Ankhrasmation: Wadada Leo Smith's Visual Language of Creative Music

 

Ankhrasmation: Wadada Leo Smith's Visual Language of Creative Music

When trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith created his first graphic score in 1967, he was not simply finding a new way to write music. He was constructing an entirely new language, one that would fundamentally reimagine the relationship between notation, performance, and creative agency.

That language, which he calls Ankhrasmation, combines ankh (an ancient Egyptian symbol meaning life force), ras (father), and ma (mother). The name itself signals the system's ambitions: to create a notational framework as fundamental as life itself, drawing on multiple cultural and spiritual traditions to establish a universal approach to creative music-making.

Over nearly six decades, Ankhrasmation has evolved from cuneiform-like symbols into vibrant visual compositions that exist simultaneously as musical scores and works of art. Smith's colorful scores are visual compositions filled with energy and mystery that illustrate the musician's vibrant conversation between improvised and formally scored music. These are not conventional instructions for performance. They are invitations to research, interpret, and create.

The Language, Not the Notation

Smith explicitly distinguishes Ankhrasmation as "a musical language as opposed to a musical notation system". This distinction is crucial. Traditional notation prescribes specifics: which pitches, which durations, which dynamics. Ankhrasmation provides parameters and possibilities, creating a framework within which musicians exercise genuine creative choice.

Smith abandoned instrumentation, meter, and choice of notes, making it a framework not so much for what to play as for how and when to play it. Rather than notes, Ankhrasmation privileges discrete moments of activity, for which he provided only general determinants: number and duration of notes, tempo, pitch, phrase length.

The scores employ a visual vocabulary of shapes, colors, lines, and symbols. The notation's signature glyph is the pennant, referred to as a velocity unit. Other elements include geometric forms, calligraphic gestures, and color fields that performers must interpret through both scientific precision and imaginative fantasy.

Color as Conceptual Territory

Color functions in Ankhrasmation not as decoration but as semantic field. The color spectrum referenced in Ankhrasmation language scores, such as yellow might be considered as a sunflower, or a banana, or a cantaloupe, or any object or idea that's imagined that can be represented by the color yellow. The color yellow can be identified scientifically by its numerical number.

This dual approach, simultaneously scientific and imaginative, characterizes the entire system. Performers are expected to research the objective properties of colors, shapes, and symbols (their wavelengths, their geometries, their cultural meanings) while also bringing personal associations and creative interpretations. The score becomes a site where empirical data meets individual imagination.

It could be referenced scientifically, according to nature or biology, or it can be referenced according to fantasy, imagination. So when all these components are connected, that guarantees the possibility of success.

The Score as Obsolete Object

Perhaps most radically, Smith asserts that the score itself becomes obsolete the moment the object has been rendered. The notation exists not as permanent instruction but as catalyst for creative action. Once the performance occurs, the score has fulfilled its purpose. Each realization generates new information that supersedes the written page.

This temporality inverts conventional relationships between composition and performance. In traditional practice, the score remains authoritative, the standard against which performances are measured. In Ankhrasmation, the performance becomes authoritative, generating knowledge that the score could only suggest.

Individual Sound as Collective Practice

What unifies all of Wadada Leo Smith's projects is what also makes them so different from each other: Smith's commitment to every musician having an individual sound. This philosophical position has practical implications for how Ankhrasmation functions.

The scores demand that performers bring their complete musical personalities to the work. There is no subordination of individual voice to ensemble blend, no requirement that musicians suppress their distinctive approaches in service of unified sound. Instead, Smith describes the performance as a community, a family of people from different cultures, different backgrounds, with different pieces of knowledge who collectively, not knowing what knowledge the other person has, put their knowledge into the performance space.

This creates music characterized by what might be called productive heterogeneity. Individual voices remain distinct, operating in dialogue rather than fusion, creating collective sound through the interaction of genuinely different approaches rather than the subordination of difference to uniformity.

Visual Art and Musical Instruction

Smith's scores are considered works of art and have been exhibited at UCLA's Hammer Museum, The Museum of Rhythm, Museum Sztuki in Łódź, Poland, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and the Kalamazoo Institute Art Museum. This dual status as both musical instruction and visual art is not incidental to Ankhrasmation but constitutive of it.

The scores exist visually before they exist sonically. Some are defined by large blocks of color and bold singular shapes, either geometric or calligraphic in nature. Others resemble a schematic for what could be a fourth law of thermodynamics. Their visual impact is immediate and powerful, independent of any eventual sonic realization.

This visual primacy means that looking at an Ankhrasmation score is itself a form of encounter with the work, not merely preparation for the "real" experience of performance. The scores circulate in galleries and museums, reaching audiences who may never hear them performed, functioning as complete aesthetic objects in their own right.

Precision and Openness

The relationship between precision and interpretive freedom in Ankhrasmation resists easy summary. While the language is extremely precise in terms of the relationship between discrete musical events, performers are invited to research the meaning of the various symbols and colors.

The precision concerns structure, relationships, and parameters. The openness concerns content, interpretation, and realization. A score might specify exactly how many sound events occur and their temporal relationships while leaving the specific pitches, timbres, and articulations to the performer's discretion.

This combination creates music that is simultaneously tightly organized and radically open, rigorously structured and freely improvised. The apparent contradiction resolves in practice, where performers navigate the score's specificity while exercising genuine creative choice within the established framework.

Historical Context and Evolution

Smith developed Ankhrasmation in the late 1960s as a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in Chicago, alongside figures like Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Leroy Jenkins. His first visual score, "The Bell," premiered on saxophonist Anthony Braxton's influential 1968 album 3 Compositions of New Jazz.

Over subsequent decades, the language has evolved considerably. Three sets of scores represent three different stages of Smith's evolution in his Ankhrasmation Language: the complete twenty-two panels of iEacigmei (1971); five never-before exhibited panels from Luminous Axis (2002), and three panels from Kosmic Music.

Early scores retained more elements of traditional notation, incorporating standard staff lines and rhythmic values alongside graphic symbols. Later scores have moved increasingly toward pure visual language, eliminating traditional notation entirely in favor of color fields, geometric shapes, and symbolic glyphs.

Implications for Contemporary Practice

Ankhrasmation offers a model for how notation can function in creative music contexts where improvisation and composition exist not as opposites but as interrelated practices. The system acknowledges that skilled improvisers bring knowledge, technique, and creative vision that should be honored rather than constrained by overly prescriptive notation.

At the same time, it demonstrates that "open" notation need not mean vague or unstructured. Ankhrasmation's rigor lies in its precise articulation of relationships, durations, and structural parameters, even as it leaves crucial elements to performer discretion.

The language also models how notation might engage multiple sensory and cognitive modes simultaneously. Performers approach Ankhrasmation scores through visual perception, symbolic interpretation, scientific research, and imaginative association. This multifaceted engagement produces performances richer than any single interpretive mode could generate.

The Cosmology of Sound

Smith's work has been described as a cosmology and a spiritual meditation about creation in the grand intergalactic sense. This characterization captures something essential about Ankhrasmation's ambitions. The system does not simply provide a more flexible way to write music. It articulates a vision of how creative music-making might function as a model for collective human activity more broadly.

In Ankhrasmation performances, musicians from different backgrounds bring distinct knowledge to shared creative space, negotiating difference through sound rather than subordinating it to predetermined outcomes. This process models a form of collaboration that preserves individual agency while generating collective work, that honors diversity while creating coherence.

The scores themselves, with their layered references to Egyptian, Ethiopian, and universal symbols, enact a kind of cultural synthesis that refuses hierarchy. Ancient and modern, scientific and spiritual, precise and open: these apparent oppositions coexist in Ankhrasmation's visual and conceptual space.

Conclusion: Language Still Evolving

Now in his eighties, Smith continues developing Ankhrasmation, creating new scores that push the language in unexpected directions. The system remains alive, evolving, responsive to new creative challenges and contexts.

This ongoing evolution is itself consistent with Ankhrasmation's foundational principles. A living language must change, must incorporate new information, must remain open to transformation. The scores are not fixed monuments but active proposals, invitations to future musicians to bring their own knowledge, imagination, and creativity to the work of making sound.

Ankhrasmation stands as one of the most sustained and sophisticated attempts to reimagine musical notation for creative music contexts. It demonstrates that precision and openness need not contradict, that individual voice and collective music-making can coexist, and that scores can function simultaneously as visual art, structural framework, and invitation to creative research.

The language continues to speak, in colors and shapes and symbols, calling future performers to bring their whole selves to the act of making music together.