W.I.P.

 

"The Contrast Was Noticeable" For Baritone Sarrusophone in E Flat

Baritone Sarrusophone in E Flat

 

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 double remove—world → model → image—reconfigures how we look. We scan for joins, edges, the flatness of paper. We learn to read surface for labor.

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—the “Brutalist Tablatures,” among others—that turn notation into terrain. 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—how light grazes a line, how a block occludes, 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—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—overhead tables, fold-outs, oblique sightlines that catch reflective inks. 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—politely, firmly—and say: the intermediary is where meaning starts.

W.I.P. August 23, 2025

 

Perforated Monumentalism: Notes Toward a Shattered Score: On the Notational Ontology of Bil Smith by Andrew Vecset

 

Perforated Monumentalism: Notes Toward a Shattered Score

on the notational ontology of Bil Smith Composer

“To puncture a monument is to reassign its meaning. To make it bleed, to make it breathe. To open it to air and error.”

Somewhere between the artifact and the assertion, between architecture and aphasia, lies the notational system Bil Smith refers to, provocatively and almost reluctantly, as Perforated Monumentalism. A term that resists both fixed interpretation and flippant dismissal. Like most of his titles, it functions less as a description and more as a provocation, or maybe a dare.

To witness one of Smith’s scores—particularly those found at the overlap of his graphic notations and compositional objects—is to encounter not music in the traditional sense, but the weather of music: its affective fronts, its pressure zones, its swirling disarrays of meaning, scale, and debris. What Perforated Monumentalism does is insist on the paradox that music can be both massive and absent, declared and hollowed out.

It’s a term I can’t stop turning over in my mouth: perforated—to puncture, to tear, to allow light through. And monumental—to endure, to stabilize, to cast shadows. But what happens when we perforate the monumental? When what should be a declaration is instead a ruin? When the authority of notation becomes not a command, but a wound?

The first time I held a score printed in this mode—let’s say one from the Symphora Domitorium series, whose paper seemed overburdened by the violence of its own symbols—I didn’t know how to read it. Or rather, I was aware that I couldn’t not read it, even if I couldn’t play it. The page was no longer a medium; it was a landscape. Each glyph, each splatter of ink, each architectural line eroded by hand-scratching or the ghost of a scanned archival diagram, seemed not to say something, but to refuse something.

Refusal, in Smith’s system, is not nihilism. It’s the gesture of carving space—for dissonance, for materiality, for the untranslatable. You could think of these scores as monuments that have been sabotaged from within, but not destroyed. Their perforation is not erasure, it’s permeability. It’s how meaning seeps in, sideways, out of sync.

I think of a performer—let’s call her L.—standing before one of these works, a single page rendered in cynthene, ash, wax pencil, powdered graphite, and archival resin. L. tells me she “approaches it like standing in front of something that remembers being destroyed.” I love this. It reminds me that scores, like people, carry trauma in their structure. They don’t speak it—they are it.

Perforated Monumentalism, then, is less a technique than a comportment. It invites the performer into the score not as executor, but as excavator. It asks: How do you render a thing that was designed to not quite cohere? How do you translate the hollowness of a monument without reasserting its power?

Smith’s notations—many of which feature gaping voids, surgical cuts, and images of brutalist fragments—seem to beg this question. Some scores feature facial profiles of his selected “models,” distorted through analog glitching or topographic segmentation. Others include medical diagrams, architectural site plans, or what look like exploded pharmaceutical blister packs. This is not window dressing. This is the debris field in which performance occurs.

In this, Perforated Monumentalism joins a lineage of other hybrid notational ontologies—Cardew’s graphic disobedience, Xenakis’s architectonic geometries, even Jorinde Voigt’s gestural topographies—but what sets it apart is its commitment to rupture as fidelity. To mark meaning by interrupting it.

To say that this work is beautiful feels, frankly, like a failure of language. It’s more accurate to say it is charged. The way a quiet room feels after someone has screamed. The way a statue looks when it’s been painted pink.

And this, I suspect, is the point. The monument remains—but now it leaks.

- Andrew Vecset

Reductive Scores: Subtracted Music Notation II

"Detlin's Baby" for Celeste and Bass Flute.  Bil Smith

Subtraction as Aesthetic Strategy

The allure of subtraction in artistic practice is not mere austerity. It is instead an architecture of absence—an act of clearing away in order to reveal. Within the space of musical notation, the reductive score proposes not a diminution of content but a recalibration of meaning: gestures voided, staves erased, clusters pared down to single resonances. This practice echoes a lineage of visual and conceptual artists who employed elimination as their primary act of creation, crafting works that are as much about what is not present as about what remains.

John Baldessari's "Wrong"

The Visual Arts of Elimination

Consider John Baldessari’s iconic 1960s and 1970s canvases where photographic images are overpainted with flat fields of white or punctuated with adhesive dots obscuring faces (Wrong, 1966–68; Commissioned Paintings, 1969). His method is less about addition than obliteration—an insistence that erasure itself can carry semantic charge. Similarly, Alberto Burri, with his series of combusted plastics and punctured tar (notably the Combustioni Plastiche, 1960s), reduced painting to the act of burning, removing, and excising, until the artwork’s wounds became its defining features.

Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases (Concetto spaziale, Attese, 1959–60) are equally acts of deliberate defacement, where incision replaces brushstroke, and the void becomes the essential gesture. Robert Rauschenberg went further still in his radical Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), where the removal of another artist’s hand became both critique and creation. And in the realm of more systematic reduction, Agnes Martin’s gridded fields of near-invisibility (Untitled #10, 1975) enact a near-erasure of figure, reducing painting to breath, pencil line, and silence.

Robert Rauschenberg 's  Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953),

These acts of artistic subtraction are not destructive but revelatory. By cutting, burning, erasing, or effacing, they expose strata of hidden form. They prepare the ground for understanding reductive music notation not as privation but as an alternative fullness.

Musical Notation as Reductive Act

In a similar register, reductive notation employs subtraction as its grammar. Instead of proliferating signs, it pares the score back until what remains vibrates with intensified presence. A silenced measure becomes more resonant than its sounded counterpart. A single dynamic mark, standing alone on an otherwise empty staff, becomes a monument to intensity.

This is a tradition not unfamiliar to music: Helmut Lachenmann’s Pression (1969) dismantles the cello’s traditional voice through techniques of negation; Morton Feldman’s late scores (Triadic Memories, 1981) reduce material almost to stasis, inviting the performer into the infinite depth of minute variation; Salvatore Sciarrino’s Sei Capricci (1976) enacts disappearance through whispered harmonics and vanishing gestures. In each, subtraction is not absence but excess turned inside out.

The Dialectic of Masking and Revealing

The reductive score is at once mask and aperture. What is removed frames what remains. Performers encounter not a transparent set of instructions but a visual riddle, one whose omissions are as telling as its inscriptions. Each erased line, each withdrawn note, insists on interpretive labor: the performer must inhabit the absent space as much as the notated one.

In this way, reductive notation mirrors Baldessari’s occluded faces—where the viewer cannot help but imagine the hidden countenance beneath. The performer, too, cannot help but fill the silences with speculative sound, the unwritten with imagined resonance.

Surface Depth and Latent Potential

Reduction also cultivates a peculiar form of surface depth. Just as Burri’s charred surfaces hold the violence of their making within their scorched texture, the reductive score’s thin notational trace harbors the intensity of what has been stripped away. An empty stave suggests what once might have filled it; a solitary gesture implies a constellation of possibilities now rendered invisible.

In this sense, reductive notation becomes an archaeology: a palimpsest where absence speaks as forcefully as presence. The performer is drawn into dialogue not with what is written but with what is deliberately withheld.

Toward a Poetics of Subtraction

Reductive scores, then, are not minimalist for the sake of clarity, nor ascetic by temperament. They belong to the same aesthetic genealogy as Baldessari’s obliterations, Burri’s burnings, Fontana’s incisions, and Rauschenberg’s erasure. They remind us that subtraction is not negation but transformation.

Through these scores, the composer enacts a kind of notational sleight of hand: revealing by concealing, offering resonance through silence, and delivering narrative through the gaps. The reductive score does not diminish music—it multiplies its interpretive density, drawing both performer and listener into the unstable, fertile terrain of what is missing.

"Bloated Halos" For Viola

"Bloated Halos"

For Viola

Bil Smith Composer

30" x 30"

Link to PDF

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FtwS1v_E5pF2emsej4XI6dqhOo99itup/view?usp=sharing

 

“Enclave of the Curated Pursuit” for Viola, Vibraphone and Flugelhorn

"Enclave of the Curated Pursuit"

for Viola, Vibraphone and Flugelhorn

Bil Smith Composer

2023-2024

Published by LNM Editions

20" X 10"

Link to Full Score PDF

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_zKpm_vXDbR8EOYpPW9ldquPJaQN-vlg/view?usp=sharing

 

“Monuments and Mirages: The Score as Relic, Reflection, and Remainder”

 

“Monuments and Mirages: The Score as Relic, Reflection, and Remainder”

In the shifting terrain of contemporary score-based performance, the role of the score itself—once a sovereign edifice of musical authority—has become more nomadic, unstable, and conceptually porous. 

My Ready-Made Compositions do not simply respond to this condition—they intensify it, drawing in deliberately jarring elements: the antique, the banal, and the iconographically enigmatic gazing ball. These ingredients are not stylistic gestures. They are philosophical intrusions, demanding that the performer reassess what it means to read, to reflect, to witness, and to enact.

The Score as Relic: Antiquity without Context

Antiquity, in this curatorial frame, does not enter the score as reverence or revival. It arrives fractured—unmoored from chronology. Classical statuary, inscriptions, and pseudo-epigraphic glyphs are layered into the score like found debris from a civilization only half-remembered. These elements resist function. They do not serve as ciphers to be translated; they are there to haunt. The performer, confronting these symbols, experiences an archaeological imperative—an urge not to interpret as in music, but to excavate.

The presence of antiquity invokes remainder: not history as clarity, but as ghost. The score becomes a ruin in the Benjaminian sense, in which the past flashes up in fragments—never whole, never resolved. Thus, the performer’s role is not unlike that of a forensic archaeologist attempting to reconstruct a ritual from incomplete bones and ceremonial ash. What sound could emerge from a silent sarcophagus? What gesture from a broken frieze?

The Banal Interrupts the Sacred

If antiquity brings gravitas, banality is its corroding counteragent. Product packaging, grocery lists, JPEG artifacts, amateur typography, instructional signage—these too populate the score, unapologetically. They arrive not to be mocked or ironized, but to rupture expectations. Banality is deployed as a critical decoy, a way to draw the performer’s attention to the assumed value hierarchies in reading. Why should one glyph feel “sacred” while another is dismissed as background noise?

This juxtaposition forces a collision between the revered and the discarded, between formality and detritus. The performative act becomes one of ethical navigation: what does it mean to give sonic or gestural weight to the mundane? Can the banal be exalted by the framing of a score? And if so, who holds the authority to exalt it?

In this regard, my scores function as notation-as-collage, where value is constantly in flux, and where the performer’s selections—conscious or intuitive—constitute a critique of canon, of prestige, of musical decorum. Banality is not a joke in this context; it is the terrain of truth.

The Gazing Ball: Mirror as Instrument

The most enigmatic of these inserted objects is the gazing ball—an orb that is both ornamental and oracular. Borrowed from garden kitsch, from Koonsian irony, and from 18th-century landscape design, the gazing ball’s role in the score is not symbolic alone—it is performative. Its inclusion becomes a site of self-reference, a reflection machine that implicates the performer, the audience, and the surrounding space in the act of reading.

Placed within or beside the score, the gazing ball disrupts the flatness of the page. It reflects not content but presence—the performer’s own body, distorted. The audience, too, appears within its curved logic. The gazing ball transforms the score into a three-dimensional ritual zone, one that contains the image of the performance as it happens. It is both mirror and memento, creating a feedback loop where interpretation reflects interpretation, and no act of reading remains private.

In this sense, the gazing ball is not merely visual; it is philosophical. It calls into question the ontology of observation: who is watching, and who is being watched? Who performs, and who interprets? The ball becomes a literal beholder’s narrative—not embedded in the score but refracted through it.

Imperatives in the Field

Introducing these dissonant materials—antiquity, banality, and the gazing ball—into the field of performative composition brings with it a series of imperatives:

1. Reject Notational Totality: These scores dismantle the illusion that notation can fully encode intention. They require the performer to function as a critical subject, not a conduit.

2. Affirm the Interpretive Body: Interpretation is not secondary. It is generative. These works demand not technical precision, but perceptual reckoning.

3. Reconfigure Temporality: Antiquity and banality alter time in the score—one stretching it backward, the other flattening it. The performer must navigate these collapsed temporalities, creating a new temporality through gesture and sound.

4. Accept the Score as Object: The gazing ball resists dematerialization. It insists on the objecthood of the score, on its presence as thing—not just instruction.

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In this conceptual constellation,  Ready-Made Compositions become more than frameworks for sound. They become ritual objects, activating space, memory, materiality, and presence. Each score is not a piece to be played, but a situation to be embodied. The performer, as beholder, becomes composer anew—caught in the loop between looking and sounding, reflecting and being reflected, reading and being read.

The gaze is no longer one-way. It returns. It distorts. It implicates. It begins again.

Morphotism: A Treatise on Form, Drift, and the Aesthetics of Compositional Transformation

Morphotism: A Treatise on Form, Drift, and the Aesthetics of Transformation

Morphotism is not a style, but a sustained inquiry into the behavior of form. It is a practice grounded in the instability of visual identity and the plasticity of image matter, wherein a single origin-image becomes the site of exhaustive transformation — not to discover a truth within it, but to exhaust its outer limits through procedural reworking.

Morphotism is the aesthetics of drift, a commitment to perpetual reformation, where each iteration reflects not a deviation, but an articulation — a contour of thought expressed through the malleability of visual matter.

Ontology of the Image

At its core, Morphotism presupposes that no image is fixed. An image is not a representation; it is a territory, a terrain through which light, memory, and perception are routed. Under Morphotism, an image is treated not as a singular object but as a morphological condition — a field in flux.

This condition is subject to:

• Chromatic reconstitution (alterations in tone and color profile)
• Spatial displacements (rotations, croppings, or refocalizations)
• Juxtapositional transgressions (overlay, mirroring, reversal)
• Textural remediations (filters, grain, clarity, distortion)

Thus, the image becomes a body in continuous self-reconfiguration — a visual organism.

Methodology

Morphotism manifests as a serial discipline, producing sets or suites of images. Each is derived from one visual source, yet rendered distinct by methodical variation. These variations are not ornamental but ontological recalibrations — each version asserts a slightly different worldview, a marginally shifted claim about the original’s identity.

This may take form in:

• A 64-page sequence where each page is a chromatic evolution of the same photograph
• A diptych wherein the original and the reoriented inhabit tension
• A grid series in which slight morphological deviations amplify across the composition
• A photobook where sequencing is the aesthetic engine, rather than singular capture

Morphotism is not repetition. It is iterative excess — a maximalist logic applied to minimalist sources.

Philosophical Grounding

Morphotism is aligned with post-structuralist thought, particularly where meaning is deferred, unstable, or constructed through difference. It owes debt to:

• Jacques Derrida’s différance (the endless deferral of fixed meaning)
• Michel Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge (visual artifacts as contingent, historical)
• Gilles Deleuze’s difference and repetition (multiplicity as generative force)

Where modernism sought the essential image, Morphotism seeks the relational image — its meaning always shaped by its neighbors, its position in sequence, its treatment history.

Anti-Finality

A key tenet of Morphotism is resistance to closure. The series is never truly complete. Even the most exhaustive treatment retains within it the ghost of further transformation. The final form is provisional — an aesthetic pause rather than a conclusion.

This aligns Morphotism with a generative ethos, one that encourages reproduction, reinterpretation, and even computational continuation. It is a visual strategy built not for iconicity, but for intellectual promiscuity — a willingness to be shaped anew.

Applications and Future Inquiry

While rooted in the photographic, Morphotism can be expanded into:

• Generative AI image sequences
• Printmaking re-inkings of a single plate
• Video frames treated as morphic intervals
• Archival reinterpretation (where existing images are subjected to morphotic recovery)

In this sense, Morphotism is medium-agnostic — it is not bound by material, only by method and intent.

To practice Morphotism is to engage in material introspection — not of the self, but of the image itself. It is to treat form not as an endpoint, but as a relay of becoming. Each variation is not a derivative, but an instantiation. Each shift, a question.

Morphotism does not ask, “What is the image?”

It asks, “How far can an image be re-formed before it loses its name?”

And in that question, it finds its power.

Morphotism and the Musical Score

If Morphotism treats the image as a mutable territory, then the musical score becomes its acoustic analogue: a field of structured potential, awaiting both interpretation and transformation.

In this frame, the musical score is not a static artifact. It is a visual syntax of sound, subject to the same morphotic processes as a photographic image — chromatically, spatially, and temporally mutable. Under Morphotism, a score is no longer the authoritative origin of a sonic event, but a generative artifact, open to deviation, drift, and serial manipulation.

The Morphotized Score: Visual and Sonic Layers

Each iteration of the score — each “page” in a series — represents a treatment, not a revision. These treatments may include:

• Graphic reorientation: rotation, inversion, mirroring of staves, noteheads, or articulations
• Color treatment: assigning chromatic shifts to different rhythmic cells, registers, or dynamics (implying emotional timbre)
• Notational erosion: removing elements to introduce silence, openness, or interpretive ambiguity
• Spatial distortion: stretching, compressing, or reorganizing notation to reimagine rhythmic or harmonic structures
• Image-score hybridization: incorporating photographs, diagrams, or marks that abstract or overlay traditional notation

Thus, the score becomes a morphotic field, where each page is not a repetition, but a divergent instance — a sonic potential with altered genetic instructions.

Morphotism as a Notational Philosophy

Unlike traditional variation form in music (theme & variations), Morphotism does not begin with a theme but with a form-substrate. That is: the score as a visual system of instruction, subject to visual and procedural subversion.

The question is not: How do I vary this melody?

But: What happens to this score when I re-encode its grammar?

It is a philosophy of notation as mutable language, inviting performers, readers, and listeners into a field of interpretive instability.

Precedents and Philosophical Kinships

Morphotism finds resonance in:

• Brian Ferneyhough’s notational density, where legibility approaches visual abstraction
• Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise, which uses graphic notation to open sonic possibility
• Jani Christou’s Epicycle and Anestis Logothetis’ symbolic systems
• John Cage’s Fontana Mix and *Atlas Eclipticalis, where form is mapped to celestial or chance-based systems
• The tradition of eye music, where visual elements of scores (e.g., Baude Cordier’s heart-shaped notation) imply interpretive framing

But Morphotism departs from these by committing to seriality — a sequence of shifting forms from a single origin, as in photography.

The Performance of Morphotism

A morphotic score is not meant to be mastered, but encountered. Each page becomes a new ecology of sound, interpreted not in isolation but in relation to its sequence.

The performer becomes a translator of transformations, enacting drift across the series:

• One page may sound formal and metered
• The next: amorphous and gestural
• Another: sparse, barely legible — a map of silence

The score unfolds as a temporal polyptych, where the audience witnesses not a theme, but a process, not a piece, but a becoming.

Toward a Morphotic Compositional Practice

To compose morphotically is to:

• Begin with a fixed visual-musical object
• Subject it to rule-based transformations
• Sequence the results into a processual scorebook
• Accept that no singular version is the “work”, but that the trajectory of change is the work

This opens the score to curation, performance variation, and perpetual reinvention — echoing the logic of the image-series in visual Morphotism.

The Score as Morphotic Archive

In Morphotism, the musical score becomes an archive of its own reformation. Each page is an index of a choice, a deviation, a reframing. Like the image set, the score sequence reveals not a singular vision, but a landscape of near-versions — a speculative cartography of sound.

Just as the eye follows the photographic drift, the ear begins to sense a sonic morphology — a vibration not of melody alone, but of notation’s becoming.

The result is not a “piece” but a score-object that maps the space between intention and mutation.