W.I.P.

 

"The Contrast Was Noticeable" For Baritone Sarrusophone in E Flat

Baritone Sarrusophone in E Flat

 

Paper, Model, Score: Thomas Demand’s Afterimage in My Compositional Surfaces

Thomas Demand’s pictures have followed me into the studio for years—not as images to imitate, but as a procedure to inhabit. He reconstructs a scene as a full-scale paper model, photographs the model, then removes the evidence. What remains is an image twice mediated: a photograph of a construction that stands in for an earlier photograph. That double remove—world → model → image—reconfigures how we look. We scan for joins, edges, the flatness of paper. We learn to read surface for labor.

That lesson is foundational to my scores. I also insert a built intermediary between source and outcome. Where Demand builds rooms, I build pages: hyper-notational surfaces that must be navigated rather than merely executed. The performance you hear is not a translation of instructions; it is an excavation of a constructed field.

Thomas Demand's "Control Room"

From Photograph of a Model to Model for a Score

Demand’s practice taught me to distrust directness. In my work, I stage a sequence: concept → model (visual, typographic, photographic) → notational object → performance. Portrait sessions with models, tilt-shift photography, and photo-real fragments feed the page; the page is then collaged with blocks, legends, and vectors—the “Brutalist Tablatures,” among others—that turn notation into terrain. Like Demand’s sets, these pages are not neutral carriers; they are architectures that record the choices of their making and demand new choices from readers.

The effect in both cases is similar: a viewer or performer must confront the intermediary. The work refuses to disappear into fluency.

Objecthood as Method (Not Decoration)

Demand’s dye-rich prints condense time and manual procedure into surface. I aim for an analogous condensation: metallic powders, conductive inks, thermochromic and photochromic layers, dense graphite, aluminum supports. These are not embellishments. They are operational materials that change the kinetics of reading—how light grazes a line, how a block occludes, how a legend becomes legible only at a particular angle or distance. The page controls tempo before a single sound is made.

In rehearsal this has consequences. Performers negotiate wayfinding—landmarks, corridors, cul-de-sacs—rather than counting alone. The score becomes site: not a tape to be unspooled but a place where decisions are staged and restaged.

Spatial Resistance

When notation turns spatial, it becomes political. The linear staff over-optimizes for excerptability, logistics, and product. A spatial score resists all three. It cannot be skimmed, clipped into “best bars,” or sight-read on short call. It costs rehearsal, and that cost is the point: time redirected from efficiency to attention, from throughput to co-presence.

This is where Demand’s ethic touches mine most directly. His pictures slow spectatorship by making the image slightly “wrong”—convincing yet off, familiar yet modeled. My scores slow performance by making the page thick—fields of potential that frustrate frictionless delivery. In both cases, the work’s difficulty is not punitive; it is repairing. It restores our capacity to read with care.

Instruction, Trace, Object

I’ve long been drawn to the hinge where instruction becomes object. In my practice, the score is simultaneously:

• Instruction (it can be played),

• Trace (it records a process of construction, including failures),

• Object (it holds on the wall, on a table, as a sculpture of information).

Demand’s model/photograph dynamic clarified this for me. We both use an interposed artifact to change the terms of reception. For him, the paper room reforms the photograph. For me, the constructed page reforms the performance. In both, the intermediary is generative, not ancillary.

Reading as Archaeology

Performing these works is an archaeological practice. Players read for seams: where instructions thicken, where textures contradict, where legends fork. Annotations accumulate; each realization leaves residue for the next. The work grows by stratigraphy, not by a single definitive text. Demand’s destroyed sets are gone, but their logic remains legible in the image; my earlier drafts are gone, but their logic is fossilized in the final page. We meet our audiences (and performers) at the surface where that history has been compacted.

Curatorial Notes (from the Studio Outward)

If these pages enter the gallery, I prefer they be treated as sites, not illustrations for a performance that “really matters.” Show the scores at scale, with vantage points that enable mapping—overhead tables, fold-outs, oblique sightlines that catch reflective inks. Present rehearsals, marginalia, and multiple realizations as parallel artifacts, not documentation. The point is to stage the same demand these works make in the rehearsal room: engage the intermediary.

Influence, Precisely Named

Demand didn’t give me a look to borrow; he gave me a logic to adapt:

1. Build the intermediary (model/page) that stands between source and outcome.

2. Harden process into surface (photograph/score) so that labor becomes legible.

3. Compel a new literacy in the viewer/performer—reading for joins, routes, and residues rather than for instant legibility.

That sequence continues to shape my compositions. It is why some pages appear obstinate; why blocks sit where common sense says “clear the path”; why certain legends seem too local or contingent. They are local and contingent—by design. The page is a model of a situation, not a shortcut through it.

Coda: Afterimage

I often think of Demand’s pictures as afterimages of making. My scores aspire to the same: to be notational afterimages that hold, in their complication, the memory of the processes that produced them and the performances they will provoke. If the work asks more of the reader, it is because I want the page to look back—politely, firmly—and say: the intermediary is where meaning starts.

W.I.P. August 23, 2025

 

Hypermetric Notation

 

Hypermetric Notation: The Interstitial Logic of Complexity

In the rarefied domain of contemporary new music, the advent of Hypermetric Notation marks a moment of rupture and recalibration in the relationship between composer, performer, and score. Hypothetical as its origins may be, its conceptual terrain is a labyrinth of overlapping densities, topological disjunctions, and interpretative infinities. Functioning both as a tool of precision and an apparatus for obfuscation, Hypermetric Notation embraces a methodology that privileges the interaction of multiple graphic systems, each imbued with its own semiotic weight and systemic intricacies. The result is a notational paradigm that eschews linearity in favor of dynamic polyreferentiality.

At the Edge of Representation

At its core, Hypermetric Notation operates on the premise that traditional staff-based systems are insufficient to articulate the multifaceted demands of contemporary compositional thought. What emerges is a system of representation where metric structures become spatialized, embodying a hyper-functional simultaneity that renders each notational layer autonomous yet interdependent. Metric frameworks, rather than being confined to the grid of temporal units, now expand into hypermetric planes—spatial matrices that exist within and between conventional durational hierarchies.

For example, a single hypermetric "unit" might encode not only rhythmic subdivision but also performative gestures, pitch constellations, and dynamic modulations, all mapped onto a single, multi-dimensional glyph. These glyphs—dense conglomerates of micrographic symbols—eschew simplicity in favor of exhaustive specificity, serving as hermeneutic keys to the compositional fabric. The notation itself, then, becomes a performative object, demanding not just realization but intellectual excavation.

The Performer as Decoder

Hypermetric Notation shifts the locus of interpretative agency decisively toward the performer. The performer is no longer merely a translator of composerly intent but an active participant in reconstructing the work’s latent structure. The graphic systems within Hypermetric Notation, while ostensibly prescriptive, often yield layers of ambiguity—moments of indeterminacy that resist immediate rationalization. Thus, the performer must oscillate between deciphering its algorithmic exactitude and responding intuitively to its aesthetic provocations.

Take, for instance, the inclusion of nested graphic systems: a grid overlay that maps rhythmic polyphony against a secondary system of kinetic vector lines indicating directional movement within pitch space. These overlapping systems demand a hyper-awareness of micro-temporalities and macro-gestural arcs, producing a performance that operates in simultaneous realms of technical rigor and imaginative interpretation.

Functional Density as Expressive Terrain

The density of Hypermetric Notation is not an end unto itself but a mechanism for creating expressive tension. The juxtaposition of layered notational systems, each competing for primacy, engenders a productive dissonance that mirrors the music’s inherent contradictions. The graphic surface becomes a site of conflict, where clarity and opacity vie for dominance, compelling the performer to navigate its labyrinthine architecture with both analytical precision and aesthetic intuition.

For example, the notation might juxtapose proportional rhythms encoded in fractal grids with graphic shapes whose curvature suggests interpretative phrasing. The hypermetric framework thus transcends its function as a mere representational device, becoming a medium through which the work's conceptual underpinning—its internal tensions, its dialectics of resolution and irresolution—are materially enacted.

The Syntax of the Impossible

One of the defining features of Hypermetric Notation is its deliberate courting of impossibility. Brian Ferneyhough has often spoken of notation as an "exhortation to the impossible," and Hypermetric Notation amplifies this ethos to an extreme. By encoding overlapping layers of temporality, gesture, and spatiality, it constructs a system whose full realization perpetually eludes the performer. Yet it is precisely in this elusiveness that its aesthetic potency lies. The score becomes less a set of instructions and more a speculative architecture—a framework for reimagining the act of performance as a site of negotiation, failure, and transcendence.

Hypermetric Notation as Aesthetic Object

While its primary function is to facilitate musical performance, Hypermetric Notation also asserts itself as an aesthetic object in its own right. Its graphic systems—reminiscent of architectural blueprints or data visualizations—invoke an uncanny sense of order and disorder. The hypermetric plane, with its intricate layering of grids, glyphs, and spatial trajectories, invites prolonged visual engagement, blurring the line between musical score and visual artwork. This dual identity underscores its conceptual ambition: to challenge not only how music is performed but also how it is seen and understood.

Toward a Hypermetric Aesthetic

Hypermetric Notation represents a radical rethinking of the score as a site of interaction between composer, performer, and listener. Its functional density, far from being a mere technical exercise, reflects a deeper philosophical inquiry into the nature of musical time, space, and perception. In embracing the complexities of hypermetric systems, contemporary composers assert the necessity of pushing the limits of notation, not as an exercise in virtuosity but as an exploration of music's potential to articulate the ineffable.

As the boundaries between visual and sonic art forms continue to dissolve, Hypermetric Notation stands as both a testament to and a catalyst for this convergence. Its challenges are as immense as its possibilities, demanding of its practitioners not only technical mastery but also a willingness to inhabit the interstitial spaces it creates. In doing so, it opens new pathways for musical thought—pathways that are as rigorous as they are revelatory.

Perforated Monumentalism: Notes Toward a Shattered Score: On the Notational Ontology of Bil Smith by Andrew Vecset

 

Perforated Monumentalism: Notes Toward a Shattered Score

on the notational ontology of Bil Smith Composer

“To puncture a monument is to reassign its meaning. To make it bleed, to make it breathe. To open it to air and error.”

Somewhere between the artifact and the assertion, between architecture and aphasia, lies the notational system Bil Smith refers to, provocatively and almost reluctantly, as Perforated Monumentalism. A term that resists both fixed interpretation and flippant dismissal. Like most of his titles, it functions less as a description and more as a provocation, or maybe a dare.

To witness one of Smith’s scores—particularly those found at the overlap of his graphic notations and compositional objects—is to encounter not music in the traditional sense, but the weather of music: its affective fronts, its pressure zones, its swirling disarrays of meaning, scale, and debris. What Perforated Monumentalism does is insist on the paradox that music can be both massive and absent, declared and hollowed out.

It’s a term I can’t stop turning over in my mouth: perforated—to puncture, to tear, to allow light through. And monumental—to endure, to stabilize, to cast shadows. But what happens when we perforate the monumental? When what should be a declaration is instead a ruin? When the authority of notation becomes not a command, but a wound?

The first time I held a score printed in this mode—let’s say one from the Symphora Domitorium series, whose paper seemed overburdened by the violence of its own symbols—I didn’t know how to read it. Or rather, I was aware that I couldn’t not read it, even if I couldn’t play it. The page was no longer a medium; it was a landscape. Each glyph, each splatter of ink, each architectural line eroded by hand-scratching or the ghost of a scanned archival diagram, seemed not to say something, but to refuse something.

Refusal, in Smith’s system, is not nihilism. It’s the gesture of carving space—for dissonance, for materiality, for the untranslatable. You could think of these scores as monuments that have been sabotaged from within, but not destroyed. Their perforation is not erasure, it’s permeability. It’s how meaning seeps in, sideways, out of sync.

I think of a performer—let’s call her L.—standing before one of these works, a single page rendered in cynthene, ash, wax pencil, powdered graphite, and archival resin. L. tells me she “approaches it like standing in front of something that remembers being destroyed.” I love this. It reminds me that scores, like people, carry trauma in their structure. They don’t speak it—they are it.

Perforated Monumentalism, then, is less a technique than a comportment. It invites the performer into the score not as executor, but as excavator. It asks: How do you render a thing that was designed to not quite cohere? How do you translate the hollowness of a monument without reasserting its power?

Smith’s notations—many of which feature gaping voids, surgical cuts, and images of brutalist fragments—seem to beg this question. Some scores feature facial profiles of his selected “models,” distorted through analog glitching or topographic segmentation. Others include medical diagrams, architectural site plans, or what look like exploded pharmaceutical blister packs. This is not window dressing. This is the debris field in which performance occurs.

In this, Perforated Monumentalism joins a lineage of other hybrid notational ontologies—Cardew’s graphic disobedience, Xenakis’s architectonic geometries, even Jorinde Voigt’s gestural topographies—but what sets it apart is its commitment to rupture as fidelity. To mark meaning by interrupting it.

To say that this work is beautiful feels, frankly, like a failure of language. It’s more accurate to say it is charged. The way a quiet room feels after someone has screamed. The way a statue looks when it’s been painted pink.

And this, I suspect, is the point. The monument remains—but now it leaks.

- Andrew Vecset

Reductive Scores: Subtracted Music Notation II

"Detlin's Baby" for Celeste and Bass Flute.  Bil Smith

Subtraction as Aesthetic Strategy

The allure of subtraction in artistic practice is not mere austerity. It is instead an architecture of absence—an act of clearing away in order to reveal. Within the space of musical notation, the reductive score proposes not a diminution of content but a recalibration of meaning: gestures voided, staves erased, clusters pared down to single resonances. This practice echoes a lineage of visual and conceptual artists who employed elimination as their primary act of creation, crafting works that are as much about what is not present as about what remains.

John Baldessari's "Wrong"

The Visual Arts of Elimination

Consider John Baldessari’s iconic 1960s and 1970s canvases where photographic images are overpainted with flat fields of white or punctuated with adhesive dots obscuring faces (Wrong, 1966–68; Commissioned Paintings, 1969). His method is less about addition than obliteration—an insistence that erasure itself can carry semantic charge. Similarly, Alberto Burri, with his series of combusted plastics and punctured tar (notably the Combustioni Plastiche, 1960s), reduced painting to the act of burning, removing, and excising, until the artwork’s wounds became its defining features.

Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases (Concetto spaziale, Attese, 1959–60) are equally acts of deliberate defacement, where incision replaces brushstroke, and the void becomes the essential gesture. Robert Rauschenberg went further still in his radical Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), where the removal of another artist’s hand became both critique and creation. And in the realm of more systematic reduction, Agnes Martin’s gridded fields of near-invisibility (Untitled #10, 1975) enact a near-erasure of figure, reducing painting to breath, pencil line, and silence.

Robert Rauschenberg 's  Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953),

These acts of artistic subtraction are not destructive but revelatory. By cutting, burning, erasing, or effacing, they expose strata of hidden form. They prepare the ground for understanding reductive music notation not as privation but as an alternative fullness.

Musical Notation as Reductive Act

In a similar register, reductive notation employs subtraction as its grammar. Instead of proliferating signs, it pares the score back until what remains vibrates with intensified presence. A silenced measure becomes more resonant than its sounded counterpart. A single dynamic mark, standing alone on an otherwise empty staff, becomes a monument to intensity.

This is a tradition not unfamiliar to music: Helmut Lachenmann’s Pression (1969) dismantles the cello’s traditional voice through techniques of negation; Morton Feldman’s late scores (Triadic Memories, 1981) reduce material almost to stasis, inviting the performer into the infinite depth of minute variation; Salvatore Sciarrino’s Sei Capricci (1976) enacts disappearance through whispered harmonics and vanishing gestures. In each, subtraction is not absence but excess turned inside out.

The Dialectic of Masking and Revealing

The reductive score is at once mask and aperture. What is removed frames what remains. Performers encounter not a transparent set of instructions but a visual riddle, one whose omissions are as telling as its inscriptions. Each erased line, each withdrawn note, insists on interpretive labor: the performer must inhabit the absent space as much as the notated one.

In this way, reductive notation mirrors Baldessari’s occluded faces—where the viewer cannot help but imagine the hidden countenance beneath. The performer, too, cannot help but fill the silences with speculative sound, the unwritten with imagined resonance.

Surface Depth and Latent Potential

Reduction also cultivates a peculiar form of surface depth. Just as Burri’s charred surfaces hold the violence of their making within their scorched texture, the reductive score’s thin notational trace harbors the intensity of what has been stripped away. An empty stave suggests what once might have filled it; a solitary gesture implies a constellation of possibilities now rendered invisible.

In this sense, reductive notation becomes an archaeology: a palimpsest where absence speaks as forcefully as presence. The performer is drawn into dialogue not with what is written but with what is deliberately withheld.

Toward a Poetics of Subtraction

Reductive scores, then, are not minimalist for the sake of clarity, nor ascetic by temperament. They belong to the same aesthetic genealogy as Baldessari’s obliterations, Burri’s burnings, Fontana’s incisions, and Rauschenberg’s erasure. They remind us that subtraction is not negation but transformation.

Through these scores, the composer enacts a kind of notational sleight of hand: revealing by concealing, offering resonance through silence, and delivering narrative through the gaps. The reductive score does not diminish music—it multiplies its interpretive density, drawing both performer and listener into the unstable, fertile terrain of what is missing.

"Bloated Halos" For Viola

"Bloated Halos"

For Viola

Bil Smith Composer

30" x 30"

Link to PDF

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FtwS1v_E5pF2emsej4XI6dqhOo99itup/view?usp=sharing

 

“Enclave of the Curated Pursuit” for Viola, Vibraphone and Flugelhorn

"Enclave of the Curated Pursuit"

for Viola, Vibraphone and Flugelhorn

Bil Smith Composer

2023-2024

Published by LNM Editions

20" X 10"

Link to Full Score PDF

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_zKpm_vXDbR8EOYpPW9ldquPJaQN-vlg/view?usp=sharing

 

“Monuments and Mirages: The Score as Relic, Reflection, and Remainder”

 

“Monuments and Mirages: The Score as Relic, Reflection, and Remainder”

In the shifting terrain of contemporary score-based performance, the role of the score itself—once a sovereign edifice of musical authority—has become more nomadic, unstable, and conceptually porous. 

My Ready-Made Compositions do not simply respond to this condition—they intensify it, drawing in deliberately jarring elements: the antique, the banal, and the iconographically enigmatic gazing ball. These ingredients are not stylistic gestures. They are philosophical intrusions, demanding that the performer reassess what it means to read, to reflect, to witness, and to enact.

The Score as Relic: Antiquity without Context

Antiquity, in this curatorial frame, does not enter the score as reverence or revival. It arrives fractured—unmoored from chronology. Classical statuary, inscriptions, and pseudo-epigraphic glyphs are layered into the score like found debris from a civilization only half-remembered. These elements resist function. They do not serve as ciphers to be translated; they are there to haunt. The performer, confronting these symbols, experiences an archaeological imperative—an urge not to interpret as in music, but to excavate.

The presence of antiquity invokes remainder: not history as clarity, but as ghost. The score becomes a ruin in the Benjaminian sense, in which the past flashes up in fragments—never whole, never resolved. Thus, the performer’s role is not unlike that of a forensic archaeologist attempting to reconstruct a ritual from incomplete bones and ceremonial ash. What sound could emerge from a silent sarcophagus? What gesture from a broken frieze?

The Banal Interrupts the Sacred

If antiquity brings gravitas, banality is its corroding counteragent. Product packaging, grocery lists, JPEG artifacts, amateur typography, instructional signage—these too populate the score, unapologetically. They arrive not to be mocked or ironized, but to rupture expectations. Banality is deployed as a critical decoy, a way to draw the performer’s attention to the assumed value hierarchies in reading. Why should one glyph feel “sacred” while another is dismissed as background noise?

This juxtaposition forces a collision between the revered and the discarded, between formality and detritus. The performative act becomes one of ethical navigation: what does it mean to give sonic or gestural weight to the mundane? Can the banal be exalted by the framing of a score? And if so, who holds the authority to exalt it?

In this regard, my scores function as notation-as-collage, where value is constantly in flux, and where the performer’s selections—conscious or intuitive—constitute a critique of canon, of prestige, of musical decorum. Banality is not a joke in this context; it is the terrain of truth.

The Gazing Ball: Mirror as Instrument

The most enigmatic of these inserted objects is the gazing ball—an orb that is both ornamental and oracular. Borrowed from garden kitsch, from Koonsian irony, and from 18th-century landscape design, the gazing ball’s role in the score is not symbolic alone—it is performative. Its inclusion becomes a site of self-reference, a reflection machine that implicates the performer, the audience, and the surrounding space in the act of reading.

Placed within or beside the score, the gazing ball disrupts the flatness of the page. It reflects not content but presence—the performer’s own body, distorted. The audience, too, appears within its curved logic. The gazing ball transforms the score into a three-dimensional ritual zone, one that contains the image of the performance as it happens. It is both mirror and memento, creating a feedback loop where interpretation reflects interpretation, and no act of reading remains private.

In this sense, the gazing ball is not merely visual; it is philosophical. It calls into question the ontology of observation: who is watching, and who is being watched? Who performs, and who interprets? The ball becomes a literal beholder’s narrative—not embedded in the score but refracted through it.

Imperatives in the Field

Introducing these dissonant materials—antiquity, banality, and the gazing ball—into the field of performative composition brings with it a series of imperatives:

1. Reject Notational Totality: These scores dismantle the illusion that notation can fully encode intention. They require the performer to function as a critical subject, not a conduit.

2. Affirm the Interpretive Body: Interpretation is not secondary. It is generative. These works demand not technical precision, but perceptual reckoning.

3. Reconfigure Temporality: Antiquity and banality alter time in the score—one stretching it backward, the other flattening it. The performer must navigate these collapsed temporalities, creating a new temporality through gesture and sound.

4. Accept the Score as Object: The gazing ball resists dematerialization. It insists on the objecthood of the score, on its presence as thing—not just instruction.

---

In this conceptual constellation,  Ready-Made Compositions become more than frameworks for sound. They become ritual objects, activating space, memory, materiality, and presence. Each score is not a piece to be played, but a situation to be embodied. The performer, as beholder, becomes composer anew—caught in the loop between looking and sounding, reflecting and being reflected, reading and being read.

The gaze is no longer one-way. It returns. It distorts. It implicates. It begins again.