W.I.P.

 

W.I.P. August 23, 2025

 

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

"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

 

“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.

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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.

Morphotism: A Treatise on Form, Drift, and the Aesthetics of Compositional Transformation

Morphotism: A Treatise on Form, Drift, and the Aesthetics of Transformation

Morphotism is not a style, but a sustained inquiry into the behavior of form. It is a practice grounded in the instability of visual identity and the plasticity of image matter, wherein a single origin-image becomes the site of exhaustive transformation — not to discover a truth within it, but to exhaust its outer limits through procedural reworking.

Morphotism is the aesthetics of drift, a commitment to perpetual reformation, where each iteration reflects not a deviation, but an articulation — a contour of thought expressed through the malleability of visual matter.

Ontology of the Image

At its core, Morphotism presupposes that no image is fixed. An image is not a representation; it is a territory, a terrain through which light, memory, and perception are routed. Under Morphotism, an image is treated not as a singular object but as a morphological condition — a field in flux.

This condition is subject to:

• Chromatic reconstitution (alterations in tone and color profile)
• Spatial displacements (rotations, croppings, or refocalizations)
• Juxtapositional transgressions (overlay, mirroring, reversal)
• Textural remediations (filters, grain, clarity, distortion)

Thus, the image becomes a body in continuous self-reconfiguration — a visual organism.

Methodology

Morphotism manifests as a serial discipline, producing sets or suites of images. Each is derived from one visual source, yet rendered distinct by methodical variation. These variations are not ornamental but ontological recalibrations — each version asserts a slightly different worldview, a marginally shifted claim about the original’s identity.

This may take form in:

• A 64-page sequence where each page is a chromatic evolution of the same photograph
• A diptych wherein the original and the reoriented inhabit tension
• A grid series in which slight morphological deviations amplify across the composition
• A photobook where sequencing is the aesthetic engine, rather than singular capture

Morphotism is not repetition. It is iterative excess — a maximalist logic applied to minimalist sources.

Philosophical Grounding

Morphotism is aligned with post-structuralist thought, particularly where meaning is deferred, unstable, or constructed through difference. It owes debt to:

• Jacques Derrida’s différance (the endless deferral of fixed meaning)
• Michel Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge (visual artifacts as contingent, historical)
• Gilles Deleuze’s difference and repetition (multiplicity as generative force)

Where modernism sought the essential image, Morphotism seeks the relational image — its meaning always shaped by its neighbors, its position in sequence, its treatment history.

Anti-Finality

A key tenet of Morphotism is resistance to closure. The series is never truly complete. Even the most exhaustive treatment retains within it the ghost of further transformation. The final form is provisional — an aesthetic pause rather than a conclusion.

This aligns Morphotism with a generative ethos, one that encourages reproduction, reinterpretation, and even computational continuation. It is a visual strategy built not for iconicity, but for intellectual promiscuity — a willingness to be shaped anew.

Applications and Future Inquiry

While rooted in the photographic, Morphotism can be expanded into:

• Generative AI image sequences
• Printmaking re-inkings of a single plate
• Video frames treated as morphic intervals
• Archival reinterpretation (where existing images are subjected to morphotic recovery)

In this sense, Morphotism is medium-agnostic — it is not bound by material, only by method and intent.

To practice Morphotism is to engage in material introspection — not of the self, but of the image itself. It is to treat form not as an endpoint, but as a relay of becoming. Each variation is not a derivative, but an instantiation. Each shift, a question.

Morphotism does not ask, “What is the image?”

It asks, “How far can an image be re-formed before it loses its name?”

And in that question, it finds its power.

Morphotism and the Musical Score

If Morphotism treats the image as a mutable territory, then the musical score becomes its acoustic analogue: a field of structured potential, awaiting both interpretation and transformation.

In this frame, the musical score is not a static artifact. It is a visual syntax of sound, subject to the same morphotic processes as a photographic image — chromatically, spatially, and temporally mutable. Under Morphotism, a score is no longer the authoritative origin of a sonic event, but a generative artifact, open to deviation, drift, and serial manipulation.

The Morphotized Score: Visual and Sonic Layers

Each iteration of the score — each “page” in a series — represents a treatment, not a revision. These treatments may include:

• Graphic reorientation: rotation, inversion, mirroring of staves, noteheads, or articulations
• Color treatment: assigning chromatic shifts to different rhythmic cells, registers, or dynamics (implying emotional timbre)
• Notational erosion: removing elements to introduce silence, openness, or interpretive ambiguity
• Spatial distortion: stretching, compressing, or reorganizing notation to reimagine rhythmic or harmonic structures
• Image-score hybridization: incorporating photographs, diagrams, or marks that abstract or overlay traditional notation

Thus, the score becomes a morphotic field, where each page is not a repetition, but a divergent instance — a sonic potential with altered genetic instructions.

Morphotism as a Notational Philosophy

Unlike traditional variation form in music (theme & variations), Morphotism does not begin with a theme but with a form-substrate. That is: the score as a visual system of instruction, subject to visual and procedural subversion.

The question is not: How do I vary this melody?

But: What happens to this score when I re-encode its grammar?

It is a philosophy of notation as mutable language, inviting performers, readers, and listeners into a field of interpretive instability.

Precedents and Philosophical Kinships

Morphotism finds resonance in:

• Brian Ferneyhough’s notational density, where legibility approaches visual abstraction
• Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise, which uses graphic notation to open sonic possibility
• Jani Christou’s Epicycle and Anestis Logothetis’ symbolic systems
• John Cage’s Fontana Mix and *Atlas Eclipticalis, where form is mapped to celestial or chance-based systems
• The tradition of eye music, where visual elements of scores (e.g., Baude Cordier’s heart-shaped notation) imply interpretive framing

But Morphotism departs from these by committing to seriality — a sequence of shifting forms from a single origin, as in photography.

The Performance of Morphotism

A morphotic score is not meant to be mastered, but encountered. Each page becomes a new ecology of sound, interpreted not in isolation but in relation to its sequence.

The performer becomes a translator of transformations, enacting drift across the series:

• One page may sound formal and metered
• The next: amorphous and gestural
• Another: sparse, barely legible — a map of silence

The score unfolds as a temporal polyptych, where the audience witnesses not a theme, but a process, not a piece, but a becoming.

Toward a Morphotic Compositional Practice

To compose morphotically is to:

• Begin with a fixed visual-musical object
• Subject it to rule-based transformations
• Sequence the results into a processual scorebook
• Accept that no singular version is the “work”, but that the trajectory of change is the work

This opens the score to curation, performance variation, and perpetual reinvention — echoing the logic of the image-series in visual Morphotism.

The Score as Morphotic Archive

In Morphotism, the musical score becomes an archive of its own reformation. Each page is an index of a choice, a deviation, a reframing. Like the image set, the score sequence reveals not a singular vision, but a landscape of near-versions — a speculative cartography of sound.

Just as the eye follows the photographic drift, the ear begins to sense a sonic morphology — a vibration not of melody alone, but of notation’s becoming.

The result is not a “piece” but a score-object that maps the space between intention and mutation.

"Sissikoppaniat" for Guitar

In examining the score for "Sissikoppaniat" for Guitar, we are immediately confronted with a compositional landscape that refuses to align itself with conventional norms of musical notation. This refusal is neither arbitrary nor experimental for its own sake; rather, it reflects a broader philosophical engagement with the nature of spatial representation in musical composition. The score, in essence, presents what we might call dual contingencies of spatial figuration, where form, mass, and volume take precedence over the more traditional reliance on line and plane. This departure from convention is not superficial but speaks to deeper theoretical questions about the structure of music and its representation in notational form.

What "Sissikoppaniat" asks us to consider, then, is a tension between disparate forms of notational representation. To understand this, we must begin by recognizing that musical notation, like law, is a system of signs that mediates between abstract ideas and real-world phenomena—in this case, sound. Traditionally, the line and plane have served as the dominant conceptual tools in notating music, allowing composers to delineate pitch and rhythm in a temporally linear format. "Sissikoppaniat" challenges this orthodoxy by privileging surface depth and mass, creating a new system where musical ideas are expressed through a kind of volumetric notation. The score becomes an object of inquiry in its own right, not merely a medium for sound, but a structure that demands engagement with spatial depth.

The critical innovation here lies in how the score transcends the tectonic, moving beyond the traditional "architecture" of musical notation, which relies on a fixed relationship between symbols and the sounds they are meant to produce. Instead, "Sissikoppaniat" becomes ever more focused on form, inviting us to think about the relationship between representation and interpretation in a much more fluid way. This is akin to the way constitutions or legal frameworks may be understood: not as rigid structures that dictate precise outcomes, but as living documents that require active interpretation to remain meaningful in different contexts.

The compositional methodology of "Sissikoppaniat" provides further insight into this complexity. The use of distortions, curvature, and gradients in the notation reflects an ongoing negotiation with the score’s irregular visual landscape. These elements are not decorative; they are essential to maintaining the score’s legibility in the face of the intricate relationships it embodies. Here, we might draw a parallel with the concept of judicial interpretation in law, where textual ambiguity or complexity is not an obstacle to clarity but a fundamental part of how we understand and apply the law. In much the same way, the distortions in "Sissikoppaniat" invite the performer to engage with the score as an evolving, interpretive challenge, where legibility and clarity are achieved not through simplification but through interaction with complexity.

This brings us to the heart of the matter: the relationship between form and function in "Sissikoppaniat". In privileging form over function, the score aligns itself with a broader philosophical tradition that sees the representation of ideas as an active process rather than a passive reflection of an underlying reality. The tension between disparate notational forms becomes a site of exploration, much like the tension in legal theory between textualism and purposivism—between those who would insist on a strict adherence to formal rules and those who seek to understand the broader purpose behind those rules. "Sissikoppaniat" positions itself firmly within the latter camp, suggesting that musical meaning arises not from adherence to notational convention but from an engaged dialogue with the score’s form.

In conclusion, the score for "Sissikoppaniat" challenges us to rethink our relationship with musical notation in profound ways. It presents a dual contingency of spatial figuration, where the focus is on form, mass, and volume rather than line and plane, and where the tensions between different notational systems are not problems to be solved but opportunities for deeper engagement. This compositional methodology, rooted in distortions, curvature, and gradients, maintains the legibility of the score in the face of its complex interrelations, much like the ongoing work of legal interpretation maintains the clarity of the law amidst its inherent ambiguities. "Sissikoppaniat" is, in this sense, not just a piece of music but a philosophical exploration of the possibilities of representation, one that transcends the tectonic to become ever more focused on form.

" The Conjunction of Her Thighs..." Bil Smith Composer.

SCORE: 

"THE CONJUNCTION OF HER THIGHS WITH THE TITANIUM TIPPED INSTRUMENT HEADS"  SCORED FOR VIOLIN, VIOLA DE GAMBA, B FLAT CORNET, SINGLE VOICE (MEZZO SOPRANO), AND VIBRAPHONE

"Conjunction..." is a combinatorial composition of reproducible metaphors, that is a chronology of computational experiments on topics related to music, speech and language. These experiments may involve the analysis of previously published corpus data, or of experiment specific sonorities that are reconciled for the occasion. 

Other relevant referential navigational tools include computational simulations, implementations of diagnostic techniques or task scoring methods, methodological tutorials, and reviews of relevant sponsors.

Although "Conjunction" is centered in musical etymology, we aim to contextualize performance from the widest possible range of disciplines that engage music, speech and language experimentally, from electrical engineering and computer science to education, psychology, biology, and speech pathology. 

In this interdisciplinary context, combinatorial methodology is especially useful in helping experimental and analytical techniques to cross over from one sub-field to another.

Legends Carved Into the Void's Mantle for Flute

 

LEGENDS CARVED INTO THE VOID’S MANTLE

6 Pages. 22” X 17”; 55.9 X 43.2 cm.

Replexium®, Pencil, Color Ink, Doped Graphene, Tyvek®, Oracet®, Infrared Charcoal, VIANT®, Turmeric Paste, Moss Pulp on Hahnemühle Torchon

Edition of 5 with 2 APs

W.I.P.

 

"ATLAS OF THE FLOODLINE IN THE JUNGLE:" A Speculative Compositional Lexicon

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"ATLAS OF THE FLOODLINE IN THE JUNGLE"

A Speculative Compositional Lexicon

The ATLAS OF THE FLOODLINE IN THE JUNGLE is less a notational system than a pre-architectural mythology. A subtextual cartography rendered in diagrams, it reimagines the musical score not as a neutral transmitter of intention, but as an ideological precinct—part reliquary, part hypothesis. It is both machine and mood, a floodplain of expressive debris awaiting performers who are not merely interpreters but settlers, archeologists, and insurgents.

Developed specifically to interface with the Conn (12A) Wonder Parlor Pocket Cornet—an instrument of ornamental brevity and compact bravura—the lexicon forges a language that acknowledges the instrument's historic sentimentality while deploying it as a node of tactical subversion. The score becomes a form of compressed infrastructure: not just notating what is to be played, but why, where, and in what speculative environmental condition it should occur.

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The Lexicon as Construct: Vertical Grammar, Diluvial Syntax

At the heart of the ATLAS is a set of archetypes—call them glyphs, indices, or pressure points—that do not merely point to pitch or time, but represent topographic tensions: surge, saturation, stagnation, and exposure. Each symbol is a miniature edifice, a spatialized ideogram that presumes a certain climatology. Notation is treated here not as an artifact of sound, but of weather. In this regard, we have not merely a system of signs, but a hydraulic epistemology—notation as the map of forces, as an inventory of subsurface sediment.

Lines bleed. Margins flood. Boundaries are traced not with clefs and meters, but with sedimentations of musical precedent and imaginary collapse. One archetype—a series of concentric circles punctuated by jagged verticals—signals “post-sonic liquefaction,” a moment in the score when the performer must enact not a note but the idea of structural failure under acoustic strain. This is not a rupture; it is a cultivated deterioration.

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The Jungle as Pretext, The Cornet as Mythology

To speak of the “jungle” in the title is not to evoke a geography but a semiotic thicket—a deliberately overgrown referential field in which signals tangle and drown. The ATLAS does not aim to clarify the jungle but to honor its resistance to monocultural order. The Cornet, small and deceptively playful, is weaponized as a proxy for the explorer's voice: sometimes declaring, other times camouflaging, or simply mirroring the lush, wet disorientation of the surrounding system.

Rather than using traditional dynamics or articulations, performers are instructed through geotemporal directives: play as if beneath a canopy in monsoon; intonate with the weight of sunken architecture; emit tone as if interrupting fungal growth. These are not metaphors, but procedural truths of the new lexicon.

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Towards the Future -Isms: Adaptive Musics for Discontinuous Times

The ATLAS does not end with the Cornet. It anticipates future -isms—musical, architectural, and ecological—that it will seed rather than merely predict.

Fossilist Expressionism might arise, where compositions simulate the slow pressure of mineral time upon musical form. Here, the ATLAS’s layered strata of notation could guide performers in mimicking deep compression: phrases fold inward, intervals erode into drone sediment.

Post-Urban Echoism could leverage the ATLAS as a blueprint for soundwalks in decommissioned spaces. With its glyphs serving as ritualized sonifications of forgotten civic plans, the work extends into the spatial politics of acoustic memory—abandoned metros, flooded libraries, brutalist relics used as natural reverb chambers.

Hydrographic Serialism, too, might develop: a compositional mode based entirely on tidal and weather-based cycles, scored with symbols derived from the ATLAS’s floodline index. This -ism would require performers to use NOAA data or speculative climate models to generate musical action.

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The Performance as Cartographic Incursion

A performance of a work under the ATLAS rubric is a ritual incursion, a temporary claim staked in the interpretive wilderness. The cornetist must approach the score as an urbanist might a half-sunken city—charting submerged transit lines, listening for reverberations in collapsed concrete halls. Practice becomes excavation, and the page a palimpsest of submerged strategies. There is no singular reading. The ATLAS demands residency in the material. It’s a dwelling score.

Each score is site-specific by default: not to place, but to climate, contour, tension. The player’s breath is not merely air—it is pressurized atmosphere, pushing against the ecology of notation, altering weather patterns on the page.

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Concluding Ruins: The Score as Memorial and Prototype

To engage with the ATLAS OF THE FLOODLINE IN THE JUNGLE is to situate oneself in a speculative history that is already decomposing. It is not a map of what music has been, nor what it might be. It is a score of losses, forecasts, and interstitial domains.

The Conn Wonder Parlor Pocket Cornet becomes the instrument of choice not because of its tradition, but because of its ability to sound like memory—compressed, evaporating, almost nostalgic for futures it never had.

In the end, this is not a system. It is a weather model.

Not a lexicon, but a field guide.

Not notation, but territory.