The Text Before the Sound: Literary Pre-Performance Conditioning and the Notation of Interiority
Bil Smith, Composer Sound Morphology
There is a moment I have come to think of as the threshold. It happens perhaps twenty minutes before a performer walks onstage, or sits down at their instrument in a studio, or takes position in an ensemble. They are reading. Not a score. Not performance notes. Not my instructions about dynamics or articulation or the particular quality of attack I want on a given passage. They are reading a catalog essay, or a weather log, or an aphorism collection, or a short story. They are reading literature. And when they put it down and pick up their instrument, something has changed in the interior of the performance before a single sound has been made.
I call this practice Literary Pre-Performance Conditioning, or more simply, textual imprinting. I think it raises questions about the nature of musical notation that I find genuinely unresolved. Which is the best kind of question.
Where This Began
I did not arrive at this practice through theory. I arrived at it through frustration.
The question that started shifting things for me was this: what actually produces a particular quality of presence in a performer? Not a particular quality of action, but presence. The kind of thing that makes an audience lean forward without quite knowing why, before a note is sounded. The kind of thing that makes a passage feel inhabited rather than executed.
The answer I kept returning to was: the performer's interior state immediately before the performance. And interior states are not produced by instructions. They are produced by experience.
What I Give Performers to Read
The literary work I assign varies considerably by piece and by performer, but it falls into roughly six forms, each of which produces a different quality of conditioning.
The Catalog Essay is perhaps the most formally disruptive choice. The performer reads what appears to be curatorial writing about an exhibition, but the exhibition is, by degrees, revealed to be something else: the self, the body, the act of performing itself. The catalog essay produces in the performer a particular double consciousness, a sense of being simultaneously the observer and the observed, that I find extraordinarily useful for works in which the performer is asked to hold awareness of the act of performance alongside the performance itself.
The Weather Log is the form I use most frequently. There is something in the sustained attention of observational record-keeping, the daily noticing, the specificity of the instrument readings, the gap between what the instruments record and what the morning actually was, that produces in performers a quality I can only describe as calibrated openness. They arrive at the instrument already in a state of attending closely to what is, rather than anticipating what should be. For music that depends on the performer's real-time sensitivity to acoustical phenomena, room resonance, the behaviour of the instrument on a particular day, the way an ensemble listens to itself, this calibration is everything.
The Aphorism Collection works differently. Where the weather log builds attention through accumulation, the aphorism concentrates it through compression. A well-made aphorism produces a specific cognitive state: the mind arrives at the end of a sentence and finds it has been changed by the sentence, and it must hold both the before and the after simultaneously. Performers who have spent twenty minutes in that state bring a particular quality of held tension to the music. They are primed for the kind of meaning that arrives in a small gesture.
The Short Story gives the performer something more like a world. I tend to use short stories for ensemble work, where I want performers to share an imaginative space without sharing identical instructions. The story becomes the room they are all inside; the music becomes what that room sounds like.
Poetry, including work inspired by Ginsberg's long catalogs, Plath's clinical precision, Pindar's ode structure, produces in performers an acute sensitivity to the breath unit as a formal element. This has direct consequences for phrasing, for the shape of a line, for the relationship between gesture and silence.
The Essay-Poem Hybrid, which some of my textual works are, produces the most unpredictable conditioning, which is sometimes exactly what I want. A text that cannot be categorised, that is literature and philosophy and notation simultaneously, puts the performer in a state of productive uncertainty that I find generative for music that is itself formally uncategorizable.
The Philosophical Stakes
I want to be honest about how seriously I take what is happening here, philosophically, because I think it is easy to misread this practice as a species of programme music. As though I am asking performers to feel a particular emotion and then express it. That is not what I am doing.
What I am doing is closer to what the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty described as the body schema: the way the body maintains a pre-reflective awareness of its own orientation, its own preparedness, its own readiness to act in specific ways. When a performer reads a weather log immediately before performing, I am not asking them to think about weather or observation or the gap between measurement and reality. I am asking them to inhabit a particular quality of attention, and the text is the vehicle for that inhabitation. The text works below the level of conscious interpretation. This is its whole purpose.
This distinction matters enormously. The performer is not told what to feel. They are conditioned into a mode of perceiving, and then they perform from inside that mode. The difference between these two things is the difference between acting and being.
There is also something important here about the irreversibility of the reading. Once a performer has read a piece of literature, they cannot un-read it. It has altered their interior landscape in a way that is not under their conscious control. This irreversibility is part of what makes the practice different from conventional performance notes, which a performer can follow or not follow, interpret or reinterpret, hold at arm's length as instructions. The literary text does not offer that arm's length. It enters the performer. And the performance that follows is, in a very precise sense, already begun before the instrument is raised.
What This Means for Notation
Here is where I think the deepest implications of this practice lie, and where I am most willing to claim that something genuinely new is being proposed.
Western art music notation is, at its foundation, a system for communicating what to do: pitch, duration, dynamics, articulation, sometimes affect (dolce, agitato, con brio), sometimes texture and approach. Even the most extended notations, from Ferneyhough to Lachenmann to Cage, are fundamentally systems of instruction, however complex, however open-ended, however philosophically elaborate. They address the performer as an executor of tasks, even when the tasks are tasks of interpretation or of choice.
What I am proposing, and what literary pre-performance conditioning enacts, is that there is a domain of musical performance that cannot be reached by instruction at all: the domain of the performer's interior state in the act of performance. And that this domain is not marginal or decorative. It is the domain in which the difference between a technically correct performance and a truly alive one is located.
This is not a romantic claim about inspiration or artistic ineffability. It is a structural observation. The performer's interior state shapes the infinitesimal decisions, the micro-timing, the sub-notational quality of attack and release, the quality of listening within an ensemble, the permeability to the acoustic event, that are not reachable by score. And these infinitesimal decisions are, in aggregate, what we hear when we hear music that is alive.
Conventional notation assumes that these micro-decisions are either unknowable, and therefore left to the performer's discretion, or irrelevant, and therefore not addressed. I want to argue that they are neither. They are conditionable. Not through instruction but through the carefully chosen textual experience that precedes the performance.
This means that the literary work I give a performer to read is, in a real and philosophical sense, part of the score. Not a supplement to it. Not a programme note. Not inspiration material. Part of the score. A notation of interiority.
This is, I think, a genuine expansion of what musical notation can mean. Not a rejection of the existing notation system but an acknowledgment of its constitutive limit, and a proposal for what lies on the other side of that limit.
Conditioning, Autonomy, and the Ethics of the Practice
I want to address a concern that this practice sometimes raises, because I take it seriously: does literary pre-performance conditioning compromise the performer's interpretive autonomy? Am I, in effect, manipulating the performer's interior state without their full awareness?
My answer is that this concern, while understandable, rests on a misreading of what autonomy means in performance. Every performance is already shaped by conditions the performer did not choose: the acoustics of the room, the instrument's particular character on a given day, what they ate, whether they slept, what they said to a colleague in the corridor ten minutes ago. The question is never whether the performer's state will be conditioned, because it always will be. The question is whether that conditioning is random or intentional, chaotic or considered.
What I am proposing is that the conditioning be chosen. Chosen by the composer, yes, but also chosen by the performer who agrees to the practice. Every performer I work with knows exactly what I am asking of them and why. The literary text is not a hidden apparatus. It is shared openly. The performer is a willing participant in their own conditioning, which transforms the act from manipulation into collaboration.
There is also something important about the specificity of the texts I choose. I am not trying to produce a generalized emotional state. I am trying to produce a specific quality of attention, a specific orientation of the performer's consciousness toward the act of performing. And this quality of attention is, in my experience, one that skilled performers recognise as valuable and want to cultivate. They are not being diminished by the practice. They are being offered a new kind of preparation.
The Texts as Objects in Themselves
I do not select existing literature for this practice, with rare exceptions. I write the texts specifically for the pieces they accompany. This is important. A catalog essay that I write as a conditioning text for a specific work is not merely a text about something. It is a text whose formal properties, whose sonic and rhythmic qualities, whose philosophical argument, are all calibrated to produce a specific quality of interior state in the performer who reads it.
The texts I have written draw on a wide range of literary traditions: the encyclopaedic witness mode of Vollmann, the ode's compressed fire in Pindar, the Beckettian imperative that cannot be refused, the long Ginsberg breath, the Plath clinical precision that discovers terror in the domestic, the Calvino invisible city that is also an argument about structure. These are not decorative influences. They are formal resources. The particular quality of attention that each tradition produces in a careful reader is the raw material of the conditioning.
This means that the composition of the literary text is not separate from the composition of the music. It is continuous with it. The score, the literary conditioning text, and the performance exist as a single complex work, distributed across different media, different temporal positions, different kinds of reading, but unified by the single question: what does it mean for a human being to be fully present in the act of making sound?
I do not have a complete answer to that question. I have a practice that keeps reopening it. That is, at this stage of my work, enough.
A Note on Documentation and Future Practice
I am aware that what I am describing raises immediate practical questions for documentation, pedagogy, and the historical record. If the literary text is part of the score, how is it archived? How is a future performer given access to the full work? How does a musicologist analyse a piece whose notation exists in two radically different media?
These are questions I am actively working through. My current practice is to publish the literary text and the musical score as a single document, what I am beginning to call a composite score, with guidance on the pre-performance reading practice included as an integral section of the score rather than as supplementary material.
This is not a fully resolved solution. The temporal relationship between the reading and the performance, how long before, how many times, remains deliberately somewhat open. Different performers in different contexts will find their own relationship to the text, and that variability is not a flaw in the system. It is part of the system. The conditioning is not a mechanism for producing identical performances. It is a mechanism for producing performances that are each, in their own way, fully inhabited.
The score tells the performer what to do. The text conditions who is doing it. Both are necessary. Neither is sufficient alone. Together they reach toward something that I believe has always been at the heart of performance, the complete presence of a human being in an act of making, and that notation has, until now, not quite been able to name.
