"The Kindly Machines" for Bass Clarinet

"The Kindly Machines" 

for Bass Clarinet

Bil Smith Composer

(2025)

Theoretical and Aesthetic Considerations of “The Kindly Machines” for Bass Clarinet by Bil Smith

by Markus Birnbaum

Bil Smith’s “The Kindly Machines” operates within a discursive zone that destabilizes conventional music notation, merging material culture, semiotic density, and performative ambiguity into a single score-object. The page evokes an epistemology of fractured legibility, situated at the crossroads of conceptual art, post-structuralist theory, and contemporary composition. It does not direct the performer toward a singular sonic outcome, but instead insists upon interpretive agency and embodied exploration.

At the score’s center lies a sculptural tableau: what appears to be a photographic or rendered grid of compressed, industrially wrapped packages, each with varying sheen, opacity, and chromatic temperature. This imagery displaces the primacy of notes or staves, suggesting instead a syntax of objects. The performer is positioned as an archaeologist of material semiotics, interpreting density, contour, weight, and implied texture as sonic provocations.

Notational Philosophy

Smith’s approach reflects an explicit turn away from teleological composition toward what might be termed non-linear performative cartography. The visual system resists hierarchy.  His numbers, grids, symbols, and objects operate without a centralized logic. In this way, the score invokes the aleatoric structures of John Cage, while visually recalling the architectonic syntax of Sol LeWitt and the visual fragmentation of Mark Lombardi's diagrammatic drawings. The performance of this piece is not only musical but investigative serving as an excavation of surfaces.

Aesthetics of Refusal

This page resists the rationalism of classical modernist notation. In the tradition of Dieter Roth or Hanne Darboven, text, number, and structure are conflated and abstracted. The grid, often a symbol of order, becomes here a space of potential collapse or infinite recursion. Numbers are scattered and color-coded, detached from any clear metric function, behaving more like Deleuzean rhizomes than linear indicators.

Further, the embedded symbols (e.g., the pink silhouette, the blue 8.03, the mirrored 7.118) function less as instructions and more as residuesto imagined processes. These may allude to biochemical weights, timestamps, or even emotive instructions. Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance is apt here.  The meaning of these signs is perpetually deferred, never fixed, and always negotiated anew by the performer.

Performativity and Objecthood

The presence of wrapped forms suggests an engagement with materialism and post-object art. The performer must decode not just symbols, but objecthood itself. This is reminiscent of Thomas Hirschhorn’s bricolage installations, in which debris, commodity, and text are layered into critical density. Similarly, Smith’s score merges the banal and the cryptic, making no distinction between high concept and packaging material.

A Musical Artefact of Ambiguity

The bass clarinet becomes an instrument of friction.  It is literally grinding against the granularity of the visual field. This may call for techniques that are gestural, timbral, or even choreographic. The inclusion of expanded notation elements and pictographic suggestions de-instrumentalizes the act of performance. It echoes Fluxus sensibilities, where the distinction between performer and observer collapses, and where notation becomes performance in itself.

Conclusion

“The Kindly Machines” is not a score in the traditional sense, but an aesthetic object that demands a rethinking of sound production as a form of spatial and conceptual inquiry. In its visual logic, theoretical density, and performative provocation, it aligns with a lineage of artists, composers, and thinkers who seek to dissolve the boundary between instruction and interpretation, between language and matter, between image and sound. It is not meant to be deciphered but engaged.  To be contested, misread, sounded out.

 

Retroactive Causality in Music: When the Present Rewrites the Past

 

Music Beyond the Arrow of Time

In most Western musical traditions, time is linear. A score unfolds from left to right, measure by measure, and causality is implicit: what happens later is a consequence of what came before. Harmony resolves tension, motifs develop, themes return. Even experimental structures, whether aleatoric, minimalist, or stochastic tend to preserve a unidirectional temporal logic.

But what happens when we reject that assumption entirely?

Retroactive Causality, as a compositional principle, proposes that the present can alter the past.  That musical gestures can travel backward, not just forward. It is an aesthetic and notational rebellion against time’s traditional architecture. In this framework, what you hear now recontextualizes what you thought you heard before, creating a musical timeline that is recursive, unstable, and self-rewriting.

Conceptual Foundation: What Is Retroactive Causality?

Borrowed from theoretical physics and philosophy of time, retrocausality suggests that an event occurring in the present can affect the interpretation or structure of a previous event. In musical terms, this invites us to consider a score where:

• Later motifs reshape the meaning of earlier ones

• The conclusion rewrites the exposition

• Performance decisions at the end influence the middle, retroactively

• Past musical forms are altered not by repetition, but by reinterpretation

Retroactive causality disrupts teleological music and replaces it with a structure where time is porous, memory is mutable, and causation loops.

How Does It Work? Strategies for Composing the Temporal Loop

Retroactive Causality can manifest in a number of compositional and notational strategies:

1. Reflexive Scoring

A passage later in the piece refers directly to an earlier one but changes its meaning retroactively. For example, a lyrical phrase that initially sounded romantic is later revealed, through context or orchestration to be ironic, bitter, or tragic.

2. Temporal Overlays

The composer places earlier and later musical ideas on top of each other, forcing the listener to reinterpret the chronology as if flashbacks are playing simultaneously with a future memory.

3. Re-compositional Notation

The score includes instruction that requires the performer to return to a previous section and alter it based on what has just occurred. This can be manual (with written instructions) or algorithmic (based on random or systemically triggered cues).

4. Audiomemetic Modulation

Sound files or live electronics play back previously recorded segments of the performance with altered parameters, effectively rewriting the past through sonic manipulation.

Retrocausality as Performance Ritual

Retroactive causality is not merely a compositional device, but it reframes performance itself. The performer becomes not just an interpreter, but an agent of revision, creating a layered dialogue between past and present. Improvised or semi-improvised performances can leverage this by:

• Annotating previous sections in real time with symbolic gestures

• Adjusting earlier motifs via real-time looping with modified articulations

• Making expressive choices late in the piece that “correct” or “reveal” hidden intentions of earlier ones

The performer, in essence, becomes a time traveler reshaping the piece as they enact it.

Historical Echoes and Philosophical Implications

While the term is contemporary, echoes of retroactive causality can be found in:

• J.S. Bach’s mirror canons and recursive fugues

• Berg’s Violin Concerto, where the chorale retrospectively sanctifies the earlier dodecaphony

• Luciano Berio’s “Rendering”, where Schubert fragments are completed in ways that revise their original implications

• John Zorn’s game pieces, where present gestures dictate revisions to prior material

More radically, it aligns with post-structuralist ideas of meaning as deferred, unstable, and reconstructed in hindsight akin to Derrida’s différance or Barthes’ notion of the reader reauthoring the text.

Listening Backward

Retroactive causality offers not just a new compositional technique, but a radical reimagining of music’s relationship to time, memory, and agency. It demands new tools of notation, new strategies of performance, and a new kind of listener.  One who is willing to hear a past that keeps changing.

In a world defined by recursion, retroactive causality might be the most truthful musical structure of all. Because in the end, we never really hear the past. We only ever remember it.

"Eventual Confidence" for Solo Guitar

"Eventual Confidence" for solo guitar emerges not merely as a musical composition but as a philosophical treatise articulated through a componential system of notation. This intricate system navigates the continuum of transitional motifs, balancing between continuous flow and categorical segmentation, crafting a narrative that is both abstract and tethered to the tangible world.

It is within this nuanced balancing act that the piece finds its unique voice, inviting the performer into a realm where they become a simulateur.  At times it is a complex agent of mimicry and description.  As the  simulateur the Guitarist is tasked with navigating the liminal spaces between creation and replication, interpretation and innovation.

The simulateur, by definition, embodies mimicry, yet this mimicry is not a straightforward replication but a nuanced re-enactment that brings to life the underlying narratives and tensions within the score. In "Eventual Confidence," the guitarist is invited to inhabit a world of notation, where motifs transition fluidly yet are segmented categorically, demanding a level of engagement that transcends the physical notes. This notational system, with its emphasis on transitional motifs and categorical segmentation, requires the guitarist to not only play the music but to deeply understand and interpret the symbolic language encoded within the score.

The "performance space" for the simulateur becomes a carceral, windowless room.  It is an analogy for the constraints and freedoms of the musical text. Within this space, the guitarist must navigate the dichotomy of absence and presence, bringing to life the constitutive absence in the montage of notational elements through a dream logic of symbolization. This process involves a delicate balance between adhering to the written score and venturing into the realms of personal interpretation and symbolic representation, thereby reinforcing notational elements through a prism of individual creativity and insight.

Moreover, the simulateur engages in a subtle act of subversion, challenging the traditional norms and expectations of musical performance. Through the act of displacement and disorientation, the guitarist questions the ethics of actuality and social concern traditionally associated with musical realism. This role is inherently political, acting as a saboteur of the established social order. The guitarist, in this guise, has the power to either blend seamlessly into the fabric of the composition, their artifice going undetected, or to boldly expose the institutional underpinnings of the musical text, inviting the audience to reconsider their perceptions of music and its role in society.

The performative act transcends mere replication of the written score. Instead, it demands an active engagement with the symbolic underpinnings of the piece, where the simulateur must delve into the depths of displacement and disorientation. This process is not about finding stability within the notational landscape but about embracing the fluidity and ambiguity that the composition inherently possesses. The simulateur, in this context, becomes a saboteur of the social order embedded within the conventional understanding of musical compositions.

This act of sabotage is dualistic in nature. On one hand, the simulateur may pass unnoticed, their artifice seamlessly integrated into the fabric of the composition, leaving the underlying subversions undetected. On the other hand, they may choose to expose the institutional foundations of the composition itself, challenging the audience and the broader musical community to reevaluate their preconceptions of what music can and should be.

A Bassoon Duet

 

In this bassoon duet, the I enter into a rigorous and irreverent dialogue with the visual vocabularies of Ed Ruscha and David Carson, translating their typographic and conceptual experiments into sonic performance. This is not simply a duet in the conventional sense, but a layered performance score where the materiality of language collides with the embodied noise of double reeds.

The abundance of text across the score is not supplemental but structural. Letters are not subservient to tone.  They are tone. The graphic gestures of the score suggest a collapse of the boundary between writing and playing, between reading and listening. The composer does not employ text to instruct, describe, or annotate, but to disrupt, to sediment, to imply tempo, breath, silence, interference. This is a work that asks performers to sound language, not as speech or lyric, but as spatial and temporal force.

Echoes of Ruscha's coolly detached word paintings resonate here, particularly in the way text is presented not as narrative, but as image and form. Likewise, Carson’s deconstructed typography, fractured syntax, and layout anarchy leave their trace in the score’s refusal to align itself with any fixed interpretive grid. The pages feel more like typographic landscapes than notation with each one a site where meaning is unstable, where visual rhythm replaces linear phrasing.

The performance becomes an act of decoding and encoding simultaneously. The bassoonists must navigate not only pitch and duration, but density, opacity, fragmentation. They are readers, improvisers, graphic interpreters. What emerges is a textured field of breaths, multiphonics, slaps, whispers, exhalations. A kind of verbal music that precedes language or perhaps mourns its collapse.

In theoretical terms, the duet may be understood as a procedural palimpsest. It excavates the sedimentation of communication itself, drawing attention to the instability of signification when mediated through print, breath, and wood. The score privileges performative error, the glitch of interpretation, the body’s limitations as a meaning-making machine. It is not about playing something correctly, but about witnessing what happens when notation unmoors itself from legibility.

There are moments in the piece that feel like reading a word you've seen a thousand times only to realize you've forgotten what it means. That rupture is where this piece lives. Between comprehension and confusion. Between mark and sound. Between text and textlessness.

This duet is not so much for two bassoons as it is for two bodies grappling with the weight and residue of language...exhausted, elusive, still urgent.

As such, this work aligns with emergent models of post-notation: scores that function less as instructions and more as speculative terrains. It is an anti-score and a hyper-score, formal and disruptive, text-drenched and illegible. It is a performance of print, a composition of surfaces, a duet for breath, typography, and bodies.

CALAVIST, OPREACH, REVUNE & TRAYKE. All for Cello

 

CALAVIST, OPREACH, REVUNE & TRAYKE

All for Cello

This series of four sequential works: CALAVIST, OPREACH, REVUNE, and TRAYKE presents a maximalist convergence of semiotic density, speculative symbolism, and recombinant typographic composition. Executed with an unusual hybrid of industrial and biological media including crushed circuit boards, spider silk, bioluminescent bacteria, and magnetized iron filings, these works resist traditional narrative, instead configuring a performative visual language deeply enmeshed in political allegory, digital entropy, and linguistic disobedience. At once brutal and ornamental, the series coalesces around the titular neologisms which disrupt semantic expectation through sheer chromatic and spatial insistence.

Each work functions as a semiotic prosthesis: a surface of layered contradiction that transposes musicality into a pictorial syntax. The black staff lines and clefs evoke classical musical structure only to collapse into gestural flux, as ornamented circular glyphs (part ocular, part microbial, part algorithmic) hover above and around the letters like extralinguistic diacritics. The letters themselves, rendered in primary overlays of cyan, yellow, and red, become visual detonations, visually loud yet fundamentally unstable, as if carved from billboard semantics and shattered mid-broadcast.

Analytical Breakdown: Visual + Thematic Analysis

CALAVIST

The most frontal and confrontational of the quartet, CALAVIST uses depthless white grid-like embossing reminiscent of industrial light diffusers as a substrate. The foreground typography, stretched and shadowed in red-yellow-blue overlays, fractures into kinetic noise with embedded orbital sigils. These floating medallions resemble molecular diagrams crossbred with currency seals or neural hubs. The use of "CALAVIST" (a term with no known definition) hints at a hybrid of "calaveras" (skulls) and "activist" serves as a visual eulogy or uprising encoded in funereal exuberance.

REVUNE

Set against a mottled ochre and mauve textured field, REVUNE appears fungal or epidermal.  It presents an abstraction of organic decay or wounded plaster. The title itself oscillates between “revenue” and “revue” (economy versus spectacle) suggesting the commodification of attention. The fluid staff line undulates like a spectrograph or seismic reading, its black ink absorbing the spectacle of candy-colored medallions above and below, as if measuring the psychic residue of capitalism.

OPREACH

Rendered on a glossy blue ground suggestive of hospital light or a flattened sky, OPREACH could be read as a portmanteau of "outreach" and "preach." The work critiques institutional persuasion...evangelism, philanthropy, and algorithmic targeting through a tonal clash of sanitized environment and maximalist intrusion. The circular markers in this piece appear more diagrammatic, evoking security camera lenses or DARPA prototypes, offering the viewer a dystopian serenity in the calm of relentless data capture.

TRAYKE

The visual language of TRAYKE borrows freely from the vernacular of branded spectacle (à la Takashi Murakami) while grounding itself in the legacy of Futurist typography and Situationist détournement. The exaggerated blocky serif fonts, layered in cyan, yellow, and red, are not only typographic elements but signal-processing devices, splitting and refracting information like spectrum analyzers. The textual centrality is destabilized by the hovering lexicon of circular forms which act as semantic parasites or resonant satellites to each letterform.

The sonic role of the cello here is hardly traditional: it is drawn into a landscape that visually insists upon de-hierarchization and material co-presence. TRAYKE is not a score in the conventional sense but a signal field .  It is an acoustic mirage designed to be interpreted with equal parts forensic attention and libidinal surrender.

The use of bioluminescent bacteria and magnetized iron filings gestures toward a semi-living score, one capable of transformation, decay, and mutation. This aligns the works not with static posters but dynamic thresholds between object, notation, and organism. Spider silk, with its tensile strength and mythological connotations of weaving and fate, threads an unseen tactility through the works. Circuit boards and resin complete the alchemical interplay between the ancient and post-human.

The four works are neither purely musical nor purely visual.  They exist as performative intercessions into the crisis of legibility. CALAVIST, OPREACH, REVUNE, and TRAYKE are less about clarity than about encounter, a confrontation with the layers we must read through: language, economy, biology, interface. These pieces do not solve.  They Provoke.

"Jaegerkorpset" A Fanfare for Two Piccolo Trumpets

“Jaegerkorpset” reads like a fanfare taken apart and rebuilt as kinetic architecture. The two piccolo trumpet systems behave less as duet and more as counter-engineered apparatuses: lattices of gridlines carry swarms of micro-gestures, while black beam-clusters flare and recede like bursts of brass harmonics caught on a high-speed camera. What would traditionally announce power becomes a study in precision, breath, and risk.

The page’s long horizontal tracts suggest parade ground and firing range, but the music subverts that lineage. Curved slurs arc across modules like tensile cables, redirecting energy from straight-ahead calls into glissandi, split partials, and filigreed afterimages. Copper-toned annotations and tiny boxes act as field markers, prompting changes of attack, valve noise, timbral trills, and mutes that fracture the bright piccolo spectrum into granular color. Antiphony is structural rather than theatrical: one part often seeds an event while the other harvests its residue, creating offset shadows and Doppler-like overlaps.

For performers, the notation proposes choreography as much as sound. Breath economies, embouchure pivots, and endurance become the piece’s hidden counterpoint. For listeners, the fanfare returns as mirage: flashes of martial rhetoric appear, then dissolve into aerated striations and razor-thin unisons that feel both heroic and diagnostic.

As a visual object, the score is a lucid map of turbulence. As music, it is an ethics of control under pressure, asking the highest, most brilliant instrument to cultivate subtlety rather than volume. “Jaegerkorpset” is a fanfare that scouts rather than declares, advancing by reconnaissance, testing how far two piccolo trumpets can move before the grid gives way to flight.

Score Satellites

Around the principal field of the page of this score, metallic meshes and fragments of engineered matter appear. They are satellites of the score, covert confirmations that sound today is built with the same intelligence that builds machines. But the machine here is deconstructed. The foil, the honeycomb, the mesh pass from use to sign and from sign to use again. 

Arte povera taught us to displace the material without erasing its memory. This page extends that lesson to notation itself: the tool of control is re-employed as a terrain of contingency.

 

"PLIMPELOMIE" for Oboe

“PLIMPELOMIE,” one page from an upcoming score for oboe, advances my ongoing “sound formulary” by treating the page like a drug label and a dose chart rather than a staff alone. The six line stave with arrowheads reads as a vector table for breath, pressure, and time. Five lines measure tradition. The added line widens the clinical range and invites the performer to think in titrations rather than fixed steps. Arrows act like tapered syringes, pointing the phrase toward an endpoint where residue and after-effects still matter.

The pill image operates as both icon and prescription. Concentric rings suggest cross-sections of a capsule and also targets for embouchure aim. Each ring can be read as a register band or dynamic band, a way to center or decenter tone. The glossy pill at the top functions like a brand panel on a blister pack. It names the compound and announces its intended intensity, yet the name is invented and therefore semantically unstable. That instability is the music’s engine. Phonemes in “PLIMPELOMIE” guide tongue placement and airflow, a soft plosive followed by liquid consonants that suggest onset, swirl, and release in the reed.

Across the middle, black and white blot structures recall chromatography or Rorschach plates. They imply interactions rather than single notes. The oboist is invited to read them as contraindications and synergies: multiphonics that should not occur in isolation, fluttered tremors that alter timbral absorption, micro-glissandi that smear like solvent. The faint botanical tracings around the orbs look like excipient lists. They are the non-active materials that still shape how the active ingredient dissolves, which here means how spectral debris colors the principal pitch.

This notation proposes a performer’s pharmacovigilance. Breath becomes dosage, articulation becomes delivery route, decay becomes half-life in the room. The six line stave with arrows provides a scaffolding for precise trials, while the neologism and pill imagery insist on affect and brand, the way music is felt and remembered.

 “PLIMPELOMIE” is not a metaphor for medicine. It is a disciplined map that lets the oboist compound timbre and time into audible therapy, with evaluation occurring in the ear that listens for side effects as carefully as it listens for pitch.

 

Work In Progress

 

Dominos, Steps, Ghostskirt

“Dominos, Steps, Ghostskirt” reads as a chamber of cause and trace. The page stages a chain reaction where notational tiles topple through space, each glyph cueing the next event. Arcing slurs and red dotted connectors sketch paths of transfer, while stacked accidentals and beamed ladders propose steps that climb and buckle. The treble clefs act like wayfinding posts rather than ordinary clef changes, pinning orientation inside a terrain that behaves more like architecture than staff paper.

At left, the pale square is a negative photograph. Look closely and a woman in a skirt appears faintly, her figure ghosted over a staircase whose risers hold domino chips that ascend into the mouth of an industrial tannery. This image anchors the title. Dominos name the chain reaction. Steps name the staircase and the score’s measured ascent. Ghostskirt names the residual body that haunts the mechanism.

Center frame, a vertical strip of sprocketed film becomes a spine for time. Orbiting rings of serrated waveform suggest rotating focus, the ear circling a sound to inspect its grain. The circular gray modules and orange cap in the lower right read as resonant chambers or valves, a reminder that the page is also an instrument diagram waiting to be assembled by breath, bow, and touch.

The score treats notation as choreography. Domino logic organizes entries. Steps measure energy, not only pitch. Ghostskirt records the afterimage of motion that remains once articulation has passed. The result is a lucid paradox. Everything is diagrammed with surgical clarity, yet the performance it invites is tactile, unstable, and vividly alive.

 

 

Exhaustive Indeterminacy: Subtraction as Score, Silence as Decision

The Paradox of Too Much

Traditional musical notation aims for clarity. It transmits intent, structure, and expression from composer to performer. Even in indeterminate or aleatoric works, where chance and choice are built in, the goal is usually to open space for freedom while retaining a composed identity. But what happens when the score becomes so overloaded with choices that freedom emerges only through reduction?

Exhaustive Indeterminacy is a radical compositional approach in which every conceivable musical option, be it articulations, dynamics, rhythms, tempi, gestures are inscribed simultaneously. Each page becomes a hyperdense matrix of sonic potential. It is not a “play everything” instruction, but rather a mandate to subtract: the performer must whittle this impossibility down to a single thread. The work emerges not from what is written, but from what is removed.

The Nature of the Exhaustive Score

Imagine a page where each line contains overlapping staccato and legato markings, conflicting tempi, contradictory dynamics, and coexistent gestures: tremolo and sul ponticello and pizzicato, all stacked. It is not chaos, but a systematic completeness.  It presents as a cartographic atlas of all ways the line could be played.

In this system:

• Notation becomes a field of possibility, not instruction

• Performance is a process of curation and elimination

• The performer is positioned as editor, sculptor, and interpreter

• Each performance becomes singular—an artifact of choices and renunciations

The Subtractive Gesture: Interpretation as Erasure

Rather than choosing between options in real time, performers of Exhaustive Indeterminacy are tasked with paring down the score in rehearsal, sometimes even physically crossing out notations. This performative editing reflects:

• The aesthetics of negation, where the piece is revealed through loss

• The act of interpreting as destruction, not completion

• A confrontation with musical overload—mirroring the contemporary saturation of options in both digital and cultural spaces

The result is a performance that is irreproducible, non-transferable, and wholly contingent on a singular sequence of subtractions.

Philosophical and Artistic Precedents

While Exhaustive Indeterminacy is a speculative compositional technique, its conceptual DNA is traceable to several artistic movements:

• John Cage’s I Ching procedures opened music to chance, but Cage still curated the results. Exhaustive Indeterminacy removes even that authorial control.

• Brian Ferneyhough’s complexist notation challenges performability, but assumes a “final version.” Exhaustive Indeterminacy assumes no finality.

• Hanne Darboven and Sol LeWitt: their serialized systems map every permutation.  Exhaustive Indeterminacy shares their impulse toward taxonomic totality.

• Wabi-sabi aesthetics in Japanese philosophy: impermanence, imperfection, and the beauty of reduction.

Practical Challenges and Opportunities

For Performers

• Encourages a redefinition of virtuosity: not in execution, but in discernment

• Promotes a slow practice ethic, where time is spent not playing, but thinking

• Forces ethical decisions: which voices deserve to live?

For Audiences

• Each performance is a unique reduction, a sonic fossil of vanished potential

• Listeners experience a musical work as negative space.  What is heard is shaped by all that is absent

For Composers

• Liberates the score from fixed structure

• Encourages a new compositional humility: the work is complete only when erased

When Everything Is Possible, Meaning Emerges from Less

Exhaustive Indeterminacy is a framework for reclaiming silence, restraint, and the act of artistic choosing. It rejects performance as mere reproduction, and instead invites performers to confront the unbearable richness of musical potential. In doing so, it asks a simple but haunting question:

If everything is possible, what should be heard?

Ashes, Scores, and Surfaces: Alberto Burri’s Combustion as Compositional Logic

 

Burri at Work with his Blow Torch

Burn as Blueprint

Excerpt from the Score "Explorer, Producer, Stoic After Your Fashion"

Alberto Burri’s scorched canvases, raw with melt, rupture, and searing transformation, remain among the most radical gestures in postwar art. His use of combustion was never mere spectacle; it was a method of erasure-as-creation, a refusal of perfection, and a recasting of control. For me, Burri’s pyro-aesthetic offers not just metaphor but methodology: a model for engaging musical scores as surfaces of trauma, entropy, and structural decay.

Burri’s torched plastics, sutured burlaps, and oxidized surfaces are not postmodern disruptions...they are architectures. They enact a material semiotics in which destruction doesn’t negate form; it is form. This logic translates directly into Smith’s graphic scores and notational lexicons, where the act of combustion becomes a compositional principle, a reductionist code, and a guide for performer interpretation.

Burri’s Combustion as Structural Language

Burri introduced fire into his practice not to symbolize destruction, but to enact it as an aesthetic procedure. The cremated edge, the buckled void, and the contorted surface all became compositional tools. He did not add marks; he removed material. This negative space becomes structure.

For me, this impulse reverberates within the act of composing. Notation becomes an act of recession, a process of removing clarity, removing linearity, removing obedience to sonic prescription. Like Burri’s combusted plastic sheets (Combustione plastiche), my scores often seem wounded, torn from conventional systems.  They appear as liminal zones between control and collapse.

Excerpt from the Score "Explorer, Producer, Stoic After Your Fashion" - Plastic sheet, oil, acrylic, white ink pen, gunpowder, shale and combustion.

Translations to the Score:

• Burn as Gesture → Symbolic deletion of standard rhythmic hierarchies

• Surface deformation → Typographic slippage, layered semiotic strata

• Charred lacunae → Notational absences requiring performer invention

Albert Burri

The Score as a Residual Surface

In Burri’s combustions, what remains is not just residue, but the final image. Similarly, I treat the musical score as a residual surface, something that bears evidence of what has been subtracted. Notation becomes subtractive, ruptured, fragmented.

In several of my works, pages reveal disjointed visual fields where notation that peels away from the staves, that bleeds through vellum, that collapses in upon its own legibility. Just as Burri allowed chance and volatility to participate in his process, I engineer scores that intentionally break, melt, or deteriorate symbolically.  This invites the performer into the post-structural detritus of a system once fixed.

Alberto Burri

Reductionism as Interpretive Demarcation

Combustion is a form of radical reduction—not simplification, but essentialization. Burri’s fire flattens excess, exposes substrate, obliterates surface narrative. I apply this ethos to his compositional mechanics: in the reduction of notation, interpretive agency emerges.

A score reduced to gestures, damaged lexicons, or imploded systems demands that the performer reconstruct meaning, not through imitation but through re-imagination. This is not improvisation. It is forensic recomposition. The performer is no longer interpreting a score, but they are restoring a burned archive.

Performer Implications:

• Forced to read through absence

• Extract sonic logic from visual entropy

• Engage in aesthetic triage, not obedience

Materiality and Temporal Collapse

Burri’s works resist chronology. A burned canvas is not finished...it’s suspended in decay. My scores also operate outside temporal linearity. Circular lexicons, fragmentary symbols, and pharmacological notations function less as instructions and more as temporal anomalies—zones of dislocated time.

The burned edge in Burri is mirrored in my use of:

• Incomplete phrase architecture

• Unstable repetition motifs

• Notation that folds back onto itself

Time becomes ambiguous. Form is spatial, not narrative. The composition exists as a surface of momentary potential, awaiting activation through damage, not direction.

Burri’s Legacy as Compositional Blueprint

The significance of Burri’s influence is not iconographic—it is ontological. Fire, in Burri’s practice, is both agent and outcome. It is a technique of refusal.  It is a refusal of the ornamental, the whole, the complete.

Smith adopts this refusal in the realm of music:

• Refusal of fixed sonic interpretation

• Refusal of performative certainty

• Refusal of the sacredness of notation

In this framework, the score is no longer a set of instructions. It is a burned relic, a site of former clarity, now destabilized. It demands not that we obey it, but that we survive it.

My works reject the modernist compulsion to build in favor of deconstruction as invention. What remains are the ash, glyph, warp, fracture.  It is not ruin. It is code. It is gesture. It is notation.

And from these scorched edges, the performance begins.