What Tools Do I Use to Create My Scores?
A musical score is, at its most basic, a set of instructions. But what if the page itself were also a participant? What if the materials that constitute the score, not just what is drawn on it but what it is made of and what has been done to its surface, were themselves carrying meaning, generating behavior, and asking something of the person who encounters them?
This is the question that has driven my practice for the better part of a decade. What follows is an account of how I actually make these works: the digital infrastructure, the physical materials, and the thinking that holds them together.
The Digital Foundation
My digital workflow is built around the Adobe Creative Suite, but the suite functions less as a production environment and more as a set of distinct instruments, each with its own role.
Illustrator is where the glyph families and proportional grids live. It is the most architectural of the tools, responsible for the structural logic of the page and the relationships between notational elements. Photoshop handles what I think of as the surface weather: the abrasions, the accumulated micro-histories, the sense that a page has been through something before the performer ever picks it up. Substance 3D Designer, Stager, and Dimension allow me to model notational elements with genuine spatial depth, to cast shadows from one symbol onto another, and to proof how a mark reads when it begins to behave like a three-dimensional object rather than a flat inscription. InDesign assembles the final folios and maintains structural legibility across multiple pages. Fontographer is close at hand for the letterforms I cannot find anywhere else.
The Astute Manager plug-ins extend the work in two directions simultaneously, toward precision and toward chance, which is not a contradiction but a productive tension that I rely on. Topaz Gigapixel enters the process at the finishing stage, when a plate needs to scale to wall dimensions without surrendering its grain and surface particularity.
To this toolkit I have added Dassault Systemes' CATIA, the aerospace and industrial design platform that most people associate with the engineering of aircraft and complex mechanical systems. In my practice, CATIA provides something that no conventional design application offers: the ability to model notational elements as genuine engineered forms, to subject them to structural and spatial logic borrowed from industrial design, and to bring a kind of technical rigor to the construction of visual forms that would otherwise remain purely intuitive. When a notational symbol in one of my scores appears to have structural weight, to occupy space in a way that feels load-bearing rather than decorative, CATIA is often where that quality was developed.
The Physical Materials
The analog bench is where the work becomes irreversible, and irreversibility is part of the point.
Conventional oils, pastels, and pencils go down first, establishing the initial surface relationship between mark and substrate. Then I bring in materials that operate by different rules.
Mica flakes and molten salt, used in works such as Luxtrapathy, Capitalocene and the Logicade, introduce a crystalline, mineral quality to the surface, something that catches light differently at different angles and refuses to settle into a single resolved appearance. Conductive ink and xylene appear in the same work, the conductive ink carrying an implicit charge that is not merely metaphorical, and the xylene as a solvent that opens the surface to further intervention. Colored pencil worked into metallic spray foam creates a layered density that reads differently at different distances, intimate at close range, almost architectural from across a room.
Liquid metal under a wash of gilding adhesive, as seen in The Criminality on the Staircase, produces a surface that is simultaneously precious and industrial, the gilding adhesive holding and also slightly obscuring what lies beneath. In the same work, thermochromic metallic paint and photochromic metallic paint introduce genuine instability to the finished object: the surface changes with light and warmth, which means the score is not a fixed thing but a responsive one, different in a cold room than in a warm one, different under natural light than under artificial.
Methylene chloride, when applied as a sculpting agent, attacks the substrate in controlled ways, creating depressions, textures, and surface events that could not be achieved by addition alone. The page is not simply built up but excavated.
Other works introduce entirely different material logics. Sky and Dye incorporates carbon fiber, PLA filament, copper tubing shavings, graphene-based superlattice, and black phosphorus alongside more conventional oils and inks, all on Hahnemühle Deckle Edge paper. These are not randomly assembled materials. Carbon fiber carries associations of engineered lightness and tensile strength. Black phosphorus is a two-dimensional semiconductor. Graphene-based superlattice is a material of extraordinary electronic properties. Their presence in a musical score is a statement about what kinds of knowledge and what kinds of material culture belong together on the same surface.
Interiority uses liquid europium, a rare earth element with luminescent properties, alongside burst charge powder, neem oil, and piezoelectric foam, materials that respond to electrical pressure, to biological chemistry, to force. Reality Bends to the Whim incorporates azurite, rhodium, and graphene oxide alongside more conventional graphite and pencil, the azurite a pigment with a history stretching back to ancient Egypt, the rhodium one of the rarest and most reflective metals on earth.
Proproxasant uses nicotine, salt crystals, aerodynamic foam, elemi oil, and Pyrodex, the last a smokeless powder propellant, on Hahnemühle Sugar Cane and Legion Colorplan Vellum. Calavist, Opreach, Revune and Trayke, among the largest works, incorporates spider silk, bioluminescent bacteria, and magnetized iron filings alongside sand, crushed circuit boards, and resin. These are not materials borrowed from another context for their associative value alone. They are chosen because of how they behave: the spider silk for its tensile strength and near invisibility, the bioluminescent bacteria for its capacity to produce light through biological process, the magnetized iron filings for the field lines they make visible.
The substrates themselves are chosen with equal care. Fujifilm Crystal Archive Maxima, Ilford Galerie Prestige Gold Fibre Silk, Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta, Kodak Professional Endura Premier Metallic Paper, Moab Entrada Digital Rag, Canson Infinity Platine Fibre Rag, Bergger Prestige Variable CB: these are photographic and fine art papers chosen not only for their archival stability and surface qualities but for the specific way each one receives and holds the materials applied to it. The conversation between substrate and substance is not incidental. It is compositional.
The Underlying Principle
I do not treat any of this as special effects, surface decoration, or the application of interesting materials to an otherwise conventional score. The piano is wood, felt, steel, and air working together. The page should answer in kind. Every material decision is a decision about what the score is asking and how it is asking it. The score that incorporates a shape-memory polymer is a score that has built memory into its physical substance. The score that uses thermochromic paint is a score that changes its appearance with the conditions of its reading. The score that carries rare earth luminescence is a score that produces its own light.
This is not notation enhanced by materials. It is notation constituted by them.
