation

In this latest evolution of The Score as Cognitive Ecology, we are presented with a radical diagram of multimodal interplay, where the musical score no longer exists as a symbolic intermediary between composer and performer, but emerges as a symbiotic territory.  It becomes an assemblage in which iconography, linguistic fragments, affective texture, and spatial logic converge into a form of aural cartography. This image is not a “score” in any reductive sense. It is a score-environment. One that performs, iterates, encodes, and anticipates action through visual, sculptural, and symbolic means.

Topography of Intention: Sonic Syntax and Notational Rupture

The dominant notational material scattered throughout the composition as architectonic black staves and explosive pitch clusters echoes the experimental typographies of composers such as Ferneyhough, Nono, and Lachenmann. However, here, traditional syntax is fractured and dispersed, creating rhizomatic constellations of micro-events. There is no singular path of reading; rather, the reader is pulled into a multidirectional swarm of interpretations.

The highly complex note clusters, overlapping accidentals, and disruptive measure blocks suggest an excess of sonic potentiality, inviting the performer not to render a static outcome but to navigate densities. The score resists literal reading.  It becomes cognitive choreography, demanding from the interpreter a mode of attunement more akin to ecological tracking than mechanical decoding.

Gene Therapies as Sonic Characters: Branding the Score

The list of hypothetical proprietary gene therapy names (e.g., Veltryon, Zynevera, Myristra) scrawled down the left-hand edge of the score operate as semantic intrusions invoking a biotechnology imaginary within the musical ecosystem. These neologisms function not only as linguistic counterpoints but also as characters or motifs, anthropomorphized through their alignment with various sculptural busts and material clusters. Their presence blurs the disciplinary boundaries between branding, genomic poetics, and performative identity.

Each “name” corresponds spatially to one of the sculptural busts, establishing an intra-semantic relationship between visual form and linguistic signal. Just as a performer interprets notation, so too must the viewer decode the interface between word, image, and symbol, reifying the names into gestural avatars of sonic intent.

The Busts as Personified Timbres

The series of deity busts, rendered in various chromatic sheens and materials, act as textural interrupts and mnemonic anchors. Their orientation, materiality (e.g., mirror-polished aluminum, rusticated stone), and embedded symbols (e.g., fusilli, baroque curls, comic book speech bubbles) gesture toward timbral identities.

These are not static icons. They perform roles analogous to orchestral instruments or timbre-generating modules, wherein their color and visual affect signal distinct sonic zones or behaviors. The mirrored bust titled PEZZO! comes clad in the aesthetic vernacular of Jeff Koons and pulp design invoking theatricality, artificiality, and perhaps a critique of commodified expression. In contrast, the biologically textured, amorphous white clusters connote organic growth, mutation, or decay; all visual metaphors for spectral morphologies in sound.

Sonic Germs: Cellular Clusters and Emergent Form

The bulbous, semi-biological spheres that populate the central register of the score recall cellular assemblies—evoking embryogenesis, gene editing, or microbial ecologies. These elements draw attention to the idea of form in flux—a key principle in both developmental biology and contemporary composition. In this context, they can be read as timbral seeds, units of sonic potential whose relationships shift depending on spatial proximity, performer gesture, or conceptual framing.

Just as gene therapies modify expression at the cellular level, these score elements suggest that sound itself is encoded, modifiable, and subject to performative engineering. They signal a non-linear temporality, one in which sound emerges through process rather than prescription.

Notation as Performance Ecology

Extending the metaphor of the score as cognitive ecology, this composition functions not as a map to follow, but as a habitat of interpretation. The traditional boundaries between composer, performer, score, and audience become porous, redefined by affect, spatial reasoning, material metaphor, and linguistic residue.

The composer, in this ecology, is less a dictator of form and more a curator of affordances offering a landscape filled with glyphs, symbols, textures, and triggers. The performer becomes a forager of sense, tasked with reading across media, across disciplines, across time.

Toward an Ontogeny of the Score

In conclusion, this piece serves as a critical evolution in score-making: a notation of becoming. The work does not illustrate a composition as it is the composition, existing as an interface for sonic speculation, a poetic field through which sound, image, and cognition interact.

It demands a post-disciplinary mode of attention, one that resists finality and embraces emergent meaning.  It projects a condition that echoes the fluid ontology of both sound and biology in the 21st century.

Just as the gene is not a blueprint but a network of probabilistic interactions, so too is this score not a directive but a living ecology, one in which sound is grown, not drawn.