These Scores Do Not Ask to be Played. They Ask to be Reckoned With.

 

Mental Mechanics: The Performer as Disrupted Executor

My notational strategy—placing signs within, under, next to, and inside one another—functions as a dysfunctional transmission. What results is a kind of mechanical metaphor for the failure of seamless communication. The performer is rendered a subjective engine, working through layers of visual obfuscation, symbolic misdirection, and embodied presence.

This disjunction is key: The scores operate on a logic of material compatibility, not performative comfort. The signs, images, textures, and figures  used are relationally coherent within the architecture of the score itself—but may resist translation into performative gesture. This is a radical proposition: that the score-machine exists not to be executed, but to be inhabited, like one of Roussel’s linguistic devices or Picabia’s eroticized camshafts.

From Notation to Imagination Machine

In this framework, the score becomes a new kind of imagination machine, one in which the laws of musical grammar have been bent to accommodate psychological interference, bodily proximity, and material seduction. This is not notation for performance—it is notation as experience, notation as artifact, notation as site of metaphysical experimentation.

Much like Duchamp’s bachelor machine, the scores embody a tension between desire and delay, between symbolic motion and erotic failure. They perform not just as texts to be read or sounds to be made, but as complexes of action, image, and concept. The machine no longer produces—it suggests, interrupts, withholds.

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Toward a New Poetics of Notation

In this work, we see a revival—not of function—but of metaphysical invention. The score becomes not a vessel but a mechanism of contradiction. A chamber of relations. A surface of layered symbolic interference. Like Roussel’s instruments, it is full of language disguised as device; like Duchamp’s glass, it is full of ghosted motion and deferred consummation. And like Picabia’s drawings, it is irreverent, recursive, and iconoclastic.

These scores do not ask to be played. They ask to be reckoned with. To be understood not through the hands, but through the eyes, the skin, the resistance of thought to sound. In this, they are notational descendants of a long lineage of impossible machines—machines that seduce not with their efficiency, but with their refusal to function on anyone’s terms but their own.