Assembling The Elements of My Scores

 

Assembling The Elements of My Scores

By Bil Smith

My scores are not merely instructions for music; they are synthetic objects.  They are assemblages of sound, symbol, architecture, and language. They function as performative systems: visual environments saturated with musical, poetic, and semiotic potential. Their construction is not procedural, but material and linguistic, developed through acts of layering, collision, translation, and provocation.

To describe how these scores are put together is to describe an evolving practice of sonic image-making where visual syntax, textual interference, and invented language operate together as compositional matter. In these works, notation is not a code to be deciphered but a living diagram.  They become a  space of negotiation, indeterminacy, and active authorship.

From Pre-Notation to Visual Grammar

The process begins in a pre-notational state.  This occurs before staves, measures, or rhythm where gesture, form, and conceptual impulse guide the creation of visual fields. I often begin with what I call vectorial provocations: drawings, splines, structural schematics, or 3D renderings that behave like sonic catalysts.

These gestures generate a visual grammar, what I call a a proto-score. It is not yet musical in the conventional sense, but it contains the kinetic and affective energy of music. These early constructions consist of curved architectures, broken staves, mechanical arms.  They become the armature upon which notational and textual systems are later anchored.

The Syntactic Scaffold: Building a Score in Layers

Once these vectorial elements are in place, I begin to construct what I call the syntactic scaffold. This is where musical notation, spatial logic, and typographic systems intersect. I embed traditional notational marks such as clefs, accidentals, and rhythmic fragments into distorted staves that collapse linear time and expand spatialized logic.

At this stage, the score functions more like a site than a system. Performers do not read left to right but traverse.  They drift, navigate, dig, orbit. Temporal relationships are encoded through density, contrast, layering, and spatial juxtaposition, not metronomic measure.

This scaffold is also where I integrate non-musical systems.  This may include medical imagery, circuitry, and architectural blueprints which behave like parasitic notations, challenging the performer to read outside of familiarity.

Language and Neologism: Text as Sonic Intervention

Integral to my process is the integration of language and invented text. I treat language not as annotation, but as a compositional material that transforms into a sonic-textual event that generates rhythm, texture, and conceptual dissonance. Words appear not to clarify, but to complicate, confuse, and reorient.

I often use:

• All-caps imperatives ("FREEZE!", "REFREEZE!", "SPILL!") as performative commands or false directives

• Fictional acronyms (e.g., "SZEOC") that echo corporate or technical language without yielding transparency

• Neologisms ("TICTRAP," "AURALAND," "LIMOLELLEOPELLI")—synthetic words that operate as naming mechanisms without fixed meaning, inviting the performer to speculate their purpose

These textual artifacts introduce a linguistic entropy into the score. They create zones of language noise, where the semantics collapse into phonetics, and the performer must decide whether to speak, vocalize, ignore, or sonify the text.

This use of invented language is part of a broader project: to queer the idea of legibility, to dislocate the authority of notation, and to allow language itself to become musical...a visual and sonic irritant embedded in the score’s architecture.

Symbolic Density and Iconographic Assemblage

The next phase involves iconographic integration: the placement of symbolic objects, signs, and rendered textures that introduce non-instructional meaning into the score. These may include:

• Classical sculptures juxtaposed with circuit paths

• Industrial icons adjacent to notated glissandi

• Film strips winding through note clusters

• Diagrams of unknown systems bordering musical instructions

These are not narrative symbols, but they are visual agents that destabilize the reading experience, suggesting metaphor, critique, or satire without prescribing a single interpretation.

Here, the visual density serves a performative purpose. It creates zones of friction, asking the performer to navigate complexity rather than decode clarity. Notation becomes relational and atmospheric, not absolute.

Temporal Distortion and Sonic Topography

Despite their architectural stillness, these scores are deeply concerned with time.  I am not referring to not measured time, but experienced time, disrupted time, and synthetic duration.

I achieve this through:

• Graphic compression (tight clusters of micro-notation) to suggest intensification

• Visual rupture (large gaps, overlapping layers, jarring shifts) to imply interruption or spillover

• Repeated neologisms or visual motifs (e.g., “SPILL” appearing amid expanding glyphs) to reinforce time-as-affect, time-as-collapse

These operations replace tempo with topology. The performer doesn't just “play through” time, but they encounter it, shaped by the score’s material architecture and textual disruptions.

Final Assembly and Performativity

The final stage of building the score is not print layout or PDF formatting.   It is the construction of a total encounter. The image must operate on multiple levels:

• As a standalone visual artifact

• As a performative script

• As a semiotic labyrinth

• As a linguistic playground

• As a conceptual critique of notation itself

The performer becomes the final assembler who is tasked not with executing instructions, but with translating, embodying, resisting, and resonating the score’s material.

It is in this moment between score and body, between symbol and gesture that the assemblage becomes alive.

 Toward a Post-Notational Poetics

How are these scores put together? Through graphic architecture, linguistic invention, and semiotic layering. Through the deliberate use of interference, opacity, rupture, and fiction. Through the belief that a score is not a map to be followed but a site to be performed.  One to be read as an object, not as a message.

By integrating text, language, and neologism alongside notation, I aim to produce scores that think.  These scores  refuse transparency, reward curiosity, and demand a creative reading of the world and its signs.

These works are not merely visual music. They are epistemological performances, designed to be as rich in silence as they are in sound, as much about reading and misreading as about playing.

In a world where meaning is always mediated, I want the score to be the place where that mediation is made visible, audible, and unstable.

WIP>>>>>>>

 

The AFTERSOUND Composition: Music That Begins After It Ends

 

Recording on SoundCloud:  

"Synerbes" for Orchestra and Electronic Tape Premiered January 17, 2013 at Zipper Hall, Colburn School of Music, Los Angeles, California -

https://soundcloud.com/bil-smith/synerbes-for-orchestra-and

The AFTERSOUND Composition

Music That Begins After It Ends

Some compositions are over before they begin. Others begin only after they are over.

The AFTERSOUND Composition belongs to the second category. It is not defined by what happens while the notes are present, but by what continues to happen when they are no longer there. Its true material is not sound, but residue. Not duration, but persistence. Not performance, but the disturbance left behind.

A conventional composition asks to be heard as it unfolds. The AFTERSOUND asks to be heard in retrospect, in the space where the ear is no longer receiving information but the mind refuses to stop processing it. The piece has ended. The room is quiet. Yet something has not been released. Something remains suspended in the listener, like dust disturbed by a door that has already closed.

This is not simply reverberation. Reverberation belongs to acoustics. Aftersound belongs to consciousness.

A note can end cleanly in the room and continue with frightening clarity in the body. A chord can vanish from the air and remain lodged in memory, not as recollection but as pressure. A fragment of rhythm can keep moving after the performer has stopped moving. The AFTERSOUND Composition is built around that phenomenon. It treats the silence after the event as the site where the work reveals itself.

The listener may believe the piece has finished. The piece knows better.

The Real Ending Is Never the Cutoff

Most endings are misunderstood. We tend to think of an ending as the point at which sound stops, the final bar line, the last attack, the moment the performer lowers the hands or releases the breath. But in the AFTERSOUND Composition, that moment is not the end. It is the transfer.

The work migrates from the instrument to the listener.

This transfer is delicate and sometimes violent. A composition may conclude with a sound so spare that the listener leans forward, still waiting for the next thing. Or it may end with an event so dense that the mind continues unpacking it long after the room has gone still. Either way, the piece refuses to occupy only the time assigned to it. It colonizes the aftermath.

This makes the AFTERSOUND Composition fundamentally different from music that merely fades, resolves, or concludes. It does not settle. It does not provide the courtesy of closure. Its ending is a wound, a hinge, a trapdoor, a residue field. The final sound is less a conclusion than a contaminant released into silence.

The old question is, what happens next?

The AFTERSOUND replies, you do.

Silence as a Host Medium

Silence is often treated as absence, but in certain compositions it behaves more like a host medium. It receives the outgoing sound, holds its shape for a moment, then begins to change it. The sound is gone, but silence keeps developing it.

This is one of the stranger properties of musical experience. A listener can hear the same final note differently after it ends than while it was sounding. The note becomes larger in disappearance. It gathers implication. It turns from event into evidence.

The AFTERSOUND Composition depends on this transformation. It is written not only for instruments, voices, objects, electronics, or bodies, but for the silence that follows them. The composer must imagine the silence as an active surface, capable of retaining marks. Every gesture must be judged not only by how it sounds, but by what kind of silence it leaves.

There are silences that erase.

There are silences that frame.

There are silences that accuse.

There are silences that continue the piece more powerfully than sound could.

The AFTERSOUND Composition seeks the last kind. It does not use silence as a pause. It uses silence as an extension of the instrument.

The Score as Residue Machine

A score designed for aftersound may look conventional, but it is not thinking conventionally. Its real instruction may be hidden in the relationship between gesture and disappearance. A note marked short may not mean brevity. It may mean impact. A long tone may not mean sustain. It may mean saturation. A rest may not mean waiting. It may mean the listener has been left alone with what was just done.

In more visually expanded scores, this becomes even more explicit. A mark may operate like an index of aftermath rather than a command for sound. A color field may indicate the emotional climate left behind by a gesture. A diagram may point to the way an event should decay in attention rather than in acoustical space. An image may be placed not to be interpreted as sound, but to alter the listener’s memory of what just occurred.

In this sense, the AFTERSOUND Composition is not only musical. It is forensic. It asks the performer to leave traces. It asks the listener to encounter those traces as the true field of the work.

The score becomes a residue machine.

It produces not a sequence of events, but a sequence of hauntings.

The Ethics of Not Finishing

There is a certain violence in refusing to finish a piece properly. Not the theatrical violence of shock, but the quieter violence of withholding completion. The AFTERSOUND Composition is often built around this refusal. It does not resolve because resolution would weaken the residue. It does not explain because explanation would consume the pressure. It does not release because release would convert the work into something finished.

This is not vagueness. It is precision of another kind.

To compose an aftersound is to decide exactly what the listener must be forced to carry away. The work may leave behind anxiety, tenderness, absurdity, erotic charge, dread, relief, numbness, or a difficult mixture of several states. But it must leave something definite enough to persist and unstable enough to keep changing.

A bad unresolved piece merely stops.

A true AFTERSOUND Composition continues by other means.

That continuation is not under the composer’s full control, which is part of the danger. Once the sound has ended, the work depends on memory, nervous system, room, expectation, mood, and the listener’s private weather. The composer has set the conditions, but the residue mutates in each person differently.

This is not a failure of the form. It is the form.

The Listener as After-Performer

The AFTERSOUND Composition quietly changes the role of the listener. Listening does not end when the sound ends. The listener becomes an after-performer, continuing the piece internally through recollection, distortion, resistance, and return.

This is why certain musical moments reappear later with no invitation. Hours after a performance, while crossing a street or opening a refrigerator, the listener may suddenly hear the piece again, not as memory exactly, but as a recurrence. A small detail returns altered. A silence returns louder than before. A sound that seemed minor becomes central. The piece, which appeared finished, has been working in secret.

This delayed action is one of the most beautiful and unnerving capacities of music. Sound disappears, but it does not always leave. The AFTERSOUND Composition makes that contradiction its governing principle.

It does not ask, what can music express while it is sounding?

It asks, what can music implant?

Against the Monument

The AFTERSOUND Composition is not interested in monumentality in the usual sense. It does not need scale, mass, grandeur, or extended architecture. A tiny piece can produce an immense aftermath. A nearly empty gesture can leave more behind than a page of virtuosity. The important question is not how much material the composer presents, but how effectively the material changes the silence around it.

This places the AFTERSOUND Composition close to certain forms of visual art, where the object is only part of the encounter. A small sculpture can reorganize the room. A photograph can alter the memory of a place it never occupied. A single word on a wall can continue speaking long after the viewer turns away.

So too with music. The composition may be brief, sparse, even evasive. But if it changes the listener’s relation to the silence that follows, it has expanded beyond its apparent limits.

The monument is not the piece.

The monument is the residue it leaves in perception.

Composing the Unheard Continuation

To write an AFTERSOUND Composition is to compose beyond audibility. The composer must imagine the unheard continuation as part of the work’s structure. What does the last sound do after it dies? What does the listener still feel responsible for? What has been left unresolved because it must remain alive outside the piece?

This kind of composition cannot be measured only by the score, the recording, or the clock. Its success occurs in the interval after documentation fails. A recording may capture the sound, but not the exact temperature of the room after the sound. A score may indicate the event, but not the private persistence it triggers. The work’s most important activity may happen where notation cannot follow.

That is the strange authority of the AFTERSOUND Composition. It accepts that music is not finished by ending. It accepts that disappearance can be a compositional material. It accepts that silence is not empty, but charged with whatever has been placed inside it.

The piece ends.

The aftersound begins.

And somewhere in that continuation, after the performer has stopped, after the page has gone still, after the audience has started to breathe again, the composition finally becomes what it was built to be.

"Codex, Capsule, Cadence: On Notation as Spatial Artifact" by Richard Towns

 

Codex, Capsule, Cadence: On Notation as Spatial Artifact

Refiguring the Score as Object, Site, and System

by Richard Towns

From Scroll to Structure

Notation, once a linear device for transmitting sonic intent, has fractured. In the wake of 20th-century experimentalism and 21st-century post-disciplinary hybridity, the score no longer behaves as a servant to sound, nor a silent intermediary between composer and performer. Today, it often asserts itself as an autonomous spatial artifact...a codex, a capsule, a cadence frozen in sculptural stasis.

To treat notation spatially is to relinquish fidelity to traditional temporality. The staff becomes scaffolding. The page becomes a site. And the composer, no longer a drafter of symbols alone, becomes a builder, archivist, and spatial tactician.

Codex: The Score as Encyclopedic Lexicon

The codex, as form and metaphor, recalls an earlier phase of human inscription before the industrialized flattening of books, when pages folded and stitched offered sequences that coiled rather than streamed.

Within the compositional context, the codex-score functions as a nonlinear archive, where each page or unit may operate independently or relationally, mirroring the logic of a modular system. We see this in Bil Smith's pharmacological circle lexicon, where each notational unit (or "capsule") is given equal epistemic weight, akin to entries in an apocryphal formulary.

These scores don’t rely on a single temporal thread; rather, they present a field of events; of conceptual fragments that resist hierarchy, embracing instead the semantic simultaneity of the codex.

A codex-score thus:

• Denies the primacy of the first page or last.

• Invites reading in reverse, tangents, or spirals.

• Becomes an assemblage of potentials, not a route.

Capsule: The Score as Contained System

Where the codex suggests a flexible architecture, the capsule evokes a self-contained semantic organ.  It presents itself as a sealed vessel of intentionality. In Bil Smith's compositional vocabulary, each circle in his pharmacological lexicon acts as a capsule of encoded meaning, visually hermetic, but internally complex.

Each circle is marked not merely with aesthetic design, but layered with extramusical metadata: pharmacokinetic attributes, synthetic procedures, and routes of administration. These capsules perform dual functions:

• As notation, they direct interpretation.

• As objects, they resist legibility.

The capsule-score challenges the performer to decode rather than read, to confront a dense object whose musical outcome is not transparent but induced, administered like a drug, released slowly through interpretive labor.

This aligns with a broader trend in visual notation that seeks to:

• Encapsulate musical gesture in visual or material form.

• Encode external systems (medical, political, historical) into notational devices.

• Prioritize material presence over performative ease.

Cadence: Temporality Rewritten

To introduce cadence into this framework is to reframe musical time as spatial negotiation. Cadence is no longer an aural resolution; it is a moment of spatial arrival, the point where the notational object crystallizes into perceptual action.

Spatial scores redefine cadence through:

• Topographic logic: Time emerges through the performer’s traversal of space, across a table, down a wall, through a folded book.

• Haptic delay: Scores that demand physical manipulation (turning, unfolding, rotating) create tactile cadences, where rhythm is governed by motion, not measure.

• Visual density: The performer's sense of progression is calibrated not by bar lines, but by the saturation of symbol, color, or mass.

Jorinde Voigt’s scores, for instance, blur the boundary between line and phrase.  A single curved stroke may embody multiple registers of cadence, depending on how it’s approached. Likewise, in Smith’s Serio-Constructivist works, cadence is sculptural: embedded within visual form, but only perceived once enacted.

Notation as Spatial Resistance

When notation becomes spatial, it becomes political.

Spatial artifacts disrupt the temporal hegemony of linear scores. They resist commodification through unpredictability, through excess, through unreadability. They cannot be easily excerpted or performed without commitment. They do not serve performance.  They demand engagement.

This shift from notation-as-instruction to notation-as-object parallels broader trends in contemporary art:

• The artist's book as sculpture.

• The score as document, trace, or instruction set.

• Performance as archaeology digging through coded objects to extract meaning.

Toward a New Ontology of the Score

The evolution of the score into codex, capsule, and cadence signals a new ontological space for music-making.  It is one in which the visual and spatial are not decorative, but generative. This is not an abandonment of music but an expansion of what music can be: speculative, sculptural, and lexically charged.

To compose such a score is to engage in architectural writing. To perform it is to inhabit a site. To listen to it is to trace its contours in real time, moving not through time alone, but through form, texture, and space.

The Score Beyond Sound

“Codex, Capsule, Cadence” is not simply a poetic triad.  It is a framework for thinking through notation as epistemology. It recognizes that to notate is to build, to enclose, to resonate.

And in that spatial gesture, the score ceases to be transparent.

It becomes visible.

It becomes embodied.

It becomes real.

The Typographic Score: Ed Ruscha and the Sonic Syntax of Word- Introduction: Typography as Sonic Architecture

 

In the expanding frontier of non-traditional notation, the intersection of typography and sound remains an underexplored yet profoundly fertile domain. Ed Ruscha’s word-based paintings, which treat typography as both semantic carrier and formal structure, offer a compelling visual framework for rethinking notation as a linguistic and performative system.

This essay examines how Ruscha’s typographic aesthetics—his use of displaced, fragmented, and emotionally charged lettering—can be repurposed as a sonic syntax within experimental music notation. It explores the idea of the typographic score, where textual elements assume performative musical functions, and notation moves beyond its traditional role as pitch and duration indicator, instead becoming a visual-linguistic event in and of itself.

---

Word as Score: The Ruscha Aesthetic and its Sonic Potential

Ed Ruscha’s work is driven by an engagement with language as an image, distilling words into isolated, suspended, or distorted entities that demand interaction beyond conventional reading. His works such as OOF (1962) and HONK (1962) present words not as conveyors of meaning, but as sensory objects, forcing the viewer to engage with their phonetic, visual, and material dimensions.

In the context of music notation, this suggests an alternative sonic approach, where words function as dynamic triggers for musical action rather than simply as textual markers. A typographic score, then, is one in which the design, font weight, kerning, spatiality, and distortion of letters inform the gestural and sonic interpretation of the performer.

---

Building a Typographic Notation System: Key Elements

1. Font as Timbre and Sonic Density

• Heavyweight fonts (e.g., Ruscha’s bold block lettering) could signify fortissimo dynamics, thick sonic textures, or clustered harmonic density.
• Light, delicate serifs might indicate whispered, ephemeral, or airy tones, guiding performers into highly sensitive sound worlds.

2. Letter Spacing and Sonic Time

• Condensed typography suggests compressed, accelerated phrasing or glissandi.
• Widely spaced letters might imply sustained resonance, delay effects, or spatial separation in ensemble performance.

3. Orientation and Distortion as Sonic Manipulation

• Words tilted or fragmented in the score function as instructions for bending pitch, modifying timbre, or shifting rhythmic perception.
• Ruscha’s fading or dissolving text could translate into gradual diminuendos, spectral dissipation, or textural deconstructions.

4. Word-Specific Phonetics and Performative Action

• Words that contain plosives (P, T, K, B) could trigger percussive articulations.
• Sibilant-heavy words (S, Z, Sh) might direct performers towards breathy extended techniques or noise-based sound production.
• Onomatopoeic text elements (WHAM, BUZZ, CLICK) become direct performative cues, suggesting specific instrumental or vocal articulations.

---

Typographic Scores in Practice: Experimenting with Word-Based Notation

A typographic score does not simply integrate words as text annotations—it treats typography as the primary vehicle of sound encoding.

Example 1: The Sonic Grid of Letterforms

A typographic score could present words in a gridded matrix, where the vertical axis determines pitch range or harmonic spectrum, while the horizontal axis determines temporal unfolding or rhythmic density. Bolder, larger text may function as sound anchors, while faded or italicized letters function as transitional elements.

Example 2: Text as Kinetic Notation

Taking inspiration from Ruscha’s liquid-like distortions, a score could present words that visually melt, fracture, or collapse, requiring the performer to sonically interpret their rate of deformation. If a word in the score visually dissolves, a performer might gradually introduce granular synthesis, microtonal inflections, or bowed textures that fade into indistinction.

Example 3: Negative Space and Sonic Silence

Just as Ruscha often emphasizes negative space as an active design component, a typographic score might utilize blank gaps, word fragmentation, or obscured lettering as a way to articulate silence, spatialized rests, or non-action in performance.

---

Beyond Ruscha: The Future of Typographic Scores

While Ruscha’s work provides a foundational visual model, typographic notation has the potential to expand in multiple directions:

• Augmented Reality Scores: Using digital typography that changes in real time, reacting to performer input.
• AI-Generated Word Scores: Allowing machine learning models to generate new typographic sonic structures based on linguistic and phonetic analysis.
• Neural-Responsive Typography: Using brain-computer interfaces to dynamically alter the typographic score based on performer biofeedback.

---

Word as a Sonic Event

Ed Ruscha’s typographic paintings demonstrate that words are not simply vessels for meaning—they are material forms, perceptual fields, and objects of physical interaction. In the same way, typographic scores redefine how notation operates, shifting it from a linear system of musical instruction to an immersive, visually-driven sonic event.

Through the careful manipulation of font, spatial layout, and typographic architecture, a typographic score does not merely represent music—it becomes an active participant in its realization.

WIP>>>>>>>>>>>>>>