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| Primary Score |
With Performance Guidance - "Commedia Meteorologica." A Weather Log to be read by the performer privately prior to the performance of the work.
PDF File to Performance Guidance:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ygP_iZFXuWXz-ik5UYZoXbISc349uVzg/view?usp=sharing
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| Transparency Atelier |
My score for "The Criminality On The Staircase" for Solo Tuba presents an example of a multimodal, maximalist compositional lexicon which is underpinned by a notational ontology that navigates the complex interplay between geometric forms and musical interpretation. It mirrors a continuum that extends from the concrete to the abstract, from the geometrically symmetric to the asymmetric, and onwards to the intricacies of knotted and woven morphologies.
The notational system employed here is as revolutionary as it is ancient, drawing inspiration from the mathematical explorations of Archimedes who, in his pursuit of pi, utilized recursively truncated polygons to approximate the circle's curvature. Similarly, the score's notational framework employs a number code based on the traversal of vertices in polygonal shapes whether they be they convex or non-convex, symmetric or asymmetric.
This traversal can occur in a clockwise or anti-clockwise direction, initiating a cycle of numbers that not only defines the shape in question but also allows for the transformation of one polygon into another through the manipulation of this code. Such a system underscores a philosophical and aesthetic inquiry into the nature of form and transformation, suggesting a fluid continuum between different states of symmetry and asymmetry, convexity and non-convexity, and extending this exploration to the realm of knotted and woven structures.
The number code, an arcane lexicon that allows for the manipulation from one polygonal shape to another, is not just notation but a narrative in itself. It tells of transformations, of the shifting landscapes of musical geometry where polygons serve not merely as symbols but as the very building blocks of composition.
This code, a cipher of sorts, speaks to the adventurous, beckoning them to alter the course of musical currents with the mere adjustment of sequences, a power that blurs the lines between composer and alchemist.
Within this esoteric framework, Pentiles (a concept borrowed from the architectural domain) finds new life on curved hypersurfaces and hyperstructures, suggesting applications far beyond the scope of mere notational elements.
Yet, what of the tuba, you might ask? This humble instrument, often relegated to the background, becomes in "The Criminality On The Staircase" the vessel for this grand experiment. It is through its brass voice that the complex interplay of geometry and sound is manifested
The Interplay of Experimental Photography and Contemporary New Music Notation
The evolution of new music composition has often paralleled innovations in other artistic media, and in recent decades, experimental photography and film have emerged as potent vehicles for rethinking musical notation. The compositional archetype of the 21st century increasingly relies on interdisciplinary tools to bridge sound, space, and time. Experimental photographers such as Jennifer Walsh, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Demand, and others have introduced a visual language that transcends traditional boundaries, offering a profound aesthetic model for the conveyance and interpretation of contemporary scores.
This discussion explores how the experimental techniques of these photographers have shaped a new aesthetic paradigm for music notation. By examining their manipulation of space, distortion of reality, and layering of visual structures, we uncover how photography and film function as notational mechanisms that challenge performers and composers to breach unknown artistic territories.
Experimental photography employs abstraction, distortion, and reconstruction to interpret and manipulate reality. This mirrors the act of musical notation, which abstracts sound into visual symbols for re-creation. Photographic techniques such as spatial fragmentation, temporal layering, and synthetic manipulation resonate with contemporary compositional practices, suggesting new methods for encoding musical information.
Jennifer Walsh: Fragmentation and Ambiguity Jennifer Walsh’s photographic and filmic techniques dismantle linearity, employing fragmented visuals and overlapping temporalities. Her work evokes a sense of dislocation, where meaning emerges through the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated elements. In the context of musical notation, Walsh's approach suggests scores that embrace ambiguity and multiplicity, challenging performers to navigate nonlinear pathways.
Andreas Gursky: Scale and Density Gursky's monumental photographs, characterized by their overwhelming detail and expansive scale, transform everyday spaces into intricate tapestries of information. This density and abstraction are analogous to complex scores in new music, where detail invites immersive engagement.
Thomas Demand: Fabricated Realities Demand’s meticulous reconstructions of spaces blur the line between reality and simulation, presenting a hyper-real aesthetic that invites scrutiny and reinterpretation. Similarly, musical notation can fabricate its own reality, serving as a constructed space that invites the performer to inhabit and transform it.
Andreas Gefeller: Aerial Distortions Gefeller’s overhead perspectives create disorienting views of familiar environments, revealing hidden structures and patterns. His work parallels the aerial view of traditional notation while challenging its hierarchical conventions.
Geert Goiris: Uncanny Atmospheres Goiris’s haunting, atmospheric landscapes evoke a sense of unease and the unknown. His manipulation of light and shadow offers a visual vocabulary for expressing tonal ambiguity and unresolved tension.
Naoya Hatakeyama: Industrial Ruins and Time Hatakeyama’s exploration of decaying industrial environments captures the passage of time and the interplay of human intervention and natural decay. This resonates with compositions that explore entropy, decay, and transformation.
Luisa Lambri: Interior Spaces and Abstraction Lambri’s focus on architectural interiors reveals abstract patterns and rhythms in spatial design. Her work suggests a compositional archetype where architectural form informs musical structure.
Photography and film extend notation beyond its static, paper-bound origins, transforming it into a dynamic, performative medium. By integrating photographic and cinematic techniques, contemporary composers can create scores that challenge the traditional relationship between composer, performer, and audience.
Temporal Layering Inspired by filmic techniques such as double exposure, motion blur, and time-lapse, scores can incorporate temporal layering to represent overlapping musical events. This dynamic visuality fosters a synesthetic experience, where performers must interpret the interplay of time and sound visually.
Synthetic Landscapes Experimental photography’s ability to fabricate synthetic environments provides a model for scores that simulate sonic landscapes. By using manipulated images as part of the notation, composers can evoke specific atmospheres or emotional states.
Interactive Visuals Techniques from photographers like Thomas Demand and Todd Hido, who manipulate perspective and scale, can inform interactive scores, where the performer’s physical relationship to the score affects its interpretation.
Jennifer Walsh’s Fragmented Temporalities
Andreas Gursky’s Monumental Density
Thomas Demand’s Constructed Realities
The integration of experimental photographic techniques into music notation destabilizes traditional hierarchies and encourages exploration into unknown territories. By treating the score as a site of visual, sonic, and material interaction, composers create a performative reality that transcends the boundaries of music, architecture, and visual art.
The experimental techniques of photographers like Jennifer Walsh, Andreas Gursky, and Thomas Demand offer a radical aesthetic model for the future of music notation. By embracing fragmentation, materiality, and temporal complexity, these visual methodologies inspire a new compositional archetype that blurs the lines between sound, space, and visuality.
As photography and film become integral to the reality of the notational mechanism, they open pathways to unknown artistic territories, redefining how music is created, performed, and experienced. This interdisciplinary convergence signals the emergence of a profoundly modern aesthetic...one that situates music not as a solitary art form but as a resonant structure within a broader architectural and visual context.
Theoretical and Aesthetic Considerations of “The Kindly Machines” for Bass Clarinet by Bil Smith
by Markus Birnbaum
Bil Smith’s “The Kindly Machines” operates within a discursive zone that destabilizes conventional music notation, merging material culture, semiotic density, and performative ambiguity into a single score-object. The page evokes an epistemology of fractured legibility, situated at the crossroads of conceptual art, post-structuralist theory, and contemporary composition. It does not direct the performer toward a singular sonic outcome, but instead insists upon interpretive agency and embodied exploration.
At the score’s center lies a sculptural tableau: what appears to be a photographic or rendered grid of compressed, industrially wrapped packages, each with varying sheen, opacity, and chromatic temperature. This imagery displaces the primacy of notes or staves, suggesting instead a syntax of objects. The performer is positioned as an archaeologist of material semiotics, interpreting density, contour, weight, and implied texture as sonic provocations.
Smith’s approach reflects an explicit turn away from teleological composition toward what might be termed non-linear performative cartography. The visual system resists hierarchy. His numbers, grids, symbols, and objects operate without a centralized logic. In this way, the score invokes the aleatoric structures of John Cage, while visually recalling the architectonic syntax of Sol LeWitt and the visual fragmentation of Mark Lombardi's diagrammatic drawings. The performance of this piece is not only musical but investigative serving as an excavation of surfaces.
This page resists the rationalism of classical modernist notation. In the tradition of Dieter Roth or Hanne Darboven, text, number, and structure are conflated and abstracted. The grid, often a symbol of order, becomes here a space of potential collapse or infinite recursion. Numbers are scattered and color-coded, detached from any clear metric function, behaving more like Deleuzean rhizomes than linear indicators.
Further, the embedded symbols (e.g., the pink silhouette, the blue 8.03, the mirrored 7.118) function less as instructions and more as residuesto imagined processes. These may allude to biochemical weights, timestamps, or even emotive instructions. Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance is apt here. The meaning of these signs is perpetually deferred, never fixed, and always negotiated anew by the performer.
The presence of wrapped forms suggests an engagement with materialism and post-object art. The performer must decode not just symbols, but objecthood itself. This is reminiscent of Thomas Hirschhorn’s bricolage installations, in which debris, commodity, and text are layered into critical density. Similarly, Smith’s score merges the banal and the cryptic, making no distinction between high concept and packaging material.
The bass clarinet becomes an instrument of friction. It is literally grinding against the granularity of the visual field. This may call for techniques that are gestural, timbral, or even choreographic. The inclusion of expanded notation elements and pictographic suggestions de-instrumentalizes the act of performance. It echoes Fluxus sensibilities, where the distinction between performer and observer collapses, and where notation becomes performance in itself.
“The Kindly Machines” is not a score in the traditional sense, but an aesthetic object that demands a rethinking of sound production as a form of spatial and conceptual inquiry. In its visual logic, theoretical density, and performative provocation, it aligns with a lineage of artists, composers, and thinkers who seek to dissolve the boundary between instruction and interpretation, between language and matter, between image and sound. It is not meant to be deciphered but engaged. To be contested, misread, sounded out.
