"Windless Hall". The Tactile Score. For One or Two Percussionists.

"WINDLESS HALL OF UNKNOWN APPARATUS" 

FOR ONE OR TWO PERCUSSIONISTS. 

Recording on Laboratorie New Music label, Premiere Recording: Darmstadt, 2012

The performer may choose up to fourteen separate percussion instruments to use throughout the performance. Whatever number of instruments the performer chooses, he/she must engage all instruments throughout the performance with frequency of use determined by the performer. It would therefore be feasible that an instrument be stricken but once (and potentially imperceptibly inaudible).

The performer may arrange the boxes in any manner seen fit. They may remain inside the large box or removed from the large box and placed at the discretion of the performer. A box may be turned, flipped or relocated at any time during the performance.

The materials represent consistencies to be aspired to during the piece. In the colophon, each material is defined and while the performer will create their own personal syntacticon based on these performance notes (found in the colophon), the tactile representation of the materials as they appear and reappear should remain consistent. Here the boxes and imagery profusely expand the vocabulary nurtured by symbolic masks, autobiographical events, and references to painting styles and spontaneous thoughts.

An innate inclination toward the geometric as is the overwhelmingly panoramic surface of the small scale painting found as hidden gems in the small reliefs.

Antiseptic Pantheon and the Evidentiary Color Achive

(Fragments recovered from Smith Jubal Notational Corpus #109b, which may also be #109c, or a later copy of a document that predates both)

(Annotated by the composer, re-annotated by the archive, contradicted by both, and almost certainly corrupted)

"Each note is a god in quarantine.

Each page a sterile shrine, sealed in lacquered tempo.

Each performance a breach of protocol I have chosen to permit."

—Inscription on the verso of Codex Para-Sterile, Bil Smith (unpublished; withdrawn; republished; withdrawn again)

❐ "The Antiseptic Pantheon"

I did not invent the Antiseptic Pantheon. I found it, the way a pathologist finds what was already growing in the sample.

People who have studied the Smith Jubal system describe its architecture as a hybrid of medical cartography and war memorial engraving. That description is accurate, and incomplete. It is also a pharmacy. Every score I make carries an indication, a dosage, and a list of contraindications, because sound administered without supervision is a controlled substance, and I prefer to write the label myself.

The Pantheon is not a notational style. It is a liturgy for a religion that has been fully sterilized: a taxonomy of deities scrubbed of belief and preserved only through their refusal to be performed. Each deity (read: pitch class, harmonic cell, psychoacoustic event, symbolic fracture, or, in at least one documented case, a pharmaceutical name that does not exist yet) is housed in a chemically sterile zone. A white void. Thin black concentric halos. A meter that obeys geometry from somewhere other than Euclid.

The staff lines are containment fields. They do not support the notes; they detain them. When I draw a staff, I am not giving the music a place to stand. I am building the cell.

[Archive note: The composer has elsewhere stated that the staff lines are "decorative" and "mean nothing at all." Both statements appear in his hand, on the same page, in different inks. Carbon dating of the inks was inconclusive. One of them may be newer than the page.]

Performers who have attempted these scores have reported the following:

• Temporal distortion during sustained phrases, catalogued as "Velocity Lag." The note arrives late, or the performer does.
• Synesthetic nausea triggered by violet glyph clusters, also called "Minor God Ribbons," also called (by one cellist, who has since stopped answering correspondence) "the purple ones."
• Recursion fatigue: the experience of having played a gesture before it was read, and then reading it, and finding it already slightly worn.
• Dosage drift: following the tempo instruction, "Take two measures every eight hours, with or without food," the performer loses track of whether the piece has begun.
• Attribution vertigo: the conviction, during performance, that the score was written by the performer and merely signed by me.

Marginalia found on certain scores include:

Don't unseal this one yet... still volatile.
Pentatonic sigil might leak if tapped.
Indicated for: listeners who have stopped believing in resolution.
Not for use in children, churches, or the key of D.
This paragraph was not here yesterday.

These are not jokes. They are infection protocols for music that wants to escape, written by a composer who is not entirely sure he wants to stop it.

❒ "The Evidentiary Color Archive"

Where the Pantheon organizes itself through absence, the Archive is built on overflow: a forensic chromatic excess in which every hue is placed on trial and none is ever acquitted.

In the Smith Jubal manuscripts, color is not ornament and it is not pitch. It is evidence. Each swatch is entered into the record as proof, not of a performance, but of intention, of trace, of contamination. The red may be breath. The teal, an inhale that was never completed. A yellow smear may be the exact duration of doubt, measured to the millisecond and then deliberately smudged so that no one, including me, can measure it again.

"We do not write music," I once wrote. "We deposit evidence."

[Archive note: This quotation also appears, verbatim, in a 1960s gallery catalogue for an artist who is not Bil Smith. The composer denies having read it. The catalogue denies having printed it. Both copies are held in the Archive, in the same folder, and the folder is labeled in pencil: "Same hand?"]

Ink becomes deposition. Graphite becomes affidavit. Spray becomes perjury. Gold leaf becomes a bribe. Every page is an exhibit with a chain of custody, and the chain has been broken at least once, probably by me.

The performer standing before a page from the Archive is no longer a reader. The performer is a witness, called to the stand, sworn in, and asked to testify about events they did not see, in a language they were not taught, before a court that has already reached its verdict.

The verdict is sealed. I have it. I have never opened it.

▣ FORMAL TRAITS OF SMITH JUBAL NOTATION (SELECTED, RECONSTRUCTED, DISPUTED)

ELEMENT	FUNCTION	STATUS
Laminated Glyph Mass	Notational clusters sealed in acetate; "Do Not Touch" gestures, preserved like an artist's sealed tin, contents unverified	Unopened. Possibly empty. Possibly not.
Isobaric Trough	A deep cut or indentation in the page signifying unspeakable silence; the paper is wounded so the silence has somewhere to go	Active. Do not press.
Perimeter Chantline	A continuous phrase-loop scrawled around the page edge, sometimes in blood analog, sometimes in a crawling declarative text the performer must read aloud and not believe	Looping. Origin point unknown.
Evidentiary Splotch	Color blot catalogued by pH and intent, not tone	Admitted as evidence. Contested.
Detained Clefs	Conventional clefs boxed in annotation grids, unplayable unless formally "released"	Held without charge.
Dosage Bar	A measure carrying a prescription instead of a tempo; administered, not counted	Off-label use reported.
Calendar Staff	Duration written out by date, one line for each day the piece was not performed	Ongoing. Currently in its fourth year.
Polished Void	A passage executed so flawlessly it becomes indistinguishable from nothing at all	Under review. Possibly the most dangerous element.
The Unnamed Compound	A note-cluster labeled with an invented drug name, "indicated for" a rare condition, with no supplier	Orphan status pending.

⎇ The two systems, the Antiseptic Pantheon and the Evidentiary Color Archive, exist in contrapuntal friction. One silences; the other testifies. One bleaches the divine down to its residue; the other proves the crime by refusing to clean it up. I have spent years trying to decide which of them I believe in. Lately I suspect they are the same system, viewed from opposite sides of a glass partition, and that I am the glass.

It is said that some of the Pantheon scores burn themselves when performed too literally, leaving a charred surface more beautiful than the music it consumed. Others dissolve in water and reveal layers of archived pigment underneath: testimony beneath testimony, a stratigraphy of unplayable truths. One score, when soaked, revealed a second score. The second score, when soaked, revealed the first one again, slightly altered, as if it had been revised while underwater.

[Archive note: The composer was asked which score came first. He replied, "The one you haven't performed yet."]

[✁ REDACTED]

[✁ REDACTED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE COMPOSER'S WISHES]

[✁ UNREDACTED BY THE COMPOSER, LATER, WITHOUT EXPLANATION, THEN REDACTED AGAIN]

"There is a score in which nothing is written except color. When you follow its sequence, you do not hear music. You hear the page breathing through your skin. When the breathing stopped, I looked down, and the color was on my hands instead of the page. I have been told this is the correct outcome."

—Field Note, Anonymous Performer (later identified; identification later withdrawn)

"Every score in this archive is a prescription for a condition nobody has diagnosed yet. If you are reading this, you may already be in the trial. Please do not stop taking the music without consulting the composer."

—Final line of Corpus #109b, or the opening line of #109c. The archive is no longer certain which direction it reads.

---

 

Paper, Model, Score: Thomas Demand’s Afterimage in My Compositional Surfaces

Thomas Demand’s pictures have followed me into the studio for years, not as images to imitate, but as a procedure to inhabit. He reconstructs a scene as a full-scale paper model, photographs the model, then removes the evidence. What remains is an image twice mediated: a photograph of a construction that stands in for an earlier photograph.

That lesson is foundational to my scores. I also insert a built intermediary between source and outcome. Where Demand builds rooms, I build pages: hyper-notational surfaces that must be navigated rather than merely executed. The performance you hear is not a translation of instructions; it is an excavation of a constructed field.

Thomas Demand's "Control Room"

From Photograph of a Model to Model for a Score

Demand’s practice taught me to distrust directness. In my work, I stage a sequence: concept → model (visual, typographic, photographic) → notational object → performance. Portrait sessions with models, tilt-shift photography, and photo-real fragments feed the page; the page is then collaged with blocks, legends, and vectors. Like Demand’s sets, these pages are not neutral carriers; they are architectures that record the choices of their making and demand new choices from readers.

The effect in both cases is similar: a viewer or performer must confront the intermediary. The work refuses to disappear into fluency.

Objecthood as Method (Not Decoration)

Demand’s dye-rich prints condense time and manual procedure into surface. I aim for an analogous condensation: metallic powders, conductive inks, thermochromic and photochromic layers, dense graphite, aluminum supports. These are not embellishments. They are operational materials that change the kinetics of reading such as how light grazes a line, how a block occludes, or how a legend becomes legible only at a particular angle or distance. The page controls tempo before a single sound is made.

In rehearsal this has consequences. Performers negotiate wayfinding (landmarks, corridors, cul-de-sacs) rather than counting alone. The score becomes site: not a tape to be unspooled but a place where decisions are staged and restaged.

Spatial Resistance

When notation turns spatial, it becomes political. The linear staff over-optimizes for excerptability, logistics, and product. A spatial score resists all three. It cannot be skimmed, clipped into “best bars,” or sight-read on short call. It costs rehearsal, and that cost is the point: time redirected from efficiency to attention, from throughput to co-presence.

This is where Demand’s ethic touches mine most directly. His pictures slow spectatorship by making the image slightly “wrong."  Convincing yet off, familiar yet modeled. My scores slow performance by making the page thick.  They become fields of potential that frustrate frictionless delivery. In both cases, the work’s difficulty is not punitive; it is repairing. It restores our capacity to read with care.

Instruction, Trace, Object

I’ve long been drawn to the hinge where instruction becomes object. In my practice, the score is simultaneously:

• Instruction (it can be played),

• Trace (it records a process of construction, including failures),

• Object (it holds on the wall, on a table, as a sculpture of information).

Demand’s model/photograph dynamic clarified this for me. We both use an interposed artifact to change the terms of reception. For him, the paper room reforms the photograph. For me, the constructed page reforms the performance. In both, the intermediary is generative, not ancillary.

Reading as Archaeology

Performing these works is an archaeological practice. Players read for seams: where instructions thicken, where textures contradict, where legends fork. Annotations accumulate; each realization leaves residue for the next. The work grows by stratigraphy, not by a single definitive text. Demand’s destroyed sets are gone, but their logic remains legible in the image; my earlier drafts are gone, but their logic is fossilized in the final page. We meet our audiences (and performers) at the surface where that history has been compacted.

Curatorial Notes (from the Studio Outward)

If these pages enter the gallery, I prefer they be treated as sites, not illustrations for a performance that “really matters.” Show the scores at scale, with vantage points that enable mapping.  Present rehearsals, marginalia, and multiple realizations as parallel artifacts, not documentation. The point is to stage the same demand these works make in the rehearsal room: engage the intermediary.

Influence, Precisely Named

Demand didn’t give me a look to borrow; he gave me a logic to adapt:

1. Build the intermediary (model/page) that stands between source and outcome.

2. Harden process into surface (photograph/score) so that labor becomes legible.

3. Compel a new literacy in the viewer/performer.  Reading for joins, routes, and residues rather than for instant legibility.

That sequence continues to shape my compositions. It is why some pages appear obstinate; why blocks sit where common sense says “clear the path”; why certain legends seem too local or contingent. They are local and contingent by design. The page is a model of a situation, not a shortcut through it.

Coda: Afterimage

I often think of Demand’s pictures as afterimages of making. My scores aspire to the same: to be notational afterimages that hold, in their complication, the memory of the processes that produced them and the performances they will provoke. If the work asks more of the reader, it is because I want the page to look back and say: the intermediary is where meaning starts.

"Exoprene" for Flute. 28" X 16" Score Link To Hi-Res PDF Score

"Exoprene"

For Flute

Bil Smith Composer

2020-2023

28" X 16" Score

Link To Hi-Res PDF Score

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hXeRPk-r0yVqV34i6-RcTc9sE5xbG4IZ/view?usp=sharing

  

Tactilism and Tactilist Scoring in Contemporary Music

---

The Emergence of Tactilist Scoring

The evolution of contemporary music has always been driven by the interplay of ideas across disciplines. In recent years, the concept of tactilism, a multidisciplinary approach that integrates tactile, sculptural, and architectural elements, has emerged as a groundbreaking paradigm for musical notation and interpretation. Tactilist scoring challenges traditional, two-dimensional notation by transforming the score into a three-dimensional, tactile object, bridging the gap between visual art, architecture, and music.

This whitepaper explores how the influences of artists such as Claus Oldenburg, Enrico Castellani, Alberto Burri, Agostino Bonalumi, Jeff Koons, Paolo Scheggi, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Irma Boom inform a new aesthetic that reshapes the relationships between composer, performer, and audience. By incorporating tactile, material, and spatial strategies, tactilist scoring establishes a new compositional archetype that transcends conventional boundaries.

---

Theoretical Foundations of Tactilist Scoring

Tactilist scoring reimagines the musical score as a sculptural, tactile, and multisensory artifact. Rather than simply encoding musical information, the score becomes an active participant in the performance process, requiring physical interaction and sensory engagement.

Key principles of tactilist scoring include:

1. Materiality: The use of unconventional materials. Wood, fabric, metal, plastic transforms scores into physical, tangible objects.
2. Spatiality: Scores occupy three-dimensional space, requiring performers to navigate them physically.
3. Interactivity: Performers manipulate tactile and spatial elements, making interpretation a dynamic and participatory process.
4. Multisensory Engagement: Tactilist scores engage touch, sight, and sometimes even sound, creating a holistic interpretive experience.

Box 12 of 16 from Windless Hall of Unknown Apparatus" for Two Percussionists.  Wood, Ink, Oils, Nails, Cotton Balls, Ball Bearings and Wire Mesh.

---

Artistic Influences on Tactilist Scoring

Claus Oldenburg: Playful Monumentality

Oldenburg’s soft sculptures and monumental depictions of ordinary objects introduce playfulness and material transformation. His works encourage rethinking the familiar through unexpected forms, textures, and scales.

• Impact on Tactilist Scoring: Scores could incorporate oversized, soft, or pliable materials that performers manipulate to “read” musical information.
• Example: A fabric-based score that performers stretch or compress to modify its notational cues in real time.

Enrico Castellani: Dimensional Surfaces

Castellani’s practice of manipulating canvases to create dynamic textures and reliefs offers a model for embedding three-dimensionality into scores. His works transform static surfaces into active spaces.

• Impact on Tactilist Scoring: Embossed or punctured surfaces in scores can encode rhythmic or dynamic information through tactile exploration.
• Example: A metallic score with raised notations that performers trace with their fingers or tools.

Alberto Burri: Material Transformation

Burri’s use of unconventional materials (burnt wood, burlap, plastic) emphasizes decay, transformation, and process. His work demonstrates the potential of materiality to evoke narrative and emotion.

• Impact on Tactilist Scoring: Scores made from degradable materials (e.g., heat-sensitive paper or reactive fabrics) reflect the temporal nature of music.
• Example: A score that alters over the course of a performance, revealing or obscuring notations as it reacts to the environment.

Agostino Bonalumi: Extroverted Canvases

Bonalumi’s "estroflessioni" push the canvas into the third dimension, emphasizing spatial projection and tactile tension.

• Impact on Tactilist Scoring: Scores could protrude into the performance space, requiring performers to navigate their physical form.
• Example: A score with layered, sculptural elements that demand both visual and tactile interpretation.

Jeff Koons: Reflective Surfaces

Koons’ polished, reflective works challenge perceptions of material and reality. His use of industrial materials introduces hyper-materiality as an aesthetic principle.

• Impact on Tactilist Scoring: Reflective or mirrored scores could distort notational elements, adding layers of visual complexity and performative interaction.
• Example: A mirrored score that forces performers to interpret distorted reflections of notations.

Paolo Scheggi: Apertures and Depth

Scheggi’s layered canvases and cut-outs explore visible and hidden spaces, creating an interplay of depth and surface.

• Impact on Tactilist Scoring: Scores with perforated or layered structures invite performers to interact with multiple notational layers simultaneously.
• Example: A score composed of translucent sheets with overlapping symbols, creating polyphonic visual and tactile relationships.

Donald Judd: Minimalism and Material Precision

Judd’s minimalist sculptures emphasize materiality, repetition, and spatial relationships. His works demonstrate the power of simplicity and precision in creating profound spatial effects.

• Impact on Tactilist Scoring: Scores could adopt modular, minimalist designs that emphasize repetition and structural clarity.
• Example: A modular score where performers rearrange geometric components to create varying musical outcomes.

Dan Flavin: Light as Medium

Flavin’s use of fluorescent light as a sculptural material redefines spatial and perceptual experiences, emphasizing the role of light in shaping form.

• Impact on Tactilist Scoring: Scores might incorporate light-based elements, such as illuminated notations or dynamic lighting that guides interpretation.
• Example: A score where light projections interact with physical notations, creating an interplay of shadow, texture, and sound.
• 
  

Irma Boom: Experimental Book Design

Boom’s avant-garde book designs push the boundaries of materiality, layout, and tactile interaction, transforming books into sculptural objects.

• Impact on Tactilist Scoring: Scores could borrow from Boom’s design principles, integrating unconventional bindings, textured pages, and interactive elements.
• Example: A score with foldable pages and embedded textures that performers manipulate as part of the interpretive process.

Conceptual Implications: A New Compositional Archetype

Tactilist scoring challenges traditional hierarchies of composer, performer, and score. It redefines the act of interpretation as a multisensory, participatory process, offering new avenues for creativity and expression.

• Embodiment: Performers engage with the score physically, blurring the line between musical and choreographic performance.
• Materiality: Scores become enduring artifacts, integrating music with visual and tactile art forms.
• Spatiality: The score transforms the performance space, creating immersive environments for both performers and audiences.
• 
  

Conclusion: The Future of Tactilist Scoring

Tactilism and tactilist scoring represent a transformative aesthetic in contemporary music. By drawing on the practices of Claus Oldenburg, Enrico Castellani, Alberto Burri, Agostino Bonalumi, Jeff Koons, Paolo Scheggi, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Irma Boom, composers can create scores that are not only seen and heard but also felt and inhabited.

This new compositional archetype challenges performers and audiences to engage with music as a multisensory experience, redefining the boundaries of sound, space, and touch. As composers continue to explore the possibilities of tactilism, they pave the way for a future where music is no longer confined to the auditory but resonates across the full spectrum of human perception.

"Weitsyde and Johnson's Addition" for Compound Ensemble. Bil Smith Composer.

"Weitsyde and Johnson's Addition" for Compound Ensemble.  

 Spatial material logic of pseudosonic collage…a step in the direction of discontinuity;  of organizing blocks of discourse simultaneously in space rather than connectively in time.

Bil Smith Composer.

This work is about grafting futures being envisageable without contradiction.  

The abandonment of real necessity permits one last elucidation.