Regarding Certain Faces Inserted Into the Score, and the Compositional Implications Thereof

 

Regarding Certain Faces Inserted Into the Score, and the Compositional Implications Thereof

In the early stages—before the lines grew thick with non-linear debris, before the glyphs misbehaved—I began collecting faces. I don’t mean this in the romantic or forensic sense (though either would be true in certain light conditions), but as a method of extracting symbolic residue from the already-symbolized. These were not just models. They were selected persons, posed and misposed, whose captured visages could serve not only as index but as topology: the high cheekbone not as contour but as crescendo; the tight brow not as mood but as timbral event; the misaligned eye as a notational fulcrum where meaning drops out and another, less nameable thing, enters.

I chose them carefully—though "choice" is perhaps too confident a term. I sifted through endless near-people. Candidates, stand-ins, facial proxies. They failed by being too knowable. I needed the ones whose identities had already eroded. Whose faces gave away nothing except the fact of being watched. Which is to say, I sought faces with no signal but pure reception—faces as devices. Instruments of indeterminacy. Machines for the generation of compositional doubt.

Of Image as Score

The face, once captured and flattened, becomes no longer face but field. There’s a duration to a stare that cannot be transcribed, and yet it persists in the notational surface as a pressure—like a thumb left too long on sheet metal. I inserted their portraits not as illustration, but as event structure. Their eyes became clefs. Their mouths served as entry points for performative impulse. Some had names. Most didn’t. The score didn't require them. Names suggest a singularity of reference, and that’s not what this work is for.

I photographed them in silence, though not without sound. A low electrical buzzing (from the ballast or the aging lens motor). Their stillness was not peace but posed resistance. The way a subject prepares to become someone else.

Once embedded in the score, they began to behave—poorly at first, and then with more confidence. Their cheeks aligned with phrase curves. Their hairlines matched the contour of pitch blocks. Sometimes their faces had to be mutilated to make room for the music. Sometimes the music had to be rewritten to let the face breathe.

The Problem of Recognition

I never wanted them to be recognized—not by audience, not by performer, not even by themselves (should they stumble upon their inclusion in a gallery or backroom archive). To recognize is to resolve, and resolution is the enemy of sound in this language.

Let me say it plainer: I do not score likeness. I score pressure.

Each face is a mask is a mirror is a metaphor that resists. The performer's task is not to reproduce but to negotiate. How do you play a jawline? How do you translate a squint into bowing direction? These are the questions that make the piece a piece.

Regarding Influences, Or, The Other Faces in the Room

You ask, where did this begin? Who gave you permission?

Was it the high-gloss banality of the archivist-photographer, who stripped the personhood from the portrait by calibrating it to forensic light and neutral backdrop? Was it the constructed woman who could never quite locate herself across wigs, or the mythographer of light who staged reality so convincingly that the narrative bled from the image’s surface?

Yes, it was all of them. And more. Those who stitched number to voice. Those who ruptured canvas to admit the wound. Those who folded the material until it spoke another name. I learned from them all: how to withhold, how to blur, how to stage the face as field. But none of them made scores out of faces. That part, I had to invent.

The Composer as Interrogator of Expression

I do not ask the performer to interpret the face. I ask them to interrogate it. Assume it lies. Assume it’s a stand-in. Assume it’s you.

Once placed on the page, the portrait becomes instrument, becomes warning, becomes temptation. Some performers weep. Others ask if they can remove the image from the part. They say it feels like being watched by someone they failed to understand. I tell them that’s the point.

There are no instructions. Only placement. The score is not a map—it is a staging of collisions. Sound against silence. Identity against absence. Legibility against suggestion.

Mis-Identity as Methodology

Let’s talk about the mis-identified.

They proliferate in this work. Not mistakes. Not errors. But intentional slippages. The subject who was cast for her neutral expression becomes, in the layering process, a tyrant. The young man photographed in profile is mirrored and inverted until he becomes a glyph indistinguishable from an 18th-century clef. The face was never the goal. It was the event through which notation emerged.

You read the score, and the face reads you back. You bow, breathe, strike, hesitate—and the score shrinks from interpretation like a trap door. This is the structure. This is the invitation.

Toward a Lexicon of Facial Notation

There is no legend. No chart. No semiotic key that reveals how to read these faces into phonation. But there is an emerging grammar. A curvature repeated. An eye placed at 33% down the page. A mouth inscribed with hypo-neologic text—letters that almost form a command, a breath-mark, a slur.

The performer must listen to the face. Not read it. Not know it.
And in doing so, something very old occurs: the face becomes sound again.

Composing the Face: Portraiture, Identity, and the Curated Human Subject in Notational Space

 

The Notation of the Human

In my compositional practice, the portrait is not an accompaniment to the score—it is a structural and aesthetic force within it. The curated image of a human subject, particularly the face, becomes both site and symbol within the notational field. These individuals—selected, photographed, and woven into the architecture of my scores—are neither merely models nor performers. They are semantic bodies, emotional vectors, and interpretive mirrors.

Inspired by the conceptual manipulations of portraiture in the works of Thomas Ruff, Jeff Wall, and Cindy Sherman, I use the face not for identity affirmation, but for mis-identification, friction, and unstable legibility. These are faces that do not resolve—they are archetypes, codes, signals. In the visual grammar of my scores, they serve as anchors and variables, architectural glyphs through which sound is imagined, diverted, and embodied.

The Curated Subject: Casting as Compositional Act

The act of selecting the people I photograph for scores is not incidental—it is compositional in nature. Just as instrumentation must be tuned to resonance and timbre, so too must the human subject be chosen for their emotive geometry, relational opacity, or facial resistance.

I approach casting with the following criteria:

• Ambiguous expressiveness: The subject must possess a facial quality that is expressive but not overtly communicative—what Roland Barthes might call a punctum without resolution.

• Visual dissonance: I seek faces that create tension with the surrounding graphic environment, resisting assimilation into any single emotional tone.

• Embodied silence: A presence that projects inward, giving the impression that the subject is not performing for the camera, but being trapped by it.

Here, Jeff Wall’s cinematic tableaux and Sherman’s dislocated personas are critical. Like Wall, I stage “realities” with deliberate artificiality. Like Sherman, I use face and costume as instruments of semiotic collapse—where identity is disassembled and reconfigured through repetition and gesture.

The Photographic Score: Thomas Ruff and the Failure of Face

Thomas Ruff’s serial photographic portraits—technically precise, emotionally blank—form a direct visual influence on my approach to the image-score interface. Ruff’s work insists on the unspeakability of the face, despite its hyper-visibility. There is no path inward, only flatness, distance, and standardization.

In my work, this manifests as:

• Gridded arrangements of multiple faces, treated like phonemes in a larger lexicon of expression.

• Manipulated images where clarity is offset by distortion—blurs, enlargements, cuts, and overlays.

• Faces embedded into notation, where the position of an eye or mouth becomes an axis for musical architecture.

The face ceases to be representational—it becomes a topological system, a living glyph, a non-instrumental motivator of sonic decisions.

Mis-Identity and Dispersed Personhood in the Score

One of the most vital conceptual layers of this practice is the notion of mis-identity—the idea that the subject is not who they seem to be, or perhaps not “someone” at all in the conventional sense.

This is derived from Cindy Sherman’s anti-portraiture:

A figure that points to roles, tropes, and distortions rather than interiority.

Within my scores:

• The subject may be photographed in multiple lighting schemes, suggesting a passage through emotional or perceptual states.

• Fragments of the face (a chin, an ear, a wrinkle) may be extracted, abstracted, and used as graphic notation modules.

• Scores may be generated algorithmically from facial vectors—using nose-bridge angles, eye spacing, or smile curves as axes for sound-event placement.

This creates a distributed identity, where the person depicted is not fixed, but flickering across visual and auditory registers.

The Performer as Viewer: Activating the Facial Score

Once inserted into the score, the portrait alters the performer’s relationship to the notation.

It asks:

• Am I being watched?

• Is this face instructive or intrusive?

• Is this person a character or a mirror?

The presence of the curated subject in the score decentralizes traditional notation. The performer must negotiate visual empathy, symbolic abstraction, and cognitive mapping. The face becomes an interlocutor, a semantic node, or even an aural gatekeeper.

This dynamic is crucial to my aim: to create scores that are not fully legible, but emotionally magnetic. The face disorients, destabilizes, and reconditions reading as witnessing.

Identity as Notation: Toward a New Lexicon of Embodied Symbols

In this framework, identity becomes notation—not in a biographical sense, but in a morphological one. The facial structure is retooled into rhythm, density, articulation, or even instrumentation.

My process includes:

• Translating photographic metadata (exposure time, lens distortion) into timing schemas.

• Aligning facial structures to architectural templates from graphic notation history.

• Embedding microtext into the iris, the mouth line, the hairline—where the score reveals itself at a second or third glance.

This connects with my broader use of hypo-neology (described elsewhere): language fragments, too, are faces of sound—gestures toward identity that never settle into fixed meaning.

The Portrait as Sonic Catalyst

To photograph a face is to score a silence.
To embed a face into notation is to compose a silence that stares back.

My compositional practice treats the curated human subject as both glyph and ghost, material and metaphor. Their presence in the score is not illustrative, but structural—a means of rethinking how sound is provoked, framed, and performed.

By integrating portraiture into the notational field, I engage with a corporeal semiotics of sound—where identity fractures, syntax liquefies, and the face becomes the space where music is first imagine

Hypo-Neology in Compositional Practice: A Lexical Approach to Experimental Notation

In my compositional framework, hypo-neology—the creation of sub-words, proto-words, or semi-legible linguistic fragments—is not merely a poetic flourish, but a central ontological axis of the score itself. Where neology concerns the invention of entirely new words, hypo-neology engages the threshold of language, operating beneath standard meaning, at the level of gesture, impulse, and sonic residue. These lexical artifacts function less as symbols to be decoded and more as auditory fossils, embedded in the strata of the visual field.

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Lexical Residue as Sonic Prompt

Hypo-neologisms in my scores exist in a pre-semantic or post-lexical state—partially eroded, over-inscribed, looped, or mirrored. They are not intended to communicate directly in linguistic terms. Instead, they perform as notation-objects, catalyzing sonic imagination in the performer.

Rather than specifying pitch, rhythm, or articulation in traditional ways, these word-forms ask:

What does this fragment feel like when sounded?
What vocal inflection does a crumpled word demand?
What gesture is required to complete an unfinished sentence?

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The Score as Polylingual Palimpsest

Influenced by Hanne Darboven’s numerico-linguistic grids, Ed Ruscha’s textual austerity, and Tacita Dean’s archival poetics, my use of hypo-neology situates the score as a layered site—part linguistic excavation, part speculative grammar. The performer is placed in the position of a semantic archaeologist, encountering linguistic fragments whose original context has been lost or deliberately withheld.

This aligns with the visual texture of my pages, which often include:

• Typographic microstructures

• Crossed-out neologisms

• Echoic syllabic forms

• Spatialized language arranged not for reading, but for listening with the eyes

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Tactile Semantics and Performer Activation

The hypo-neologism acts as an activator—a point of engagement for the performer’s interpretive imagination. Drawing influence from Cornelius Cardew’s graphic provocations and Alberto Burri’s ruptured surfaces, the fractured word in my notation becomes sonic material, sculpted not just by voice or instrument, but by touch, breath, and interpretive risk.

These elements are often designed to be:

• Unreadable but pronounceable

• Familiar yet untranslatable

• Silent but resonant

This tension creates a field of ontological uncertainty where sound emerges not from instructions, but from lexical hauntings—from what might have been a word, a name, a direction.

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Hypo-Neology as Resistance to Semantic Closure

The hypo-neologic fragment resists the tyranny of closure. Unlike traditional notation, which fixes meaning into reproducible sound events, my use of text operates in the fugitive zone between language and noise, reading and voicing, image and utterance.

This is a deliberate political and aesthetic stance. Inspired by Enrico Castellani’s tension fields and Burri’s ruptures, I use hypo-neology to rupture the presumed transparency of the score. It is an anti-authoritarian act. A refusal of the fixed. A commitment to semantic entropy.

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The Composer as Lexical Architect

In sum, hypo-neology in my compositional approach is not a side-effect of poetic excess—it is a structural tool, a performative condition, and a methodological commitment. The invented fragment is the score’s heartbeat: unstable, intimate, and unfinished.

It invites the performer not to obey, but to co-author, to listen to the page the way one listens to ruins, archives, or tongues never fully learned.

The hypo-neologic score does not say what it means.
It becomes what you hear when you try to make it say anything at all.

My Compositional Approach: Visual Aesthetics and Morphological Sound in Notation

Introduction

My compositional approach is grounded in the interplay between visual art aesthetics and sonic morphology. Rather than treating musical scores as mere instructions, I see them as conceptual landscapes—spaces where sound and image converge, interact, and transform. This paper expands on the principles of my approach, drawing analogies with visual art, reimagining traditional notational systems, and positioning the performer as both interpreter and co-creator.

Conceptual Foundations

At the core of my compositional philosophy is a rejection of linearity and uniform interpretation. Traditional Western notation often encodes time and pitch in fixed, hierarchically structured ways. My work challenges this by embracing non-linearity, visual abstraction, textual layering, and an open-ended semiotic framework. This aligns more closely with contemporary visual art than with conventional musicology.

Non-linear Structure: Refracting Time and Narrative

Much like the fractured narratives of postmodern visual culture, my scores unfold through fragmentation, simultaneity, and multiplicity. Rather than progressing from left to right or top to bottom, they may:

• Exist in spatial clusters

• Allow for multiple entry and exit points

• Encourage repetition, recursion, or omission based on performer judgment

This reflects a philosophy of perception: time is not fixed, but experienced differently across moments and individuals. My scores invite the performer to navigate these landscapes as one would navigate a gallery installation—non-sequentially, intuitively, and responsively.

Graphic and Abstract Notation: Image as Instruction

Inspired by the works of visual artists such as Locher and Wolfgang Plöger, I incorporate abstract geometries, drawn textures, gestural markings, and photographic overlays. These symbols do not correspond to fixed pitches or durations but instead evoke sonic gestures, densities, intensities, and spatial qualities.

Examples include:

• Thick black lines indicating intense timbral focus

• Diaphanous shapes suggesting ethereal textures

• Intersecting polygons representing polyphonic intersections

Such notation resists immediate translation, requiring the performer to engage in interpretive acts that are both intuitive and analytical.

Lexical Idioms, Textual Material, and Hypo-Neology

Central to my notational language is the incorporation of textual forms: words, fragments, invented idioms, and constructed vocabularies. These serve not merely as annotations but as compositional elements with ontological weight.

• Lexical idioms function as sonic triggers or affective markers, guiding the performer through states of articulation or gesture (e.g., "fracture-breath," "spill-rest").

• Text appears in multiple typographic registers—handwritten, digital, stenciled—each encoding different semantic pressures.

• Hypo-neology, or the creation of semi-words or almost-words, opens interpretive space while resisting fixed meaning. These hypo-words are meant to be sounded mentally or verbally, offering ambiguity as an invitation to embodied cognition.

Text operates as score, score as text. The visual and verbal coalesce into a singular notational logic, extending the boundaries of music notation into the realms of poetry, concrete language, and conceptual art.

Dynamic Interaction: Performer as Co-Creator

Just as visual art is not passively consumed but actively interpreted, my scores demand an embodied, responsive interaction. The performer becomes an essential co-creator, using the visual cues and textual idioms as springboards for sonic exploration. This involves:

• Moment-to-moment decision-making

• Internalizing visual rhythm and spatial layout

• Embodying the affective state implied by the graphic and textual form

This process resembles performance art as much as it does traditional music-making. It prioritizes presence, risk, and responsiveness.

Score as Object and Space

The score, in my practice, is both an object of contemplation and a space of potentiality. It is simultaneously artwork, map, and temporal script. This triadic identity enables a rich multivalence, offering layers of meaning and interpretation that unfold over time and through performance.

Rather than encoding music in a deterministic way, the score becomes a prompt for phenomenological experience—a site where sight, sound, and word merge, where performer and material converse.

Theoretical and Artistic Influences

My approach is deeply informed by cross-disciplinary artists and thinkers:

• Hanne Darboven: for her use of textual and numerical structure as both visual rhythm and time code

• Ed Ruscha: for his deadpan use of words as image, and the semantic instability of typographic display

• Tacita Dean: for her visual poetics, erasure, and site-specific temporalities

• Cornelius Cardew: for his revolutionary graphic notation and openness to performer agency

• Enrico Castellani: for his manipulation of surface and dimensionality in spatial rhythm

• Alberto Burri: for his material ruptures and the affective properties of physical textures

These influences help situate my work within a broader intellectual and aesthetic continuum, one that spans sound, text, image, time, and materiality.

Toward a New Syntax of Listening and Reading

My compositional method seeks not to direct but to suggest; not to prescribe but to provoke. By fusing visual art aesthetics with sonic morphology and lexical experimentation, I aim to create a syntax of listening and reading that is open, dynamic, and profoundly human. In this framework, the score is not a barrier but a bridge—between disciplines, between senses, between people.

"Psymonic Ratios" for Trumpet. Bil Smith Composer

"Psymonic Ratios"

For Trumpet

2024

Score 32" X 12"

Link to Hi-Def PDF

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dLUQBKxEmBDuP2wqNG3Ad6yRO7qz_Kjm/view?usp=sharing

"Psymonic Ratios" for Trumpet emerges as an exploration extending the boundaries of traditional scorecraft into the spectral domain. Lasting a precise three minutes and twenty-four seconds, this piece not only challenges conventional expectations through its temporal specificity but also through its use of spectral notation constructs.

The foundation of "Psymonic Ratios" forges formal unity from the spectral constructs employed within the score. These constructs do not merely serve as a notation system but act as a canvas where formal unity and incongruity coexist and converse.

The performer must navigate the suggestion of perspective—an invitation to perceive depth and dimensionality, which is then subverted by the very structure that proposes it. This contradiction creates a complex spatial dynamic within the performance, where depth can be hinted at but is never fully realized, much like an optical illusion that tantalizes but never satisfies. The result is a piece that oscillates between flatness and three-dimensionality, constantly challenging the trumpet's auditory and spatial perceptions.

The irregularity of interlocking forms within the score further accentuates this effect. Unlike traditional scores, where measures and phrases often predictably interlock, "Psymonic Ratios" presents a scenario where these forms seem to connect yet remain distinctly apart. This lack of regularity not only disrupts the linear progression of the music but also enhances the overall sense of unpredictability and intrigue.

Color integration within the score adds another layer of complexity and expression. The placement of the colored strips atop the score page challenge the trumpeter to interpret sections not as isolated incidents but as parts of a continuum. This approach encourages a performance that is less about executing discrete musical events and more about weaving a coherent tapestry of sound that reflects the complex layering of colors and emotions, akin to how Richter’s strips overlay translucent colors to create depth and texture.

The inherent ambiguity of using colors instead of precise musical notation grants the trumpeter a significant degree of interpretative latitude. This latitude transforms the performer from a mere executor of predefined musical instructions to an active participant in the creative act. The trumpeter must make real-time decisions about how to translate these visual cues into sound, which demands a high degree of musical sensitivity and imagination.

The piece exudes an unashamed sense of artifice, embracing its constructed nature without pretense. This is paired with an unchecked air of exuberance that permeates the performance, a celebration of the possibilities that arise from stepping outside traditional compositional techniques. The score does not attempt to hide its synthetic qualities; rather, it flaunts them.

 

"The Kindly Machines" for Bass Clarinet

"The Kindly Machines" 

for Bass Clarinet

Bil Smith Composer

(2025)

 

Three Pages from the Score of "The Benevolent Engine Accord" for Solo Viola

Three pages from the score of "The Benevolent Engine Accord" for Solo Viola

Bil Smith Composer

2025