The Score Is a Site

Architecture, unbuilt cities and the radical notational platform

Start with a burned hole.

In the third issue of ZERO, in 1961, some pages were not printed so much as attacked: fire went through them. I come back to that hole often, because it settles an argument that music has been having, mostly politely, for seventy years. A page is not a neutral surface waiting for symbols. It is a territory. Whatever you put on it, or burn out of it, has an address and edges. It has neighbours, and it has a climate.

Composers have known this since Earle Brown's December 1952 floated a handful of rectangles on a white field and called it music. Cornelius Cardew knew it across the 193 pages of Treatise. Larry Austin's Source, which sits in my collection closer to my own work than anything else on the shelf, printed scores so large and so strange that the magazine had to change its format to hold them. Yet when we talk about notation now, we still talk like music theorists. We discuss symbols and their meanings, and what a performer is supposed to do. We almost never ask the question an architect asks first: what kind of place is this, and who gets to live in it?

That is the question this essay wants to put at the centre of the new score. The thinkers who have worked hardest on it are architects, and most of them were happiest when they built nothing at all.

Five lines as zoning law

The five-line staff is a piece of urban planning. It zones the vertical axis into pitch and the horizontal axis into time. It legislates density through bar lines, and it gives every symbol a lot to stand on. Like most zoning, it was written to make a certain kind of building easy and every other kind expensive. A string quartet goes up on it in an afternoon. A sound that breathes, warps, or splits into three tempos at once needs a variance, a footnote, a performance-practice preface, and a patient ensemble.

I don't want to tear the grid down. Rem Koolhaas taught us, in Delirious New York in 1978, that Manhattan's relentless grid did not kill invention but provoked it. Because every block was identical, each one became a laboratory for something no one had planned. The grid's indifference was its generosity. That is my own experience with numerical structures. A strict system, a series, a matrix or a number field doesn't confine the music. It clears ground so that something unruly can grow there. The problem with the staff is not that it is a grid. It is that it is only one grid, inherited and unexamined, laid over every possible site as if music had a single terrain.

The new score needs many grids. It needs the freedom to choose, invent or abandon them, and that is a design problem before it is a musical one.

Lebbeus Woods and the unprogrammed room

No one drew instability more beautifully than Lebbeus Woods. His projects for Berlin, Zagreb and Sarajevo around 1990 were full of what he called freespaces: rooms with no assigned purpose, often hard to enter, with surfaces that refused to be level. You had to work out how to inhabit them. He was explicit that this was political. A space whose use is not fixed in advance hands authority back to the people inside it. He wrote of heterarchy, an order without a single top, in which elements govern one another in turn.

Read that as a description of a score and it becomes a programme for performance. A conventional part tells a player what to do, measure by measure, and it is a fully programmed room. A freespace score would be deliberately underdetermined in some dimensions and exact in others. The performer's first act would not be execution but occupation: reading the terrain, finding a foothold, and deciding what this place is for tonight. That is not indeterminacy as an alibi. Woods's structures were engineered with obsessive precision; their freedom came from rigour, not from vagueness. A freespace score needs the same discipline. It should be exact about its forces and tensions, and silent about the life that happens among them.

Woods's System Wien installation in Vienna in 2005 went further. It drew no buildings at all, only vectors: lines of movement and energy crossing the city like weather. That is the most musical architecture I know. It suggests a notation that writes the forces acting on sound, such as pressure, attraction, decay and resistance, and lets the sounds be whatever those forces produce.

Archigram: the score that arrives by airship

Archigram began as a magazine. In 1961 a group of young London architects (Peter Cook, Ron Herron, Warren Chalk, Dennis Crompton, David Greene and Michael Webb) stapled together a broadsheet because nobody would publish what they were drawing. Over the next thirteen years it became one of the great artist periodicals. It used collage, comic strips, pop-ups, and the famous half-issue, Archigram 9½. For someone who collects magazines that are artworks, this matters: the work and its distribution were the same thing.

The projects were outrageous in the most useful way. Cook's Plug-In City (1964) imagined a permanent megastructure into which housing, shops and services were slotted, swapped and thrown away. Herron's Walking City gave buildings legs. Instant City (1968–70) was a city carried by airships into a sleepy town, where it unloaded screens, sound, lights and people for a few days, then floated off and left the town changed.

Each is a model for the new score. Plug-In City is a score with a stable frame of time, structure and number, into which modules are inserted by composer, performer or audience, and replaced between performances. Walking City is a score that travels and adapts to each hall like a creature finding its footing. Instant City is the performance as event-infrastructure: it arrives, transforms a place, and leaves a residue. Archigram's lesson is that a radical score need not be monumental. It can be light, modular, disposable and joyful, and still be serious.

Thom Mayne: morphology as method

This magazine shares a root with Thom Mayne's firm, and the coincidence is useful. Morphosis, founded in Los Angeles in 1972, the same year Mayne helped start SCI-Arc, has always treated a building less as an object than as the result of a process. Forces such as site, programme, movement, climate and politics are mapped, layered and allowed to deform one another, until a form emerges that nobody could have drawn directly. Mayne's book Combinatory Urbanism (2011) makes the argument at city scale. Complex collective form is not designed top-down. It is produced by rules interacting over time, and the designer's job is to set the rules and steer.

This is the closest architecture comes to how I compose. I begin with a numerical structure, which is a field of relationships rather than a melody, and I let it push against material until the music finds its shape. Mayne's drawings, layered and torn open, read to me like the working sheets of such a process. They are not pictures of a finished thing but records of transformation.

A morphological score would publish the process along with the result. It would carry its generative rules on its surface, so a performer could see not only what to play but why this form and not another. It would also let them run the process again under new conditions. The score would stop being a fossil of one decision and become a living system of decisions. That, to me, is what sound morphology ought to mean: sound as something that grows into form, whose form you can still watch growing.

Koolhaas: the stacked section and the warning

The most important drawing in Delirious New York is not a skyline. It is a section through the Downtown Athletic Club of 1931, where each floor holds a different world. There is a golf course on one level, a boxing ring on another, and oyster bars and locker rooms stacked up through the building, with only the lift connecting them. Koolhaas saw in it a model for the city as a stack of independent platforms, sharing a structure but not a story. He called the result a culture of congestion.

OMA's 1982 entry for the Parc de la Villette competition laid that section on its side. The park became parallel bands of activity running across the site, free to change while the strips stayed fixed. Look at that plan with a composer's eyes and you see a full score. Each band is an instrument or a layer. They run in parallel, are coordinated by position rather than harmony, and meet in the friction of their edges.

So the new score can be a section. Layers with their own laws are stacked in one structure, each legible alone, and their congestion makes the music. One layer can run on a number series while another follows a text, a third tracks a performer's breath, and a fourth is the room's own resonance. The lift is the shared clock, or the absence of one.

Koolhaas also wrote the warning we need. In Junkspace (2001) he described the endless, seamless interior of contemporary building, such as airports, malls and atriums. It is space with no edges and no argument, where everything flows and nothing is decided. Most music software today is junkspace for notation: infinitely smooth, infinitely undoable, endlessly scrolling, and indifferent to what you put in it. A radical notational platform must resist that. It needs edges, friction and places you can't scroll past. It must be able to say no.

The others in the room

The four names in my title are only the loudest voices. Several others belong in this conversation, and one of them should arguably have been first.

Iannis Xenakis is the hinge. He was Le Corbusier's engineer and also a composer, and he moved ideas in both directions. The string glissandi of Metastaseis (1953–54) became the ruled surfaces of the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels Expo. Twenty years later his UPIC system let you draw on a tablet and hear the drawing. Xenakis proved the traffic between building and sound is not a metaphor. It is geometry, and it can be computed.

Bernard Tschumi's Manhattan Transcripts (1976–81) is the most explicitly notational work in modern architecture. Each sequence runs three tracks in parallel: photographs of events, diagrams of movement, and plans of space. Read left to right, it looks uncannily like a score for three voices. Tschumi showed that architecture could be written in time, and by the same token a score can be built in space.

Daniel Libeskind trained first as a musician, and his Chamber Works (1983) drawings play like dense, dissolving lines of counterpoint. Cedric Price's Fun Palace, conceived with Joan Littlewood in the early 1960s and never built, was a structure meant to be reconfigured by its users daily. It was architecture as an instrument rather than a monument. Constant's New Babylon imagined a whole planet given over to play, its sectors endlessly reassembled by their inhabitants.

What unites them is a refusal to treat the drawing as an instruction for something else. For each of them the drawing was already the work. It was a site of thought, unfinished on purpose and open to occupation. That is exactly where the new score must stand.

Nine propositions for the new score

What would a notational platform built on these lessons actually be? It would not be a better engraving program or a prettier graphic score. It would be an ecosystem: a shared ground where composers, performers, listeners, instruments and machines all build, occupy and alter scores over time. Here is where I would start.

1. The score is a site, not an instruction. It defines a territory with edges, forces and laws, and performance is the act of inhabiting it. (Woods)
2. Every score chooses its own grid. Number fields, series, text, maps and the body are all valid structures, and the staff is one option among many, never the default. (Koolhaas's Manhattan)
3. Structure is exact; life is free. The rigour lives in the forces, proportions and numbers. The freedom lives in what happens among them. Underdetermination is designed, never lazy. (Woods)
4. The frame is permanent; the parts plug in. A score can hold a stable armature into which modules are inserted, swapped and retired between performances, so each performance is a version, not a deviation. (Archigram)
5. The process is published with the form. Generative rules sit on the surface of the score, so anyone can see why it takes this shape and can run it again under new conditions. (Mayne)
6. Layers are stacked, not blended. Independent strata, each with its own law, share one structure and meet in friction. Congestion is the music. (Koolhaas)
7. The score has edges. The platform refuses junkspace. It needs resistance, limits and places where the music says no. Friction is a feature. (Koolhaas, again)
8. The score can be held. Like Aspen, S.M.S. or an issue of OU with its disc, the new score can be an object, such as a box, a deck of cards, a record or a burned page, as well as a file. Its material is part of its meaning.
9. The score invents its own language. Notation is not a fixed alphabet but a grammar each work may coin, as concrete poets coined theirs, and the platform's job is to make invented languages shareable without flattening them. (Xenakis, Tschumi, and the whole concrete-poetry tradition)

None of this requires us to abandon the musicians who read staves beautifully. It asks only that the staff become one neighbourhood in a much larger city, and that the city stay unfinished.

An unbuilt city, open for occupation

Most of the architecture in this essay was never built. Woods's freespaces, Plug-In City, the Fun Palace and New Babylon exist as drawings, models and magazines. Yet they changed what buildings became, because they enlarged what people believed a building could be. Visionary architecture's real construction site was the imagination of everyone who saw it.

The new score is in the same position. It does not have to wait for perfect software, for an orchestra willing to rehearse it for a month, or for a publisher brave enough to print it. Like Archigram in 1961, it can begin as a stapled broadsheet among people who refuse to wait. Sound Morphology is a good place for that broadsheet.

So here is my invitation. Send scores that are sites. Send notations with edges, with plug-in parts, with their rules showing, and with layers stacked high enough to congest. Send the burned page, the card deck, the record and the field of numbers. Let's build the city together, and keep it unfinished on purpose.

Geoplasium: Notational Cartography

Geoplasium: Notational Cartography

A cartographic aesthetic for sonic inscription and spatialized composition

Preamble

In an age of collapsing coordinates...of data gluts, ghost geographies, and fractured listenin, Geoplasium emerges not as a style, but as a terrain. It is not a movement in the conventional sense. It is a topography: speculative, unstable, interpretive. It is the dream of a score that charts not merely sound, but place. A place imagined, encoded, and inscribed.  Not to be located, but navigated.

Speculative Cartography as Compositional Logic

Geoplasium reconfigures musical notation as cartography in crisis.  It represents a space of symbolic mapping where the score becomes a sovereign zone. Sound is no longer scripted linearly, but traced across imagined landscapes. These are maps not of territories, but of potentialities: resonant plains, tonal ridgelines, rhythmic sinkholes, and harmonic weather systems.

• The page is not a page, but a geoscore, layered with vectorial trajectories and spatial sediment.

• Each notation is a latitude, each symbol a sonic landmark awaiting interpretation by the performer-cartographer.

Spatial Fiction and the Illogic of Performance

Geoplasium embraces spatial fiction.  It is the act of constructing invented environments through notation. These fictions are not lies; they are alternative realities encoded through visual syntax, open to exploratory engagement.

• The performer does not play the piece; they traverse it.

• There is no correct tempo—only directionality, scale, and proximity.

• Time is replaced by distance. Timbre by terrain.

Performance becomes locative ritual.  It is an exercise in moving through imaginary acoustic topographies.

Semiogeotics and the Language of Signs

Geoplasium is founded upon a theory of semiogeotics: the study of meaning-making at the intersection of sonic, geographic, and symbolic signifiers.

• Traditional clefs, staves, and rests are decentered, replaced or interlaced with glyphs, field-marks, and spectral artifacts.

• Each sign is a resonant cipher, drawn from visual, scientific, and linguistic sources.

• Interpretation is not fixed but relational and built through the dynamic between symbol and performer, much like a traveler decoding a dialect from limited cues.

Topographical Syntax

Rather than vertical harmony or horizontal melody, Geoplasium operates through topographical syntax which is defined as the spatial arrangement of sonic forms and interpretive logic.

• Elevation lines may signal density or dynamic range.

• Fragmented grids can encode tactile rhythm or phasing architectures.

• Iconic clusters act as gesture summits, accumulations of sonic pressure or instability.

This syntax is not formalized but adaptive, bending to each work's internal terrain. It is a grammar of edges, contours, and displacements.

On Legibility, Obfuscation, and Error

Geoplasium is deliberately resistant to standardization. It embraces the productive instability of partial legibility, misreading, and interpretive misfire.

• Every execution of a Geoplasium score is an act of translation.  It may be flawed, generative, and necessary.

• Obfuscation is not a failure, but a topological feature. It demands not precision, but presence.

• Error is redefined as geographical slippage, a reminder that all maps are approximations.

 The Performer as Navigator, Not Technician

The performer within Geoplasium is not an executor of fixed gestures, but a sonic navigator. He becomes an interpreter, mapper, improviser.

• Sight-reading becomes sight-roaming.

• Memory becomes cartographic familiarity.

• Skill becomes interpretive fluency within an unstable terrain.

Each performance is an expedition...part ritual, part cartographic revision.

Coda

Geoplasium is not a repudiation of notation, but its radical expansion. It does not erase the past; it draws over it, like an ancient city rewritten by generations of mapmakers. It is an act of sonic geography, a speculative inscription of elsewhere...where sound is not prescribed, but located, imagined, and traversed anew.

 

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?

W.I.P. - NOVEMBER, 2026

 

Typography as Sound: Notes from My Desk

Typography as Sound: Notes from My Desk

I’ve never trusted a score that only wants to be heard. Somewhere along the way, I started caring as much about how the words on my pages look as what the notes say. These days the type is often the music itself, and the performer has to find their way into it.

A handful of artists got me here, most of them not musicians at all.

David Carson

David Carson

I remember the first time I saw David Carson’s magazine layouts: text crashing into text, columns sliding off the page, headlines you had to tilt your head to read. It felt like someone had finally given typography permission to misbehave.

That’s how I use words in my scores now. An invented word like Vistrallic or Obfuscene might be broken into pieces and scattered across the page, and the performer has to put it back together in their own order. Layers of type sit on top of each other, some easy to read, some barely there, so reading becomes a kind of search. A heavy, bold word sounds different in my head from a thin, faded one, and I want the player to feel that difference too. The page stops being a road map. It becomes a maze you have to talk your way through.

Agostino Bonalumi

Bonalumi stretched his canvases over hidden shapes, so the surface swells and pushes out toward you. His paintings look like they’re breathing.

I want my scores to have that kind of body. I’ve thought about raised lettering a player has to feel with their fingers. Sheets of clear Mylar, thin wires, or rubber stretched across the page, so reading takes a little effort, the way a hard passage takes effort to play. Smooth against rough. Soft against stiff. Each texture suggests a sound. Reading the score turns into a physical act, almost a small performance in itself.

Piero Manzoni

Piero Manzoni

Manzoni canned his own excrement and called it art. He signed people and declared them living sculptures. I love him for it. He never let art take itself too seriously.

He gave me permission to be absurd. Some of my words, like Somaticor or Anaesthovalence, sound like medicines because I spend my working life naming medicines. But I never say what they mean. The performer has to decide. I’ll print words upside down, or backward, or half hidden, and see what the player does with that. I leave blank spaces on the page and let them be silences, without telling anyone how long they last. The result is part music, part joke, part dare.

Thomas Demand

Thomas Demand

Thomas Demand builds rooms out of paper, photographs them, then destroys the models. The photographs look completely real until you notice everything’s a little too perfect.

That idea, of something built to look real, runs through a lot of my work. I break words into small parts the performer has to assemble. I layer clear sheets of type so certain words only appear when you tilt the page toward the light. Folds and layers make the score feel constructed, like one of his rooms, and the player starts to wonder how much of what they’re reading is real and how much they’re making up. Meaning ends up somewhere between my intentions and theirs.

Jennifer West

Jennifer West

Jennifer West’s experimental films, where text, sound, and image pile up and shift, showed me that words don’t have to sit still. In her hands, text moves through time.

So why not in a score? Words could be projected into the room, or printed on surfaces that turn, so the meaning keeps changing while the music plays. Film techniques like cuts, dissolves, and overlays can become ways of laying out type, each one suggesting a rhythm or a color of sound. The score starts to behave like a film, and the performer has to keep up with it.

Where this leaves me

Put all of that together, and the words on the page stop being labels for the music. They become the structure the music lives in.

Invented words become sparks. Players hear them, say them, feel what they suggest, and make sound from that. The page itself becomes something to touch, so reading becomes physical. And text that moves, shifts, or appears in the room brings time into the score, until it’s hard to tell where the page ends and the performance begins.

I don’t know exactly where this leads. I just know that every time I let the words on the page get a little stranger, the music gets more interesting.

What Lee Bontecou Taught Me About Scores

 

 

What Lee Bontecou Taught Me About Scores

The first time I stood in front of one of Lee Bontecou’s wall reliefs, I didn’t want to look at it so much as climb into it. All that welded steel and stretched canvas, pulled tight around a black hole in the middle. I leaned in, half expecting to hear something come out of the dark.

I’ve had that same feeling opening certain scores. You look at a page of marks and realize it’s not really telling you what to do. It’s inviting you somewhere. Bontecou’s work does that to me every time, and over the years it’s quietly changed how I think about making a score. I don’t want to copy how her work looks. I want to borrow how she thought.

Here are five things she taught me.

1. The hole is where the music is

Bontecou’s black openings are the first thing everyone notices. They feel empty and full at the same time, like something might be waiting in there. Silence in music works the same way. It’s never just nothing. It’s held breath.

So I started wondering what would happen if a score had actual holes in it. Literal cutouts in the paper, or blacked-out areas on a screen, where the performer has to decide what happens. Maybe it’s silence. Maybe it’s improvisation. Maybe it’s a cue to move, or to turn the page around.

Picture a string quartet called Hollow Frequencies. The players read the shapes around each hole: a round opening might swell outward into a crescendo, while a jagged tear might mean something sudden and sharp. The music stops running in a straight line from left to right. It starts orbiting the empty spaces instead.

2. A score can be built, not written

Bontecou didn’t paint her early pieces. She assembled them from steel frames and canvas, often salvaged materials like old conveyor belts, all stitched and wired together. Every part stays visible, but somehow it all becomes one thing.

That made me think about scores as kits. Separate pieces, each holding its own music, that performers arrange themselves.

Imagine Industrial Resonances, written on sheets of translucent vellum. Some panels hold jagged, metallic shapes for hard attacks. Others hold woven patterns for layered textures. The players arrange them on a magnetic board before each performance, so no two concerts are ever built the same way. The composer makes the parts. The performers make the piece.

3. What it’s made of matters

Bontecou’s materials weren’t neutral. Steel and canvas carried the weight of the postwar industrial world, and later, when she turned to molded plastics, the work felt fragile and strange in a completely new way. You can’t separate what her pieces mean from what they’re made of.

Scores don’t have to live on white paper either. What would it mean to read music off a steel plate, a sheet of acrylic, or a piece of rough cloth?

Think of Tactile Horizons, its notation etched into metal, so the performer has to run a finger along the grooves to read it. The act of touching the score becomes part of the performance. The page stops being paper and becomes an object, something closer to sculpture.

4. A line can tell a story

Her drawings, many of them made with soot, are full of sweeping arcs and sharp edges that feel like thoughts in motion. They aren’t pictures of things. They’re records of movement and feeling.

Musicians already live by the line: melody, phrasing, the arc of a whole piece. But Bontecou made me see line as a gesture in its own right.

In a piece called Line of Ascent, performers might follow long curves drawn across a large canvas. How thick the line is, how rough, which way it travels: all of it translates into bow pressure, vocal intensity, or the force of an attack. The drawing is the music.

5. Show the work in progress

The critic Suzanne Hudson, writing in Artforum, described Bontecou’s work as a record of her own process, forms caught in the middle of taking shape. That idea has stayed with me. So much new music is about process too, about leaving things open.

What if a score showed how it was made? Sketches, crossed-out passages, notes in the margins, all left on the page.

Imagine Echoes of Assembly, where the final music sits on top of layers of my working notes. Erased lines, rewritten bars, a notation system I abandoned halfway through. Performers decide which layers to bring forward and which to leave buried. Every performance becomes another round of building the piece.

Why she matters to me

Bontecou eventually stepped away from the art world and kept working mostly out of public view. I think about that a lot. She never seemed interested in making things easier to understand. She just kept following the work wherever it led.

That’s what I want from my scores. Not a set of instructions, but a place you can step into, with dark corners worth exploring. Her black holes were never empty. They were openings. I’ve come to believe a good score works the same way: it doesn’t end where the marks stop. That’s where it starts.

 

"Molecular Semantics: Naming the Drug, Notating the Score"

By Bil Smith

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For most of my working life I’ve had two desks. At one, I name medicines. At the other, I take music notation apart and put it back together wrong, on purpose. People assume these are separate lives. They aren’t. I’ve just never found a good way to explain that at dinner parties.

When we named Remicade, we weren’t decorating a molecule. We were building something that had to survive a pharmacist’s handwriting, a lawyer’s search, and a frightened patient saying it out loud for the first time. Every sound was argued over. Did it feel trustworthy? Did it hint at what the drug does without promising too much? Could a doctor say it twenty times a day without tripping? Evenity, Vyondys, Veozah: each one went through that same slow, obsessive tuning. The weight of a vowel. Where the hard consonant lands. How it ends in the mouth. I’ve spent decades listening to names that way, and somewhere along the line I stopped being able to listen to anything else that way too.

So it’s no accident that my scores have names like Ablutorax for Septal Loops or Extylphex Miasma for Atonal Conduction. They sound like medicines because I think like someone who makes medicines sound right. They don’t mean anything in the dictionary sense. They’re meant to land somewhere in your chest before your brain catches up. A good drug name does the same thing. It suggests. It doesn’t explain.

Every name I’ve ever proposed has been picked apart by regulators. The FDA and EMA look for confusion, sound-alikes, anything that could lead someone to take the wrong pill. There’s even a computer score for it. I find that oddly moving: an entire system built around the fear that a word might be misunderstood. My scores go through their own review. Musicians read them, argue with them, misread them, and make something I never imagined. In medicine, misunderstanding is the danger. In my music, it’s the point.

That’s why my pages often look like they came out of a pharmacy. Blister packs. Boxed warnings. Dosage tables. Patient information inserts. I’m not being clever. I genuinely believe music is something you take. It goes into the body and changes it for a while, and then it wears off, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Over the years, Brand Acumen has created more than a thousand drug names, from Abilify to Atripla. I used to think of that list as a client record. Now I think of it as the longest piece I’ve ever written. Each name is a tiny composition, performed every time a doctor writes it on a pad or a patient repeats it in a waiting room, quietly, to make sure they’ve got it right.

So when someone performs one of my scores, I don’t really think of it as playing music. It’s closer to administering something. You’re giving the room a dose. You’re taking the risk that someone will hear it wrong. You’re putting a name on something that has no body.

No agency regulates my scores. Only attention does, and attention is a much harder reviewer to satisfy.

If both of my desks have taught me one thing, it’s this: the words are the active ingredient. Everything else is how they reach you.