"A Miraculous Positional Memory"
For Alto Clarinet and Baritone Horn
Bil Smith Composer
The Full Score:
Paper, Model, Score: Thomas Demand’s Afterimage in My Compositional Surfaces
Thomas Demand’s pictures have followed me into the studio for years—not as images to imitate, but as a procedure to inhabit. He reconstructs a scene as a full-scale paper model, photographs the model, then removes the evidence. What remains is an image twice mediated: a photograph of a construction that stands in for an earlier photograph. That double remove—world → model → image—reconfigures how we look. We scan for joins, edges, the flatness of paper. We learn to read surface for labor.
That lesson is foundational to my scores. I also insert a built intermediary between source and outcome. Where Demand builds rooms, I build pages: hyper-notational surfaces that must be navigated rather than merely executed. The performance you hear is not a translation of instructions; it is an excavation of a constructed field.
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| Thomas Demand's "Control Room" |
From Photograph of a Model to Model for a Score
Demand’s practice taught me to distrust directness. In my work, I stage a sequence: concept → model (visual, typographic, photographic) → notational object → performance. Portrait sessions with models, tilt-shift photography, and photo-real fragments feed the page; the page is then collaged with blocks, legends, and vectors—the “Brutalist Tablatures,” among others—that turn notation into terrain. Like Demand’s sets, these pages are not neutral carriers; they are architectures that record the choices of their making and demand new choices from readers.
The effect in both cases is similar: a viewer or performer must confront the intermediary. The work refuses to disappear into fluency.
Objecthood as Method (Not Decoration)
Demand’s dye-rich prints condense time and manual procedure into surface. I aim for an analogous condensation: metallic powders, conductive inks, thermochromic and photochromic layers, dense graphite, aluminum supports. These are not embellishments. They are operational materials that change the kinetics of reading—how light grazes a line, how a block occludes, how a legend becomes legible only at a particular angle or distance. The page controls tempo before a single sound is made.
In rehearsal this has consequences. Performers negotiate wayfinding—landmarks, corridors, cul-de-sacs—rather than counting alone. The score becomes site: not a tape to be unspooled but a place where decisions are staged and restaged.
Spatial Resistance
When notation turns spatial, it becomes political. The linear staff over-optimizes for excerptability, logistics, and product. A spatial score resists all three. It cannot be skimmed, clipped into “best bars,” or sight-read on short call. It costs rehearsal, and that cost is the point: time redirected from efficiency to attention, from throughput to co-presence.
This is where Demand’s ethic touches mine most directly. His pictures slow spectatorship by making the image slightly “wrong”—convincing yet off, familiar yet modeled. My scores slow performance by making the page thick—fields of potential that frustrate frictionless delivery. In both cases, the work’s difficulty is not punitive; it is repairing. It restores our capacity to read with care.
Instruction, Trace, Object
I’ve long been drawn to the hinge where instruction becomes object. In my practice, the score is simultaneously:
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Instruction (it can be played),
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Trace (it records a process of construction, including failures),
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Object (it holds on the wall, on a table, as a sculpture of information).
Demand’s model/photograph dynamic clarified this for me. We both use an interposed artifact to change the terms of reception. For him, the paper room reforms the photograph. For me, the constructed page reforms the performance. In both, the intermediary is generative, not ancillary.
Reading as Archaeology
Performing these works is an archaeological practice. Players read for seams: where instructions thicken, where textures contradict, where legends fork. Annotations accumulate; each realization leaves residue for the next. The work grows by stratigraphy, not by a single definitive text. Demand’s destroyed sets are gone, but their logic remains legible in the image; my earlier drafts are gone, but their logic is fossilized in the final page. We meet our audiences (and performers) at the surface where that history has been compacted.
Curatorial Notes (from the Studio Outward)
If these pages enter the gallery, I prefer they be treated as sites, not illustrations for a performance that “really matters.” Show the scores at scale, with vantage points that enable mapping—overhead tables, fold-outs, oblique sightlines that catch reflective inks. Present rehearsals, marginalia, and multiple realizations as parallel artifacts, not documentation. The point is to stage the same demand these works make in the rehearsal room: engage the intermediary.
Influence, Precisely Named
Demand didn’t give me a look to borrow; he gave me a logic to adapt:
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Build the intermediary (model/page) that stands between source and outcome.
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Harden process into surface (photograph/score) so that labor becomes legible.
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Compel a new literacy in the viewer/performer—reading for joins, routes, and residues rather than for instant legibility.
That sequence continues to shape my compositions. It is why some pages appear obstinate; why blocks sit where common sense says “clear the path”; why certain legends seem too local or contingent. They are local and contingent—by design. The page is a model of a situation, not a shortcut through it.
Coda: Afterimage
I often think of Demand’s pictures as afterimages of making. My scores aspire to the same: to be notational afterimages that hold, in their complication, the memory of the processes that produced them and the performances they will provoke. If the work asks more of the reader, it is because I want the page to look back—politely, firmly—and say: the intermediary is where meaning starts.
