Glossary of Post-Conceptual Terms for Contemporary Composition & Intermedia Practice
Destructural Narratology
noun
A critical and creative strategy that dismantles conventional narrative forms in favor of fragmented, non-linear, or recursive structures. It rejects plot hierarchies and fixed sequencing, enabling open-ended or rhizomatic realizations. In musical or performative contexts, it challenges continuity and causality, emphasizing rupture, entropy, or unstable agency.
→ See also: anti-narrative, indeterminacy, rhizomatic form.
Hypo-Atomism
noun
A compositional and notational approach that works beneath the level of traditional musical atoms (notes, beats, intervals), engaging with micro-gestures, timbral impulses, and pre-symbolic fragments. Hypo-atomism avoids discrete events in favor of proto-musical textures typically expressed through graphic or gestural scores where notation operates as implication rather than instruction.
→ Contrast with: pointillism, granular synthesis (as metaphor).
Post-Notation
noun
An umbrella term for notational practices that operate beyond the conventions of Western staff notation. Post-notation includes graphic scores, spatial diagrams, algorithmic instructions, visual-poetic systems, and non-visual (e.g., tactile or conceptual) directives. These scores prioritize process, interpretation, and context over fixed content.
→ Related: performative notation, meta-score, open form.
Pharmacoform
noun
A speculative or aestheticized delivery mechanism for a conceptual "dose" often modeled after pharmaceutical forms (capsule, tablet, vapor, patch), but used metaphorically or sculpturally in compositional or exhibition contexts. Pharmacoforms carry meaning not just in what they deliver (sound, scent, text), but in how the form itself encodes ritual, regulation, or affective experience.
→ Coined in speculative pharmaco-aesthetics and biodesign.
Semantic Drift (in Score-Based Work)
noun
The gradual displacement or mutation of a symbol’s meaning as it travels across time, media, or interpretive acts. In post-conceptual music, semantic drift allows notational elements to act as semi-stable carriers open to reinterpretation, distortion, or recombination. Often used intentionally in modular scores, iterative works, or collaborative installations.
→ See also: score erosion, interpretive entropy.
Inscriptive Field
noun
The total visual-textual space of a score, including marks, margins, non-verbal cues, and absences. An inscriptive field functions as a performance ecology rather than a directive object. In post-conceptual practice, attention is paid not just to the notation but to the material, topological, and atmospheric qualities of the field.
→ Related: paratext, score as object, field-based composition.
Meta-Score
noun
A score that describes or generates other scores. It may take the form of instructions, rule sets, conditions, or algorithms that define the parameters for score creation. Meta-scores operate at a structural level and often produce different outputs per iteration. They function as compositional frameworks rather than finished works.
→ Associated with generative systems, procedural music, and AI-informed practices.
Sonic Ficta
noun
Borrowed from the medieval term musica ficta, this post-conceptual term refers to sonic or performative content that is not notated but implied often existing between interpretation and invention. Sonic ficta plays with expectation and insinuation, inviting the performer to interpolate gestures not explicitly present in the score.
→ Related to: implied voicing, interpretive invention, ghost notation.
Paranoiac Reading (of Score)
noun
A mode of score interpretation in which the performer assumes hidden codes, misdirections, or double meanings within the notational system often drawing from surrealist or psychoanalytic frameworks. This reading strategy encourages non-literal, affective, or symbolic interpretation of scores.
→ Inspired by Salvador Dalí’s “paranoiac-critical method.”
Archive-as-Performance
noun
The practice of treating archival material (texts, sketches, past scores, data, failed ideas) as active compositional matter. In this approach, the archive is not static, but performative. It becomes a site of iteration, remix, or reanimation. Often used in posthumous collaborations, re-scoring, or durational installations.
→ Related: living archive, curatorial composition, memory-based notation.
Temporal Scaffold
noun
A structural framework within which time is suggested but not dictated. A temporal scaffold may include proportional spacing, visual pacing, or environmental triggers rather than metrical cues. It provides enough shape to orient performance without determining rhythmic behavior.
→ Often found in spatial scores, durational installations, or time-adaptive works.
Gesture Archive
noun
A collection of non-notated or semi-notated micro-actions {sonic, visual, or embodied} that function as a reservoir for improvisation or re-composition. A gesture archive may appear in a score as a legend, index, or rotating palette, and often grows or mutates with each performance.
→ Related to embodied notation, modular vocabularies.
Negative Score
noun
A score defined by what it omits (i.e., silence, void, erasure, or restriction). A negative score might be a redacted document, an instruction to avoid certain actions, or a field marked only by absence. These works rely on inferred structure, tension, or paradox.
→ Echoes conceptual art’s use of negation as content.
Rhizomatic Form
noun
A non-hierarchical, non-linear structure in which elements are linked through multiplicity rather than sequence. Borrowed from Deleuze & Guattari, rhizomatic scores allow for multiple entry points, rearrangements, and relationships without fixed origin or resolution.
→ Frequently used in modular, improvisational, or digital works.
Parametric Notation
noun
A system in which musical parameters (pitch, duration, timbre, dynamics, etc.) are represented independently, often through visual encoding (e.g., color, shape, opacity). Performers interpret intersecting parameters holistically, rather than from a single unified symbol.
→ Used in spectral, electronic, or graphic notation systems.
Post-Legible Notation
noun
A visual score that prioritizes aesthetic density, abstraction, or affective texture over literal readability. Often exists at the edge of legibility, but not entirely symbolic, not entirely graphic. These scores resist decoding, instead generating atmosphere or sensation.
→ Example: blurred glyphs, layered text, noise-as-notation.
Interpretive Overfit
noun
The phenomenon in which a performer or ensemble reads too precisely into an ambiguous or open score reducing its multiplicity by anchoring it in overly deterministic choices. Often results in flattened outcomes that miss the conceptual or improvisational intent.
→ Warning against over-rationalizing indeterminacy.
Hypernotational Field
noun
A dense, multidimensional plane of symbols, fragments, and spectral data where notation exceeds legibility and enters saturation. In a hypernotational field, semiotic overload becomes the medium where performers do not read the score, they navigate it.
→ Think of notation as environmental immersion, not instruction.
Auto-Liquefaction
noun
The built-in tendency of a compositional structure to collapse or dissolve under the weight of its own logic. Auto-liquefying scores may start with formal clarity but rapidly become unstable deteriorating via entropy, contradiction, or recursion.
→ Similar to “planned failure,” but encoded in the score’s design.
Noetic Reverb
noun
The echo effect of speculative meaning that lingers around a score or compositional gesture even when that gesture is inaudible, invisible, or unrealized. Noetic reverb is how the idea of a sound continues to shape performance long after its formal absence.
→ The score becomes a site of conceptual resonance, not just instruction.
Non-Euclidean Score
noun
A score whose temporal and spatial logics are warped, folded, or topologically disobedient. These scores may operate in curved time, irrational proportions, or impossible geometries. Navigation is nonlinear and may loop or contradict.
→ Inspired by spatial computing, deep mathematics, and speculative architecture.
Occluded Lexicon
noun
A vocabulary or symbol set embedded in a score that is deliberately obscured, private, or incomplete functioning more as ritual or myth than as transmission. Its purpose is not to be decoded, but to construct an atmosphere of uncertainty, invitation, or intimacy.
→ Language becomes residue, not instruction.
Infrasonic Grammar
noun
A compositional language built from below-threshold, sub-perceptual gestures notated through compression, scale reduction, or spectral ghosting. These scores prioritize tactile, vibrational, or speculative listening, rather than sonic clarity.
→ Typicaly rendered through body, space, or installation rather than through sound itself.
Signal Ruin
noun
A technique or aesthetic state where a once-coherent notational system decays into corrupted signals — glitches, compression artifacts, illegible layers. A form of digital entropy that celebrates the breakdown of symbolic authority.
→ The score is not read ; it is excavated.
Spectral Refusal
noun
A compositional stance or tactic wherein the work resists being sounded existing instead as a potential, a threat, or an afterimage. Spectral refusal involves withholding resolution, denying climax, or making itself conditionally unperformable.
→ Similar to poetic negation or deferred presence.
Recursive Illegibility
noun
A notational condition in which attempts at interpretation only generate deeper uncertainty. Each decoding opens new contradictions. The performer enters a loop where meaning becomes a moving target — the score performs them as much as they perform it.
→ Inspired by autopoiesis, paradox logic, and asemic writing.
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