Rethinking the Opera Score...A Work in Progress

Rethinking the Opera Score: Transformational Notation and the Emergence of Libretto-as-System

The score presented here rejects the historical function of the operatic manuscript as a container for linearity, character, and voice. Instead, it becomes a matrix; at once architectural, procedural, and epistemic. The traditional contract between librettist, composer, and performer is ruptured. In its place: an unstable yet fertile topology of notation as action, page as ontology.

This work does not feature arias, recitatives, or ensemble. Rather, what is offered is an accumulation of panels, systems, and graphic provocations that behave less like a musical score and more like a cartographic interface.  It maps cognition, semiotic interference, and muscular behavior into a unified performance artifact. The notion of “libretto” is absorbed into the visual schema itself. There are no characters. There is no sung language. The libretto, if one can still call it that, is dispersed and distributed across blocks, rotations, densities, and conditional architectures that transform the performer into both reader and medium.

Each component, whether it it a graphic vector, typographic glyph, or notational anomaly, functions as a trigger within a curatorial logic. This is not a ‘score’ to be interpreted for sound alone, but a manuscript to be curated in real-time. Footnotes are not marginalia but spatialized into blocks, giving the illusion of detached commentary, when in fact they are fully integrated executable devices. Their presence instructs the performer not with musical phrase but with categorical imperative. These inserts operate like switches of visual event toggles that determine how sonic material is negotiated. Their opacity is deliberate. They simulate the indexical function of critical apparatus while remaining gesturally generative.

The treatment of time is likewise inverted. The score is not temporal in its organization but accumulative. Time is not measured; it is collaged. Its geometry does not yield phrasing but instead creates terrain of which field conditions through which the performer navigates. Each instrumental line becomes a vector of behavior rather than a voice, each gesture a cue for physical transformation. The typical dramaturgical arcs of opera are displaced by mechanical flux and the emergence of form through repetition, fracture, and reconsideration.

This work poses a fundamental question: can opera exist without voice, text, or character? The answer here is a resolute yes—provided we understand opera as a system of intensities, not identities. The score presented is not merely prefigurative, but meta-operatic. It does not represent a work; it generates one. The libretto is latent, embedded within an ecology of signs, freed from the tyranny of verse and narrative. The result is not an opera that has evolved but one that has mutated into a score that is both surface and depth, both architecture and impulse, both instruction and artifact.

In this schema, notation is not a medium of communication but a mechanism of transformation. The opera is no longer staged. It is activated.

 

"Carnogrammics: Scoring as Mass, Trace, and Theatrical Debris"

"Carnogrammics: Scoring as Mass, Trace, and Theatrical Debris"

By Bil Smith

I have long believed that the score is a sculpture disguised as information. If it walks the stage in black ink and intention, I prefer it to limp, to sag, to resist decipherment while insisting on presence rather than transparency. In this new archetype I’ve begun to formulate what I call Carnogrammics where the score disbands the idea of instruction and instead becomes a mass-gesture, an accumulation of objecthood, residue, and contradiction.

New Accidentals - Bil Smith

Here, the graphic protocols of notation are not eroded...they are swollen. Inflamed. Think of Claus Oldenburg's soft sculptures not as ironic artifacts but as models for swollen syntax. Notes droop. Dynamics wrinkle. Time signatures lurch across folds. The score isn’t "read" in the classical sense; it is palpated, like an object found on the street, sticky with interpretive contingency. One encounters a density of tactility; one of vinyl sheeting, reflective gels, burlap text panels, or the carbon scoring of graphite pulled through coarse material. The artifact insists on its sculptural character first. Sound becomes the echo of material confrontation.

Claus Oldenburg Soft Drum

Robert Rauschenberg’s collage sensibility underwrites the internal logic of Carnogrammics. I insert fragments: ticket stubs, anatomical diagrams, grocery lists, degraded floor plans, not as decoration, but as derailments.  They become interruptions that force the performer to lose their place and recalibrate. In Rauschenberg’s terms, this is not about layering, but about interference-as-strategy. The notation is erratic. It wants to be illegible. It wants to create performative crisis.

Robert Rauschenberg

Damien Hirst’s compartmentalization of spectacle influences the framing (not the content) of Carnogrammics. Modular units. Wall-sized triptychs. Series of framed panel scores resembling display cases or institutional signage. The modularity allows for performative reordering. Scores can be stacked, rearranged, played backward or concurrently, depending on the architecture in which the piece is deployed. Carnogrammics is an anti-canonical score architecture. It refuses finality.

Damien Hirst

What about language?

In Carnogrammics, neologism becomes a notational device. Words are invented not for clarity, but for provocation. One might see markings like thresquint, vulpexin, nathar, or clept. They bear no etymological lineage, but they contain gestural DNA. To utter nathar is to sense a downward spiral, a shedding. These invented lexemes operate in place of traditional dynamics or articulation marks. They demand interpretive invention from the performer. Not knowing is essential.

 "Opreach" for Cello - Bil Smith

And sound? It is the last arrival. These scores are not sonic templates. They are triggers for residues of intention. The performer’s gestures are not instructed but exhumed from visual and linguistic density. What results is not "music" as such, but a performed archaeology of marks, folds, gestures, and hesitations. The audience hears the detritus of reading.

Carnogrammics, then, is a score archetype premised not on legibility but on phenomenological weight. The score is heavy. Disorienting. Imposing. It does not wish to help the performer. It wishes to impede, to seduce, to devour.

This is not notation. It is debris. And the performer, not unlike a respondent in a Beckett play or a Rauschenberg tableau, must interpret without guidance, must deliver without understanding, must produce sound in the absence of faith.

To me, that is where the future of notation lies.

"Immoral Geography" for Soprano Saxophone

 

"Immoral Geography" 

for Soprano Saxophone

Bil Smith Composer

Link to PDF

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sRWIVRMHbeTOVzXm7C25HJ4TlCmyHhcj/view?usp=sharing

Notational Epidemiology

Notational Epidemiology frames individual gestures or passages within a score as biologically contained units, isolated from one another by visual "containment fields" (boxes, hatching, color-coding) that performers must decide whether to breach. Cross-contamination between supposedly quarantined material becomes a compositional event in itself, and the performer is recast as something between a lab technician and a quarantine violator.

"Pelippopism": A Score-Borne Theoretical Framework

In the evolving landscape of contemporary composition, where the boundaries between visual art, linguistic play, and sonic event are deliberately destabilized, I introduce a provocative conceptual framework: Pelippopism. As a term coined from the concatenation of visual, onomatopoetic, and pseudo-Hellenistic fragments, Pelippopism proposes a multi-modal ideology that situates the musical score not only as a site of instruction or sonic coding, but as a poly-referential object of cognition, rupture, and performative agency.

Defining Pelippopism

At its core, Pelippopism asserts that a musical score, is not an antecedent to sound, but a non-hierarchical parallel to sound, language, and architectural form. The term itself, with its recursive loops of plosive and sibilant sounds, evokes the vibrational logic of both semiotic interference and kinetic movement.  It presents sound as a glyphic vibration, notation as optical residue.

In my compositions, such as Effluvium and Retro-Gradient Lustration, or A Game of Curtains, Glass Door, Twice Closed, Pelippopism reveals itself through the layering of modular symbol-sets, syntactic disobedience, and a rejection of stasis. Scores become "anarchival zones" in which the functions of notation are subjected to erasure, overwriting, and distortion.  They become gestures that enact Pelippopist refusal.

Materiality and the Pelippopist Score

Pelippopist works often begin as corrupted vectors with post-architectural blueprints infected by linguistic spores and pharmacological diagrammatics. On the page, this takes the form of compositional glyphs that recall industrial design patents, histological charts, or circuit board overlays. The typographic elements, often modeled after extralinguistic scripts or proprietary fonts, function not as legible carriers of meaning but as disrupted conduits subject to failure, re-appropriation, and misreading.

In this framework, Pelippopism is less a doctrine than a behavior. The composer acts not as author, but as cartographer of chaotic fields. The score becomes an event horizon where disciplinary silos collapse: notation as textile, performance as forensic audit, typography as bio-linguistic residue.

The Performative Imperative

Pelippopism demands that performers not interpret, but inhabit the score. Rather than seeking fidelity, the performer becomes a strategic interlocutor between unstable systems. In one example, the presence of transparent euphoniums, spectrographic glyph overlays, and asemic typographies requires the musician to interact with the score as though it were a spatialized hologram reading not in time, but across layers of opacity, feedback, and contradiction.

Such performative instability is not an error but a core feature of the Pelippopist ontology. The score is not a pre-image of performance, but a provocative partner, oscillating between architecture, image, and ruin.

Pelippopism as Aesthetic Strategy

Conceptually, Pelippopism aligns with para-Futurist sensibilities, Lettrist dérives, and the anti-systemic gestures of Jean Tinguely and Hanne Darboven. However, my embrace of pharmaceutical nomenclature, forensic simulation, and speculative linguistics places Pelippopism within a distinctly post-biotechnological aesthetic. It is a mode that treats the score as a semiotic organ, constantly rewriting itself through contamination, refusal, and breakdown.

In this light, Pelippopism is not merely a neologism. It is a methodological disorder that invites mutation, a radical anti-mnemonic strategy for encoding musical thought in the age of spectral excess and information decay.

Pelippopism offers a new topology for thinking the musical score, not as static artifact, but as a feedback vector, a non-linear libretto, and a semiotic surface infected by language, image, and speculative pharmacology. It serves as both aesthetic provocation and conceptual scaffolding.  It is a refusal to resolve, a demand to reconceive.

Let Pelippopism, then, not be defined, but continually enacted.

Let it mutate. Let it resist. Let it sound.

Fundamental Assumptions and Forgotten Lore” For Piccolo Oboe. Bil Smith Composer

 

"Fundamental Assumptions and Forgotten Lore”  

For Piccolo Oboe

Bil Smith Composer

Link to Full Score PDF

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W4pbc91kOjsInli9jZEfkDSlGO1KXXFt/view?usp=sharing

In the composition "Fundamental Assumptions and Forgotten Lore" for Piccolo Oboe, we encounter a score that invites the performer into a complex, hyper-maximalist world with its compound visualizations.

The score's foundation in liminality; its inherent resistance to being confined within the precise, well-defined borders of traditional notation, serves as a critical point of departure for understanding its essence. To fully engage with this piece is to embrace a fluidity and ambiguity that traditional musical analysis often seeks to circumvent. This embracive attitude toward the liminal allows this work to exist in a state of continuous conversation across a myriad of categorical divides, thereby challenging the performer to consider the piece not only as a composition but as a dialogue with the broader world of art and ideas.

The visualizations are not mere adornments but are integral to the piece's structure, offering a cinematic collage that intertwines with the music to create a multisensory experience. The score's engagement with complex concepts such as diasporic Blackness and theorizations of the Global South provides a fulcrum for its wide-ranging explorations, positioning the piece not merely as a musical work but as a scholarly investigation into the intersections of culture, identity, and history.

This approach to composition and notation, where the score becomes a site of interdisciplinary inquiry, reflects a broader trend in contemporary art toward the dissolution of boundaries between artistic mediums. "Fundamental Assumptions and Forgotten Lore," in its refusal to adhere to the conventional limitations of its form, invites us to reconsider the potential of the musical score as a vessel for conveying complex, nuanced ideas. The piece's reliance on visual and conceptual elements to complement and complicate its musical content encourages a mode of engagement that is both intellectual and emotional, demanding of its audience not passive consumption but active participation in the work's multifaceted dialogue.

This is not music as known to ears that crave the comfort of resolution, nor is it art to eyes that seek the solace of clarity. It is, rather, an aesthetics of imperfection, a deliberate pursuit of the unfinished, where the value lies not in the answers provided but in the questions posed, in the improvisation that unravels composition, in the contingency that unravels certainty, in the openings that defy closure.

This composition, in its refusal to adhere to the dictates of form, in its celebration of the unfinished, poses a challenge to the very notion of understanding. It demands a relinquishment of the desire for completion, an acceptance of the perpetual state of incompletion, as the truest expression of the spirit.

Perforated Monumentalism: Notes Toward a Shattered Score: On the Notational Ontology of Bil Smith by Andrew Vecset

 

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.  Think 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