Perforated Monumentalism: Notes Toward a Shattered Score
on the notational ontology of Bil Smith Composer
“To puncture a monument is to reassign its meaning. To make it bleed, to make it breathe. To open it to air and error.”
Somewhere between the artifact and the assertion, between architecture and aphasia, lies the notational system Bil Smith refers to, provocatively and almost reluctantly, as Perforated Monumentalism. A term that resists both fixed interpretation and flippant dismissal. Like most of his titles, it functions less as a description and more as a provocation, or maybe a dare.
To witness one of Smith’s scores—particularly those found at the overlap of his graphic notations and compositional objects—is to encounter not music in the traditional sense, but the weather of music: its affective fronts, its pressure zones, its swirling disarrays of meaning, scale, and debris. What Perforated Monumentalism does is insist on the paradox that music can be both massive and absent, declared and hollowed out.
It’s a term I can’t stop turning over in my mouth: perforated—to puncture, to tear, to allow light through. And monumental—to endure, to stabilize, to cast shadows. But what happens when we perforate the monumental? When what should be a declaration is instead a ruin? When the authority of notation becomes not a command, but a wound?
The first time I held a score printed in this mode—let’s say one from the Symphora Domitorium series, whose paper seemed overburdened by the violence of its own symbols—I didn’t know how to read it. Or rather, I was aware that I couldn’t not read it, even if I couldn’t play it. The page was no longer a medium; it was a landscape. Each glyph, each splatter of ink, each architectural line eroded by hand-scratching or the ghost of a scanned archival diagram, seemed not to say something, but to refuse something.
Refusal, in Smith’s system, is not nihilism. It’s the gesture of carving space—for dissonance, for materiality, for the untranslatable. You could think of these scores as monuments that have been sabotaged from within, but not destroyed. Their perforation is not erasure, it’s permeability. It’s how meaning seeps in, sideways, out of sync.
I think of a performer—let’s call her L.—standing before one of these works, a single page rendered in cynthene, ash, wax pencil, powdered graphite, and archival resin. L. tells me she “approaches it like standing in front of something that remembers being destroyed.” I love this. It reminds me that scores, like people, carry trauma in their structure. They don’t speak it—they are it.
Perforated Monumentalism, then, is less a technique than a comportment. It invites the performer into the score not as executor, but as excavator. It asks: How do you render a thing that was designed to not quite cohere? How do you translate the hollowness of a monument without reasserting its power?
Smith’s notations—many of which feature gaping voids, surgical cuts, and images of brutalist fragments—seem to beg this question. Some scores feature facial profiles of his selected “models,” distorted through analog glitching or topographic segmentation. Others include medical diagrams, architectural site plans, or what look like exploded pharmaceutical blister packs. This is not window dressing. This is the debris field in which performance occurs.
In this, Perforated Monumentalism joins a lineage of other hybrid notational ontologies—Cardew’s graphic disobedience, Xenakis’s architectonic geometries, even Jorinde Voigt’s gestural topographies—but what sets it apart is its commitment to rupture as fidelity. To mark meaning by interrupting it.
To say that this work is beautiful feels, frankly, like a failure of language. It’s more accurate to say it is charged. The way a quiet room feels after someone has screamed. The way a statue looks when it’s been painted pink.
And this, I suspect, is the point. The monument remains—but now it leaks.
- Andrew Vecset
