"Scraping Over Bleached Bones and Brittle Scrub"
for Solo Flugelhorn (2024)
Bil Smith Composer
The score for Scraping Over Bleached Bones and Brittle Scrub for solo flugelhorn is not merely a document of musical instruction but a complex artifact in which the boundaries between sound, image, and text collapse into a singular, inscrutable whole. This composition operates in a space where many of the conventional signifiers of music—notes, rhythms, and dynamics—are supplanted by a language of typography and imagery, a language that speaks to the unarticulated depths of meaning that lie beneath the surface of sound. It is here, in the interplay of these elements, that we encounter the score as an event, a performative gesture that exceeds the mere reproduction of music and enters the domain of symbolic logic and syntactics.
The score does not function as a mere conduit between composer and performer; rather, it stands as a testament to the dissolution of traditional musical notation into something far more elusive and potent. The typography of the score, with its deliberate use of distressed fonts, irregular spacing, and fragmented letters, disrupts the familiar linearity of reading. The page itself becomes a field of contestation, where the visual disarray mirrors the sonic rupture intended by the composer.
This deliberate distortion of typographic norms serves not simply as an aesthetic choice but as an epistemic challenge to the very concept of the musical score. Here, the score is not an objective medium through which sound is conveyed but a site of power where the traditional hierarchies of signification are subverted. The performer, confronted with this non-linear, non-standard text, must navigate a labyrinth of symbols that do not yield to easy interpretation but require an engagement with the materiality of the text itself.
Imagery as Indicant: The Visual Syntax of Sound
Accompanying the unconventional notation are images—scratches, scrawls, and ghostly imprints that haunt the pages like spectral remnants of a forgotten past. These images are not merely illustrative; they function as indicants, signs that point towards the unspeakable, the unplayable. The imagery in this score cannot be decoded in the same manner as traditional musical notation; it resists the reductive logic of signifier and signified. Instead, it operates within a different syntactical realm, where meaning is constructed not through linear representation but through a process of visual and sonic association.
The images of bones and brittle scrub, which recur throughout the score, serve as visual metaphors for the sound that the flugelhorn is called to produce—sounds that are dry, fractured, and on the edge of dissolution. These are not just metaphorical allusions but are embedded within the very structure of the score’s syntax. The performer is asked not merely to play these images but to become enmeshed in their symbolic logic, to produce sounds that resonate with the visual texture of the score.
The Logic of the Unsaid: Symbolic Syntactics in Performance
To engage with the score of Scraping Over Bleached Bones and Brittle Scrub is to engage with a form of symbolic logic that transcends the conventional boundaries of musical notation. The use of syntactics in this context refers not to the arrangement of notes on a staff but to the arrangement of signs—typographic, visual, and sonic—within a system of relations that defy linear interpretation. This logic is one of absence as much as presence, of what is left unsaid as much as what is articulated.
The flugelhorn, in its performance of this score, becomes a voice of the unsaid, an instrument through which the invisible connections between these signs are made audible. The sounds produced are not mere notes but gestures—gestures that invoke the imagery of the score, that call forth the bones and scrub from their silent domain into the realm of sound. In this sense, the score is a syntactical machine, a device that produces meaning through the very act of performance, where each sound is a symbolic act that negotiates the tension between signifier and signified.
Towards a New Episteme of Musical Discourse
What emerges from this engagement with Scraping Over Bleached Bones and Brittle Scrub is not a piece of music in the conventional sense but a new mode of discourse, a discourse in which the score is not a script to be followed but a text to be interrogated. The typography and imagery within the score do not merely signify; they enact, they perform, they generate a field of meaning that is as much about what is not played as what is.
The score thus becomes a site of epistemic production, where the boundaries between music, text, and image are continually redefined. It is a place where the traditional signifiers of music dissolve into a more fluid and complex syntax, a syntax that requires the performer to navigate a space of indeterminacy, where sound and silence, presence and absence, are in constant negotiation.
In this new episteme, the role of the composer is not to dictate but to suggest, to create a framework within which the performer becomes an active participant in the construction of meaning. The score is no longer a fixed text but a living document, a dynamic interplay of signs that opens up new possibilities for the articulation and experience of sound.
The Score as Palimpsest
Scraping Over Bleached Bones and Brittle Scrub for solo flugelhorn represents a radical rethinking of what a musical score can be. It is not merely a set of instructions but a palimpsest, a text written over and over again, where the traces of previous meanings are never fully erased but are always present, haunting the new inscriptions. The typography and imagery are not passive elements but active agents in the creation of a new syntactics, a new symbolic logic that challenges the very foundations of musical signification.
In this score, we witness the dissolution of traditional musical hierarchies and the emergence of a new form of discourse, one that is as much about the visual and the textual as it is about the sonic. The performer, in engaging with this score, becomes a co-creator, a participant in the ongoing process of meaning-making, where each performance is not a reproduction but a reinvention, a new inscription on the ever-changing palimpsest of musical discourse.
