"Pleasured and Fractured Certainty" for Bassoon

"Pleasured and Fractured Certainty" for Bassoon

5 Pages. 46” X 32”; 116.8 X 81.3 cm

Ink, Molten Gel, Acrylic, Tarte Maracuja Oil, Cold Spray Coating, Oil on Fujifilm Crystal Archive Supreme

Edition of 5 with 1 AP

 

"Voide". For String Quartet

"Voide"

For String Quartet

Bil Smith Composer

Published by LNM Editions

Like to Full Score PDF (Hi-Res)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iCqWRlz35DsMg9AWRqGVx9iIxqLJ8GwW/view?usp=sharing

Notation as Habitat. Further Thoughts on the Score as Cognitive Ecology

 

The Score as Cognitive Ecology: Toward a Morphogenetic Notation

In this latest evolution of The Score as Cognitive Ecology, we are presented with a radical diagram of multimodal interplay, where the musical score no longer exists as a symbolic intermediary between composer and performer, but emerges as a symbiotic territory.  It becomes an assemblage in which iconography, linguistic fragments, affective texture, and spatial logic converge into a form of aural cartography. This image is not a “score” in any reductive sense. It is a score-environment. One that performs, iterates, encodes, and anticipates action through visual, sculptural, and symbolic means.

Topography of Intention: Sonic Syntax and Notational Rupture

The dominant notational material scattered throughout the composition as architectonic black staves and explosive pitch clusters echoes the experimental typographies of composers such as Ferneyhough, Nono, and Lachenmann. However, here, traditional syntax is fractured and dispersed, creating rhizomatic constellations of micro-events. There is no singular path of reading; rather, the reader is pulled into a multidirectional swarm of interpretations.

The highly complex note clusters, overlapping accidentals, and disruptive measure blocks suggest an excess of sonic potentiality, inviting the performer not to render a static outcome but to navigate densities. The score resists literal reading.  It becomes cognitive choreography, demanding from the interpreter a mode of attunement more akin to ecological tracking than mechanical decoding.

Gene Therapies as Sonic Characters: Branding the Score

The list of hypothetical proprietary gene therapy names (e.g., Veltryon, Zynevera, Myristra) scrawled down the left-hand edge of the score operate as semantic intrusions invoking a biotechnology imaginary within the musical ecosystem. These neologisms function not only as linguistic counterpoints but also as characters or motifs, anthropomorphized through their alignment with various sculptural busts and material clusters. Their presence blurs the disciplinary boundaries between branding, genomic poetics, and performative identity.

Each “name” corresponds spatially to one of the sculptural busts, establishing an intra-semantic relationship between visual form and linguistic signal. Just as a performer interprets notation, so too must the viewer decode the interface between word, image, and symbol, reifying the names into gestural avatars of sonic intent.

The Busts as Personified Timbres

The series of deity busts, rendered in various chromatic sheens and materials, act as textural interrupts and mnemonic anchors. Their orientation, materiality (e.g., mirror-polished aluminum, rusticated stone), and embedded symbols (e.g., fusilli, baroque curls, comic book speech bubbles) gesture toward timbral identities.

These are not static icons. They perform roles analogous to orchestral instruments or timbre-generating modules, wherein their color and visual affect signal distinct sonic zones or behaviors. The mirrored bust titled PEZZO! comes clad in the aesthetic vernacular of Jeff Koons and pulp design invoking theatricality, artificiality, and perhaps a critique of commodified expression. In contrast, the biologically textured, amorphous white clusters connote organic growth, mutation, or decay; all visual metaphors for spectral morphologies in sound.

Sonic Germs: Cellular Clusters and Emergent Form

The bulbous, semi-biological spheres that populate the central register of the score recall cellular assemblies—evoking embryogenesis, gene editing, or microbial ecologies. These elements draw attention to the idea of form in flux—a key principle in both developmental biology and contemporary composition. In this context, they can be read as timbral seeds, units of sonic potential whose relationships shift depending on spatial proximity, performer gesture, or conceptual framing.

Just as gene therapies modify expression at the cellular level, these score elements suggest that sound itself is encoded, modifiable, and subject to performative engineering. They signal a non-linear temporality, one in which sound emerges through process rather than prescription.

Notation as Performance Ecology

Extending the metaphor of the score as cognitive ecology, this composition functions not as a map to follow, but as a habitat of interpretation. The traditional boundaries between composer, performer, score, and audience become porous, redefined by affect, spatial reasoning, material metaphor, and linguistic residue.

The composer, in this ecology, is less a dictator of form and more a curator of affordances offering a landscape filled with glyphs, symbols, textures, and triggers. The performer becomes a forager of sense, tasked with reading across media, across disciplines, across time.

Toward an Ontogeny of the Score

In conclusion, this piece serves as a critical evolution in score-making: a notation of becoming. The work does not illustrate a composition as it is the composition, existing as an interface for sonic speculation, a poetic field through which sound, image, and cognition interact.

It demands a post-disciplinary mode of attention, one that resists finality and embraces emergent meaning.  It projects a condition that echoes the fluid ontology of both sound and biology in the 21st century.

Just as the gene is not a blueprint but a network of probabilistic interactions, so too is this score not a directive but a living ecology, one in which sound is grown, not drawn.

 

Exhaustive Indeterminacy: Subtraction as Score, Silence as Decision

The Paradox of Too Much

Traditional musical notation aims for clarity. It transmits intent, structure, and expression from composer to performer. Even in indeterminate or aleatoric works, where chance and choice are built in, the goal is usually to open space for freedom while retaining a composed identity. But what happens when the score becomes so overloaded with choices that freedom emerges only through reduction?

Exhaustive Indeterminacy is a radical compositional approach in which every conceivable musical option, be it articulations, dynamics, rhythms, tempi, gestures are inscribed simultaneously. Each page becomes a hyperdense matrix of sonic potential. It is not a “play everything” instruction, but rather a mandate to subtract: the performer must whittle this impossibility down to a single thread. The work emerges not from what is written, but from what is removed.

The Nature of the Exhaustive Score

Imagine a page where each line contains overlapping staccato and legato markings, conflicting tempi, contradictory dynamics, and coexistent gestures: tremolo and sul ponticello and pizzicato, all stacked. It is not chaos, but a systematic completeness.  It presents as a cartographic atlas of all ways the line could be played.

In this system:

• Notation becomes a field of possibility, not instruction

• Performance is a process of curation and elimination

• The performer is positioned as editor, sculptor, and interpreter

• Each performance becomes singular—an artifact of choices and renunciations

The Subtractive Gesture: Interpretation as Erasure

Rather than choosing between options in real time, performers of Exhaustive Indeterminacy are tasked with paring down the score in rehearsal, sometimes even physically crossing out notations. This performative editing reflects:

• The aesthetics of negation, where the piece is revealed through loss

• The act of interpreting as destruction, not completion

• A confrontation with musical overload—mirroring the contemporary saturation of options in both digital and cultural spaces

The result is a performance that is irreproducible, non-transferable, and wholly contingent on a singular sequence of subtractions.

Philosophical and Artistic Precedents

While Exhaustive Indeterminacy is a speculative compositional technique, its conceptual DNA is traceable to several artistic movements:

• John Cage’s I Ching procedures opened music to chance, but Cage still curated the results. Exhaustive Indeterminacy removes even that authorial control.

• Brian Ferneyhough’s complexist notation challenges performability, but assumes a “final version.” Exhaustive Indeterminacy assumes no finality.

• Hanne Darboven and Sol LeWitt: their serialized systems map every permutation.  Exhaustive Indeterminacy shares their impulse toward taxonomic totality.

• Wabi-sabi aesthetics in Japanese philosophy: impermanence, imperfection, and the beauty of reduction.

Practical Challenges and Opportunities

For Performers

• Encourages a redefinition of virtuosity: not in execution, but in discernment

• Promotes a slow practice ethic, where time is spent not playing, but thinking

• Forces ethical decisions: which voices deserve to live?

For Audiences

• Each performance is a unique reduction, a sonic fossil of vanished potential

• Listeners experience a musical work as negative space.  What is heard is shaped by all that is absent

For Composers

• Liberates the score from fixed structure

• Encourages a new compositional humility: the work is complete only when erased

When Everything Is Possible, Meaning Emerges from Less

Exhaustive Indeterminacy is a framework for reclaiming silence, restraint, and the act of artistic choosing. It rejects performance as mere reproduction, and instead invites performers to confront the unbearable richness of musical potential. In doing so, it asks a simple but haunting question:

If everything is possible, what should be heard?

When Text Becomes the Notation. The Text Score

Gone are the days when musical scores were confined to the rigid lines and dots of standard notation. Today, composers are experimenting with scripts of words, sentences, and textual expressions as the framework for their musical creations. This novel method is not just a shift in notation; it's a complete reimagining of the performer's role and the audience's experience.

Imagine a violinist, traditionally trained to read and interpret classical scores, now faced with a sheet of poetry or a narrative excerpt. Each word, each phrase, becomes a cue for musical interpretation. The pitch, tempo, and dynamics are no longer dictated by traditional musical symbols but are inferred from the emotional and semantic content of the text. This approach demands a new level of creativity and emotional intelligence from performers, who must now become adept at translating linguistic nuances into musical expression.

Consider this: At what point do our objects, our musical instruments, the texts we read, become extensions of us? Or inversely, when do we morph into mere extensions of these objects, these texts? This is not just a question of physicality but of essence, of being. In a world where music is guided by the ebbs and flows of text, the boundary that separates self from other, or inside from outside, becomes intriguingly permeable.

The concept becomes even more radical when we ponder the rearrangeability of these boundaries. In a conventional orchestra, a violinist is just a violinist, a cellist merely a cellist, bound by the physicality of their instruments and the strictures of their music sheets. But in this new realm, where words guide music interpretation, a musician becomes a poet, a storyteller, a sculptor of soundscapes, unconfined by the traditional borders of their role.

Henry Miller, in his defiance of literary norms, often blurred the lines between the writer and the written, the observer and the observed. Similarly, in this textual approach to music composition, the line between the composer and the performer, the score and the interpretation, is deliciously muddled. 

The performer, interpreting text, must navigate these fluid boundaries, deciding in the moment whether to be a vessel for the music or the architect of it.

This exploration into text-based composition is not just a musical endeavor; it’s an ontological one. It asks profound questions about our identity as creators and interpreters. Just as Miller's prose dissected the human experience, this new musical form dissects the experience of creation and performance. It forces us to confront the transient nature of our identities, our roles, and our creations.

This innovative use of text in composition is also redefining the audience's experience. The listeners are no longer just passive recipients of predetermined melodies and harmonies. Instead, they are invited into a more engaged and subjective experience. As the performers interpret the text, the music becomes a reflection of that interpretation, offering a multitude of perspectives and emotional landscapes. Each performance, inherently unique in its interpretation of the text, becomes a conversation between the composer, the performer, and the audience.

The potential for diversity in expression is vast. A single piece of text can be interpreted in myriad ways, depending on the performer's perspective, emotional state, and artistic choices. This opens up a realm of possibilities where a single composition can give rise to a spectrum of musical renditions, each as valid and compelling as the next.

Furthermore, this approach democratizes the compositional process. Text-based notation is inherently more accessible than traditional musical notation, allowing composers from various backgrounds to express their musical ideas. It also encourages collaboration across disciplines, inviting poets, writers, and storytellers to contribute to the musical creative process.

However, this radical shift is not without its challenges. The subjective nature of text interpretation can lead to vastly different performances of the same piece, potentially causing inconsistencies and confusion. The lack of a standardized system for text-based notation also poses a challenge for widespread adoption and understanding.

Despite these challenges, the use of text as a compositional tool represents a significant leap forward in the evolution of music. It breaks down barriers between different art forms, encourages innovative thinking among composers and performers, and offers audiences a more immersive and personal experience.

The Composer as Interrogator of Expression

The Composer as Interrogator of Expression

To speak of expression today is already to step into compromised terrain. Expression presumes sincerity, assumes transparency, imagines a direct passage between inner state and outward form. The work under consideration rejects this passage entirely. It proposes instead a different role for the composer: not as facilitator of expression, nor as architect of affect, but as interrogator. What is staged is not feeling, but suspicion. Not communication, but friction.

“I do not ask the performer to interpret the face. I ask them to interrogate it.”

This distinction is not rhetorical. Interpretation presumes goodwill. Interrogation presumes deceit.

The portrait, once placed on the page, is stripped of its human alibi. It ceases to function as likeness and becomes object. Instrument. Evidence. The face does not represent a person; it performs as a proxy for identity itself, a stand-in that must be treated as unreliable. Assume it lies. Assume it is not what it claims to be. Assume, finally, that it is you. Not as autobiography, but as structural condition.

Here the composer does not offer expressive content to be realized. Instead, they install a situation. A face is positioned, not explained. No backstory, no dramaturgical reassurance. The performer is left alone with the image, and the image refuses to stabilize. It watches without responding. It accuses without speaking. It invites projection while withholding consent.

This is where the work begins.

Once embedded in the score, the portrait becomes a functional device. It does not decorate the notation; it contaminates it. It alters the phenomenology of reading. The performer is no longer alone with symbols and gestures, but with a gaze that interrupts neutrality. The page becomes a site of exposure. The score ceases to be an abstract field and becomes a room in which someone is already present.

Responses vary, and these variations are not incidental; they are diagnostic. Some performers weep. Others ask if the image can be removed. They describe discomfort, distraction, an uncanny sensation of being observed by someone they failed to understand, or worse, someone who understands them too well. The request for removal is telling. It is not the difficulty of execution that troubles them, but the collapse of distance. The performer can no longer retreat into technique, into professionalism, into the safety of interpretation.

They are implicated.

“I tell them that’s the point.”

The composer’s refusal to mitigate this discomfort is not cruelty; it is precision. The work insists that expression is not something one safely produces, but something one risks being undone by. By withholding instructions, the composer denies the performer the familiar scaffolding of intention. There is no guidance on how to feel, what to convey, or who the image is supposed to be. This absence is not a lack; it is an active pressure.

There are no instructions. Only placement.

Placement, here, functions as compositional force. The image is not explained because explanation would domesticate it. Instead, it is situated, framed, allowed to exert its gravity. The score does not tell the performer what to do with the portrait; it forces them to decide whether they can proceed at all. The act of performance becomes an ethical negotiation rather than an expressive one.

This is why the score is not a map. A map reassures. A map promises arrival. This score stages collisions.

Sound against silence.

Identity against absence.

Legibility against suggestion.

Each collision is unresolved. Sound does not conquer silence; it exposes it. Identity does not assert itself; it fractures against the realization that the face might be empty, might be a mask, might be an echo. Legibility does not clarify meaning; it destabilizes it by suggesting that what can be read is precisely what should not be trusted.

In this framework, the performer is no longer an interpreter but a participant in an experiment on expression itself. What happens when expression is no longer authorized by intention? What happens when the face on the page does not ask to be understood, but demands to be questioned? What happens when the performer recognizes their own strategies of avoidance, projection, and control reflected back at them?

The composer, then, is not offering a language, but setting a trap. Not a trap designed to catch the performer, but one designed to catch habits: the habit of sincerity, the habit of empathy, the habit of assuming that expression is a virtue rather than a problem.

This is curatorial composition. The work curates conditions under which meaning misbehaves. It arranges objects, images, and absences so that the performer cannot simply pass through them unchanged. The portrait is not there to humanize the score; it is there to estrange it. To remind the performer that every act of expression is also an act of substitution, displacement, and possible falsification.

In this sense, the work does not ask, “What does this mean?”

It asks, “What are you doing when you try to make it mean?”

The answer is never stable. And that instability is the work’s most precise achievement.

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