Saturday, July 11, 2026
"The Paranormal Detective Agency's Guide To Modern Physics" for Viola
"The Paranormal Detective Agency's Guide To Modern Physics" embodies a plethora of complex musical concepts and intricate notational structures. My goal for this work, composed for the viola, is to exude a sense of otherworldly energy and a heightened sense of mystery that is both awe-inspiring and eerie.
The composition employs a highly developed notational palette that incorporates fissures, fragmentation, and semicollapsed geometric transformations, which pivot and rotate. The visual landscape of the score is both complex and multifaceted, with each element interacting in a unique and intricate manner, creating a complex and layered soundscape that is both immersive and mesmerizing.
The score is in the midst of a metamorphosis, caught in the process of becoming something else. The composer's vision is to create a piece that defies conventional music theory and notation, incorporating a multitude of unique concepts and techniques that push the boundaries notation.
As a composer, I define myself as someone in total opposition. I believe that resistance is autonomy, and that it is the raison d'etre for my existence as a composer. It is fundamental to my work and is the driving force behind my compositional endeavors.
The use of fissures and fragmentation in the score creates a sense of fragmentation and disorientation, with the performer jumping from one section of the score to another, creating a sense of chaos and disorder. The semicollapsed geometric transformations add another layer of complexity, with the notes and symbols appearing to pivot and rotate around each other in a dizzying display.
Despite its complexity, the piece is incredibly engaging and captivating, albeit it is also an extreme extension of systemization and depersonalization incorporating a range of techniques and elements that create a sense of dematerialization, a seductive effacing of architectural boundaries, and of the surfaces rendered so emphatically present that defines the viola in an abstract, extreme persona.
The discreet allusiveness gives way to the linear evocations of perspectival recession, generating the feeling of an empty space mirroring itself to infinity.
"Scant". For Tuba.
Scant exists as a manifesto of complexity. It is an embodied treatise on the ontological relationship between notation and performance, between sight and sound, and between the abstract precision of geometry and the corporeal imperfection of interpretation.
Central to the composition is a custom-designed notational font, whose cylindrical coordinate system and radial symmetry propose not just a novel method of organizing musical material but an entirely reimagined definition of musical space and gesture.
The Geometry of Sound: A Radial Grammar of Music
The score for Scant situates itself within a conceptual framework where the traditional linear temporality of Western musical notation is replaced with a circular architecture. The circle in Scant does not merely represent a recurring cycle or a return to a point of origin. Rather, it operates as a multidimensional representation of simultaneous forces...that of gesture, articulation, and timbral evolution emanating outward like ripples from an epicenter.
In this system, the circle becomes a locus for interaction between spatial and sonic dimensions. Each radial segment corresponds to a specific sonic parameter: articulation, pitch cluster density, dynamic contour, and timbral fluctuation. Unlike a Cartesian grid, which rigidly dichotomizes pitch and time, the cylindrical coordinate system accommodates a fluid interrelation of parameters, encouraging performers to think of musical gestures as rotational vectors rather than linear sequences.
A Hypothetical Definition of the Circle in Scant
In Scant, the circle is more than a geometric figure; it becomes a sonic topology, a living architecture of sound. Its symbolic definition might be imagined as follows:
The circle in Scant represents a multidimensional musical environment wherein sound, space, and time are unified as intersecting planes of motion. Each radius functions as a vector defining the trajectory of an interpretative decision, while the circumference traces the boundaries of performative potentiality.
The Elements of Radial Notation:
Radius as Vectorial Gesture: Each radius in the circle marks a pathway for the performer’s interpretative action. The length of the radius encodes the intensity or dynamic weight of a given gesture, while its angle signifies a shift in timbral focus. For instance, a radius angled toward the upper-right quadrant might indicate a transition from multiphonic textures to pure tones, while a radius angled downward suggests harmonic distortion or air resonance.
Circumferential Motion as Temporal Flux: The circle’s circumference does not delineate a single unidirectional timeline; rather, it invites the performer to navigate through overlapping layers of temporal density. Each segment of the circumference is an elastic temporal framework, within which the performer can expand, compress, or even suspend time altogether.
Radial Nodes as Intersections of Density: Specific nodes along the radii mark points of heightened activity, where articulation, pitch density, and dynamic instability converge. These nodes serve as interpretative landmarks, guiding the performer through moments of calculated tension or release.
Timbral Modulation Across Circular Arcs: Timbral transformations in Scant are encoded along concentric arcs within the circle. The closer an arc lies to the center, the more “raw” or “unrefined” the timbre; outer arcs correspond to more stabilized, harmonically resonant tones. This layering of timbral arcs allows the performer to navigate textural extremes while maintaining cohesion within the radial structure.
Cylindrical Coordinates as a Performative Challenge
The cylindrical coordinate system underlying Scant adds yet another dimension to its notational framework by incorporating the depth of sound, both literally and figuratively. Where traditional musical notation restricts itself to two-dimensional space, the cylindrical model introduces the idea of vertical depth as a metaphor for the tuba’s rich harmonic overtone series and spatial resonance.
The Performer’s Role in Navigating Cylindrical Space:
Circular Motion and Breath: The tuba, as a wind instrument, naturally lends itself to circularity through the physical act of breath. The performer’s airflow becomes analogous to the rotational motion of the circle, creating a physical resonance between the player and the notational system.
Dynamic Elevation through Depth: Depth within the cylindrical system represents not only volume and dynamic range but also the metaphorical “weight” of sound. A deeper point within the cylinder corresponds to the tuba’s lower register and its capacity for sustained, resonant tones. Conversely, shallower depths highlight quick, fleeting articulations in the higher registers.
Rotational Interpretation as Fluid Form: The performer must engage with the score’s radial symmetry by adopting a mindset of fluidity. Rather than approaching the music as a fixed series of instructions, the cylindrical coordinate system demands interpretative flexibility, encouraging the player to think in terms of dynamic, rotational motion rather than static execution.
Interplay of Circularity and Instrumentality
The tuba, with its expansive range and textural possibilities, is uniquely suited to this radial architecture. Its capability to oscillate between piercing clarity and dense harmonic undertones finds a natural parallel in the rotational layers of the score. Moreover, the instrument’s sheer physicality seems to echo the circular logic of Scant itself.
The tuba becomes a vessel through which the performer channels the score’s multidimensional energy, translating visual symbols into physical gestures, and ultimately, into sound. The decision to create a new notational font for Scant reflects an inherent understanding of this symbiosis between instrument, notation, and performer. The cylindrical system is not merely a tool for organizing musical data; it is an invitation to explore the boundaries of what an instrument can express.
Toward a New Notational Ecology
With Scant, I have crafted not merely a composition but a cartography of sonic exploration. The cylindrical coordinate system and radial symmetry redefine the relationship between notation and performance, challenging traditional notions of time, space, and gesture. The circle, as a living symbol, embodies the fluid interplay of sound and motion, inviting performers to inhabit the music as a multidimensional landscape.
Friday, July 10, 2026
The Jubal Notational Initiative: A New Lexicon for Music and Design.
The Jubal Notational Initiative: A New Lexicon for Music and Design.
Link to Full Article PDF (19 Pages)
The Jubal Notational Initiative
Bil Smith’s Jubal Notational System is a radical reimagining of musical notation, designed to expand the language available to composers and performers. Introduced in late 2022 as part of Smith’s Jubal Project, this system is “a massive new musical lexicon” at the core of which lies a single, powerful visual motif: the circle. Few projects in contemporary music notation are as ambitious – Smith’s goal is nothing less than to “change the way we think about notation and sound.” In what follows, we explore the conceptual foundations of the Jubal system, its formal graphic language, the new performer–score relationship it proposes, and the integration of metabolist (and even architectural) principles that inform its design. We will also consider how Smith’s aesthetic strategies set Jubal apart from traditional Western notation, and why this new system matters as a tool for creative exploration in today’s musical landscape.
Conceptual Foundations: Circles, Symbols, and Continuous Sound
At the heart of the Jubal Notational System is the circle – a shape rich with symbolic meaning. Smith chose the circle as the foundational element of his lexicon because of its associations with “totality, wholeness, original perfection, the infinite [and] timelessness.” In Western music notation, we’re used to seeing circles and ellipses in the form of noteheads, but here the circle is reimagined and elevated to a primary symbol that carries musical significance beyond pitch or rhythm. The circle in Jubal notation represents sound in a flexible, dynamic way, not as a fixed point on a staff, but as an evolving form. In Smith’s words, “by using circles to represent sound, The Jubal Project offers a new way of thinking about musical notation, one that is both flexible and dynamic.” Each notational gesture in the system is built around circular forms, sometimes alone and sometimes in complex nested arrangements, conveying musical information through shape, color, and spatial arrangement rather than traditional note values.
Crucially, the Jubal system is not just about one symbol but about how symbols behave and transform. Smith describes his notation as an archetype that can oscillate between different representational modes – it can function as an index, a symbol, or even a sensory prompt. In practical terms, this means a marking in a Jubal score might simultaneously indicate a concrete musical action (indexical registration), an abstract force or gesture (a “symbol of forces in flux”), and a visual cue that stimulates the performer’s interpretive imagination (sensory stimulus). Rather than prescribing a single outcome, the notation creates “a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities”– a musical space that is alive, fluid, and not oriented toward a fixed endpoint or climax. This concept aligns with contemporary ideas of open-form and process-oriented music: the score outlines a field of possibilities rather than a predetermined path.
One of the most important conceptual innovations of the Jubal Notational System is its capacity for transformation and variation. The system is designed so that musical material can be generated and regenerated in multiple forms. Smith emphasizes the “ability to yield aftereffects that empower the composer and performer, allowing for multiple transformations and variants of sound creation.” In other words, a single notated idea in Jubal language can be taken by a performer or composer and morphed into new shapes and sounds. The notation itself encourages iteration; patterns can repeat with variation, branch into new patterns, or be recombined in novel ways. This makes the Jubal lexicon not static but generative – it behaves almost like a living language, where words (or musical symbols, in this case) can spawn new meanings and phrases. For composers, this means a vast playground of forms to explore; for performers, it means each encounter with the score can be unique and creative.
It’s telling that Smith named the project after Jubal, a figure from the Bible (Genesis 4:21) traditionally regarded as the “inventor of music.” By invoking Jubal, Smith signals a foundational re-invention of musical language itself. Just as the mythic Jubal was said to have originated music-making, Smith’s Jubal Project aims to reinvent how music is represented and communicated. The conceptual foundation here is one of origin and possibility: establishing a new origin point (a new notation system) from which countless musical ideas can flow. This foundation is also deeply philosophical – the use of circles and the avoidance of a single culmination point reflect a worldview in which wholeness and process take precedence over linear progress or finality. Smith summarizes the ethos succinctly: “The Jubal Project offers a new way of thinking about music, one that is rooted in the power of form and pattern.” By focusing on fundamental forms (like the circle) and their patterns of transformation, the Jubal Notational System provides a fertile ground for musical thought to evolve in fresh directions.
Formal Graphic Language: Visual Lexicon and Aesthetic Design
Smith’s aesthetic approach in Jubal draws from the world of visual art and architecture, reflecting a multimodal design sensibility. He cites inspiration from Italian avant-garde artist Enrico Castellani, known for his explorations of dimensional surfaces, and composer Morton Feldman’s famous affinity for the slight irregularities in handmade Persian rugs. These references are telling: Castellani’s art involves repetitive patterns with subtle three-dimensional shifts, and Feldman’s late music often features repeating motifs with gentle, unpredictable deviations. Smith “embraces the work of Enrico Castellani” in the way his notation employs repeated visual elements that create texture and depth on the page. Likewise, he channels Feldman’s rug-inspired approach by allowing repeat patterns in the music notation to have irregular variations, preventing mechanical repetition and imbuing the visual score with a kind of organic variation. This results in a notation that is formally repetitive yet never exactly the same twice, much like a geometric pattern that is hand-drawn anew each time. The aesthetic strategy here is to balance consistency and surprise: the performer sees recurring shapes (consistency) but with evolving details (surprise), which mirrors the musical outcome—repeated gestures that never sound exactly alike.
Another key aspect of the Jubal system’s design is its embrace of multimodality in communication. Smith explicitly frames the project around “the theme of multimodality”, referring to the coexistence of multiple modes of conveying meaning (visual, textual, sonic, gestural) in a single context. Traditional scores are mostly unimodal (visual symbols interpreted into sound), but Jubal notation is created with the understanding that modern creative work often spans several media. The score itself is a visual artwork, the performance is an audible and possibly physical experience, and the two are intertwined. In a Jubal score, images and symbols carry as much weight as written instructions, and performers might respond to the color, shape, or spatial layout of a symbol as much as they would to a dynamic marking or verbal tempo indication in a conventional score. This resonates with the 21st-century reality that “we experience the world through multiple senses and modes of communication.” By integrating a strong visual aesthetic into the musical script, the Jubal system ensures that the act of reading music is not purely analytical (decoding pitch and rhythm), but also sensory and interpretive. It engages the performer’s visual imagination and invites a more holistic form of musical thinking, linking sight, sound, and even kinesthetic sense (as the performer imagines how to physically realize the shapes in sound).
An excerpt from Bil Smith’s “Propaganda Fly” for B♭ Trumpet, realized in the Jubal Notational System. The score is rendered as an undulating flow of shapes and circular icons rather than traditional notes. Each colored circle and waveform-like contour represents musical material or gestures for the performer to interpret. The connected dots and arcs suggest pathways or relationships between events, highlighting the system’s non-linear and multimodal design.”
In the example above (from Smith’s composition “Propaganda Fly”), we can see how the Jubal notation translates a piece of music into a graphic experience. Instead of a left-to-right sequence of notes on a staff, the score unfolds as a continuum of curved lines, nodes, and vividly colored circles. Time and musical structure are suggested by the horizontal sweep of the image and the connecting arcs (the grey numbered bubbles act like waypoints or structural markers), but there is no single linear path—rather, the piece appears as a network of musical ideas. The circular icons of different designs (concentric rings, radial patterns, textured disks) are spaced along a flowing black-and-white wavy line that might indicate the main thread of the trumpet’s sound. These icons correspond to motifs or sonic events, each with its own character. The performer’s task is to navigate this visual field, translating it into sound by understanding what each symbol implies (in terms of technique, timbre, pitch collection, or musical gesture). Notably, the score has an architectural quality on the page: it looks almost like a schematic or a map, with structural relationships drawn out graphically. This is a deliberate aspect of Jubal’s formal language—the score can depict musical relationships spatially (above, below, connected by curves, etc.), something traditional notation only does in a very abstract way. Through such design, Smith’s system rethinks what a score can look like and how information can be embedded in visual form. The result is not only musically instructive but also “immersive and sensual” for the performer blurring the line between score as a technical document and score as visual art.
Rethinking the Performer’s Interaction with the Score
Perhaps the most profound shift that the Jubal Notational System introduces is in the role of the performer. In classical Western notation, the performer’s job is to interpret and execute the composer’s instructions as faithfully as possible; the notation is a fixed script. In the Jubal system, by contrast, the performer becomes a kind of co-creator, navigating a score that is dynamic, open-ended, and responsive. Smith explicitly states that in this new notational vernacular, “the performer is charged with adapting patterns to fluctuating desires and contingencies”, making performance an “ongoing process.” Rather than a one-way transmission from composer to performer, the Jubal score sets up a dialogue: the performer responds to the notated material in real time, and because the notation provides possibilities rather than absolute dictates, the performer’s choices can influence the course of the music.
Download the Full Article to Continue to Read:
"Imaginarium Chronicles" for Oboe and Euphonium. Bil Smith Composer
"Imaginarium Chronicles"
for Oboe and Euphonium.
Bil Smith Composer
Published by LNM Editions
link to Hi-Res PDF Score
THE SCORE AS DOSSIER: ON "RECITIVUS BORKOWSKI (IN ROMANCE)" Notation, Testimony, and the Threshold State
THE SCORE AS DOSSIER: ON "RECITIVUS BORKOWSKI (IN ROMANCE)" Notation, Testimony, and the Threshold State
There is a moment, encountering the first plate of "Recitivus Borkowski (In Romance)" for solo flute, when you are not sure what kind of object you are holding. The stave is there. The notation is there, and it is ferocious: tuplets of 5, 7, 11, 13, and 19 stacked and interlocking, beams five deep, a legend of twenty extended techniques running down the left margin like a column of hieroglyphs awaiting a Rosetta stone. But the stave does not arrive first. What arrives first is the apparatus.
Document 01-4-A. Plate III of 4. A tuning duration given not as a pitch standard but as a length of time: 1h:16mn:40sec. A reference code. A day count running down the right margin, eight dates from July 2018, numbered like evidence. A photograph of a brutalist structure alone on a basalt plain, captioned with coordinates, weather, and the entry "medium: oceanic wind / basalt." A verification stamp in red. Blank lines at the foot of the page waiting for a signature and a date that may never come.
This is not a score with a cover page. This is a dossier that happens to contain music. And that inversion is the work's entire philosophy.
THE ARCHIVE IS THE INSTRUMENT
Conventional scores present themselves as origins. The composer writes, the page is the source, the performance flows downstream from it. "Recitivus Borkowski" refuses this genealogy. Every element of its framing insists that the music already happened somewhere else, and that what you are holding is the institutional record of it: a field recording transcribed, an event catalogued, a phenomenon processed by an archive that stamps, numbers, and files.
The source blocks tell us the material was captured on a SONY PCM-D100, over rain, wind at 7.3 meters per second, humidity 0.1 percent. Whether these facts are true is beside the point. Their function is grammatical. They shift the score's tense from imperative to testimonial. The page does not say: play this. The page says: this occurred, here is the record, you are now part of its chain of custody.
The performer, in this grammar, is not an executor of instructions. The performer is the next archivist. To play the piece is to verify the file.
PRECISION THAT CONFESSES ITS OWN APPROXIMATION
The notation itself operates at the outer edge of the New Complexity tradition. Tempo marks of quarter note equals 33.33 and 52.5: decimal precision that no human pulse can hold. Ratio boxes floating above the systems like theorems: 13:17(5) = 19:23(7), annotated with golden-ratio powers, phi squared against phi cubed. An irrational ratio given as phi to the fourth against root two against fifteen against five root five, with the instruction "tempo indeterminate, use internal pulse."
And then, in the colophon at the foot of the page, the confession: "all ratios approximate. all gliss a-relative. all dyps provisional."
This is the score's deepest and most honest gesture. It notates with a precision beyond execution and then states, in the same institutional voice, that the precision is approximate. This is not a contradiction. It is an accurate description of what notation has always been. Every score in history is a precise document of an approximate intention, performed approximately, heard approximately. Most scores hide this. This one files it as a note in the record.
The prime numbers matter here. The tuplet vocabulary leans on 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31: ratios that do not reduce, quantities that share no factors, durations that will never line up again once they diverge. Primes are the arithmetic of the unrepeatable. A music built on them is a music that cannot loop, cannot resolve into a common denominator, cannot come home. Which brings us to the performance note.
DO NOT RESOLVE
At the bottom of Plate III, in the space where a conventional edition would put metronome advice or a publisher's address, the score gives its only unambiguous instruction: "this movement exists in the threshold state. do not resolve."
The subtitle has been telling us this all along. In limine: on the threshold. The Latin phrase survives today mostly in legal language, where a motion in limine is decided before the trial begins, at the doorway, before the main event is permitted to occur. The piece locates itself exactly there. Before the trial. Before the arrival. At the door that is neither inside nor outside.
Everything in the work's construction serves this threshold condition. The decimal tempos that hover between countable speeds. The prime ratios that refuse common ground. The dynamics legend that redefines its own terms (pp given not as an absolute but as "soft | very soft," a range, a doorway between two adjacent states). The epigraphs that read like navigation instructions for staying lost: "and the string an edge of space." "return the compass. keep the edge."
Keep the edge. Not cross it. The piece is not a journey toward resolution that happens to be difficult. It is the deliberate sustaining of the state before resolution, engineered so that arrival is structurally unavailable. The complexity is not virtuosic display. It is threshold maintenance. Every nested tuplet is another wedge holding the door open.
THE FLUTE AS WITNESS
Why the flute? Because the flute is the instrument closest to the medium the archive claims as its source: wind. The technique legend is a taxonomy of the instrument's own threshold states: air tone, overblow, subharmonic moan, jet whistle, bisbigliando, tongue ram, the sounds that live between breath and pitch, between the player's body and the instrument's voice. The score's field-recording fiction ("medium: oceanic wind / basalt") and its technique list describe the same territory from two directions. The archive recorded wind against stone. The flutist produces wind against metal and returns it to the file.
The performer is thus asked to do something stranger than play difficult music. They are asked to impersonate a natural phenomenon on behalf of an institution, with a stamp waiting at the bottom of the page.
THE CHECKSUM AND THE ROMANCE
Plate IV closes the document with a final checksum: 00000136. A number that verifies nothing except the archive's need to verify. Beside it, a second red stamp. The notes turn quietly green for the last colophon: all ratios approximate, all pulses relative, all depths provisional. The file ends. "end of document."
And yet the title says: In Romance. It is easy to miss, and it changes everything. Beneath the dossier numbers, the accession codes, the humidity readings, the piece declares itself a romance: a form about longing, about the beloved who is approached and never possessed. The threshold state and the romantic state are the same state. Desire that resolves is desire that ends. The instruction "do not resolve" is not only a structural rule. It is the oldest rule of the love poem.
That is the philosophy of this score, finally. The bureaucratic apparatus and the impossible notation are not armor around the feeling. They are the feeling, given the only form that can sustain it indefinitely: an open file, a pending verification, a signature line left blank, a compass returned with its edge kept. The archive never closes because the romance never does.
The performer stands at the door, plays the wind, and does not go in.
Sound Morphology is an ongoing investigation into the edges of compositional thinking.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)