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

 

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.

“Totality in the Moment”: How Rauschenberg’s Combines Shape My Art {Scores}

 

“Totality in the Moment”: How Rauschenberg’s Combines Shape My Scores

Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines are often described as neither painting nor sculpture but both.  They are hybrid works that import the world into the work: stuffed birds and Coca-Cola crates, clipped headlines and wallpaper, doors and windows. They don’t sit politely on a wall; they enter the viewer’s space as visual puzzles that must be navigated. That operating logic has been a decisive influence on how I make scores.

Rauschenberg famously said, “Art has everything to do with life, but it has nothing to do with Art.” In the Combines, life arrives unfiltered; materials keep their identities even as they are re-situated. No hierarchy, only co-presence. My scores, likewise, are not built to disappear into performance. They are combines of notation being assemblages where drawing, photography, typography, maps, and found graphic systems are made co-present so that performers must read life (its textures, contradictions, indices) to make sound.

From Object to Operating System

When I look at the Combines, I don’t see a style to emulate; I see an operating system:

• Import, don’t imitate. Rauschenberg pulls the world in as-is. In my pages, ephemera (tickets, forms, barcodes), fragments of architectural plans, halftone fields, and color calibrations are imported as readable strata, not background décor.

• Keep the seams visible. Staples, sutures, overlaps in a Combine announce their making. I keep joins legible: overlays, perforations, taped edges, registration marks. The score shows how it came to be, and performers inherit those traces as cues.

• Let things stay themselves. A blanket remains a blanket; a newspaper remains a newspaper. In my notation, a photo’s halftone remains a halftone (and might map to tremolando grain), a ledger grid remains a grid (a metric lattice), a tear remains a silence aperture. Integration without erasure.

This is the core transfer from Combine to score: assemblage as instruction. The page is not a neutral carrier; it does something.

Non-Hierarchy as Reading Practice

Rauschenberg admired how Leonardo’s Annunciation gives “the tree, the rock,  and the Virgin  the same importance at the same time.” That non-hierarchy is not an anecdote for me; it’s a reading practice. In traditional notation, time and value are ranked left-to-right, top-to-bottom, and forte above piano. The Combine teaches another lens: multiple systems can assert at once, and meaning is produced by navigation, not obedience.

Concretely, I design pages where:

• A legend (taxonomy of marks, colors, textures) shares the same visual weight as the field it governs like a Broodthaers-style museum label that is itself part of the work.

• Serial modules (a Hirst logic) make tiny anomalies consequential where a single inverted unit becomes a hinge for form.

• Occlusions (a Baldessari logic) withhold information now to create time inside the page; lifting an overlay is a dramaturgical act, not a clerical one.

• Subtractions (a Burri logic) cut literal holes; absence becomes an event, a window of rest or exposure for a solo voice.

The result is a page that refuses to become invisible. It is a space to be negotiated as an ethics of ensemble agency, not a logistics of compliance.

Sound by Way of Things (After Cage)

Rauschenberg’s friendship with John Cage matters here. The Combines cultivate a post-hierarchical attention akin to Cage’s invitation to hear everything. In my scores, everyday visual systems become sound operators:

• Halftone density → noise spectra (denser dots, denser air/bow noise).

• Barcode / ruler → micro-meter or pitch ladders (granular intonation, measured glissandi).

• Fabric weave → multiphonics/split tones (cross-grain = interference).

• Shipping labels & stamps → percussive attacks (rubber-stamp accents, time-signature pivots).

• Perforations / die-cuts → silence windows (literal apertures indicating cut-sound).

• Tape strips → glissando rails (angle determines rate; color determines instrument family).

These mappings aren’t metaphors; they’re interfaces. Material brings behavior with it. The Combine’s “thingness” becomes a performer’s do-ability.

The Score as Stage Décor (Cunningham in Mind)

Rauschenberg’s work with Merce Cunningham reminds me that a page can stage bodies, not just notes. I print some scores at furniture scale (fold-outs, tables, walkable maps) so rehearsal becomes choreography: players rotate, cluster, travel between panels. The page gives blocking; sound follows from spatial relation, not only from symbolic command. The Combine’s invasion of viewer space becomes the score’s invasion of performer space.

Procedures I Borrow (and Name Out Loud)

From the studio, five Combine-derived procedures recur:

1. Grafting — attaching incongruent systems edge-to-edge (an isobar map meets a ledger).
   Musically: hand-offs between incompatible tempi or tunings; the “seam” is the form.

2. Indexing — leaving measurement artifacts visible (crop marks, color bars, registration crosses).
   Musically: cue points and alignment nodes for ensemble consensus; the “printer’s marks” become rehearsal anchors.

3. Occluding — masking with colored fields or vellum.
   Musically: delayed revelation; the timing of a lift equals an entrance cue.

4. Scarring — cuts, burns, abrasion.
   Musically: scored silences, breath drains, bow pressure spikes; damage as timbre.

5. Enumerating — numbering modules like shelves.
   Musically: arrays for non-linear form; performers choose routes under stated constraints.

These are humble, mechanical moves and the very ones Rauschenberg keeps visible. Their power is exactly in their explicitness.

Against the Disappearing Score

Abstract Expressionism wanted the absolute; Rauschenberg countered with the contingent. In music, the analog is a score designed to vanish in execution. I’m not interested in that. I want the page to persist as object, as trace, as parallel artwork. This isn’t “Art for Art,” to borrow Rauschenberg’s provocation; it’s art with life. The world stays in the room: the smell of paper, the drag of a vellum overlay, the glare off metallic ink that alters legibility and, therefore, time.

What Performers Tell Me (and Teach Me Back)

Ensembles learn these pages as terrains:

• They triangulate position by landmarks rather than count through bars.

• Leadership becomes local and temporary; authority migrates to whoever stands nearest the next decision.

• Rehearsal turns into research where paths are tested, not merely repeated.

• Mark-ups become archaeology for the next realization; every performance leaves residue that thickens the piece.

This is the Combine ethos adapted to sound: the work accumulates meaning through use.

Archiving the Mess (with Care)

Because these scores are composite objects, I keep two mirrors:

• A human ledger—a concise legend, examples, and “field notes” from past realizations.

• A machine ledger—layered vector files and canonical legends so archives (and, yes, machines) can parse the grammar without flattening the art.

Rauschenberg’s totality is temporal. To keep it alive, the record must be transparent enough to travel and stubborn enough to resist being emptied of its resistance.

Why the Combines Still Matter to Music

Rauschenberg did not add “real life” to painting in order to shock; he added it to change how we look. My scores pull everyday visual systems into notation to change how we listen. They are puzzles, not to frustrate, but to reallocate attention, from counting to wayfinding, from obedience to collaboration, from absolute to contingent. The goal, like his, is “totality in the moment”: a page where everything that matters is present at once and must be negotiated in real time.

The Combine showed that the world fits in the work without being corrected first. That remains the most radical, useful lesson I know for score making. Bring the world in. Keep the seams. Let each element stay itself. Then give it to performers and let life do the rest.