Tuesday, August 26, 2025
Saturday, August 23, 2025
Thursday, August 21, 2025
Wednesday, August 20, 2025
“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:
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.
Affirm the Interpretive Body: Interpretation is not secondary. It is generative. These works demand not technical precision, but perceptual reckoning.
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.
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.
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.
Friday, August 15, 2025
"Sissikoppaniat" for Guitar
In examining the score for "Sissikoppaniat" for Guitar, we are immediately confronted with a compositional landscape that refuses to align itself with conventional norms of musical notation. This refusal is neither arbitrary nor experimental for its own sake; rather, it reflects a broader philosophical engagement with the nature of spatial representation in musical composition. The score, in essence, presents what we might call dual contingencies of spatial figuration, where form, mass, and volume take precedence over the more traditional reliance on line and plane. This departure from convention is not superficial but speaks to deeper theoretical questions about the structure of music and its representation in notational form.
What "Sissikoppaniat" asks us to consider, then, is a tension between disparate forms of notational representation. To understand this, we must begin by recognizing that musical notation, like law, is a system of signs that mediates between abstract ideas and real-world phenomena—in this case, sound. Traditionally, the line and plane have served as the dominant conceptual tools in notating music, allowing composers to delineate pitch and rhythm in a temporally linear format. "Sissikoppaniat" challenges this orthodoxy by privileging surface depth and mass, creating a new system where musical ideas are expressed through a kind of volumetric notation. The score becomes an object of inquiry in its own right, not merely a medium for sound, but a structure that demands engagement with spatial depth.
The critical innovation here lies in how the score transcends the tectonic, moving beyond the traditional "architecture" of musical notation, which relies on a fixed relationship between symbols and the sounds they are meant to produce. Instead, "Sissikoppaniat" becomes ever more focused on form, inviting us to think about the relationship between representation and interpretation in a much more fluid way. This is akin to the way constitutions or legal frameworks may be understood: not as rigid structures that dictate precise outcomes, but as living documents that require active interpretation to remain meaningful in different contexts.
The compositional methodology of "Sissikoppaniat" provides further insight into this complexity. The use of distortions, curvature, and gradients in the notation reflects an ongoing negotiation with the score’s irregular visual landscape. These elements are not decorative; they are essential to maintaining the score’s legibility in the face of the intricate relationships it embodies. Here, we might draw a parallel with the concept of judicial interpretation in law, where textual ambiguity or complexity is not an obstacle to clarity but a fundamental part of how we understand and apply the law. In much the same way, the distortions in "Sissikoppaniat" invite the performer to engage with the score as an evolving, interpretive challenge, where legibility and clarity are achieved not through simplification but through interaction with complexity.
This brings us to the heart of the matter: the relationship between form and function in "Sissikoppaniat". In privileging form over function, the score aligns itself with a broader philosophical tradition that sees the representation of ideas as an active process rather than a passive reflection of an underlying reality. The tension between disparate notational forms becomes a site of exploration, much like the tension in legal theory between textualism and purposivism—between those who would insist on a strict adherence to formal rules and those who seek to understand the broader purpose behind those rules. "Sissikoppaniat" positions itself firmly within the latter camp, suggesting that musical meaning arises not from adherence to notational convention but from an engaged dialogue with the score’s form.
In conclusion, the score for "Sissikoppaniat" challenges us to rethink our relationship with musical notation in profound ways. It presents a dual contingency of spatial figuration, where the focus is on form, mass, and volume rather than line and plane, and where the tensions between different notational systems are not problems to be solved but opportunities for deeper engagement. This compositional methodology, rooted in distortions, curvature, and gradients, maintains the legibility of the score in the face of its complex interrelations, much like the ongoing work of legal interpretation maintains the clarity of the law amidst its inherent ambiguities. "Sissikoppaniat" is, in this sense, not just a piece of music but a philosophical exploration of the possibilities of representation, one that transcends the tectonic to become ever more focused on form.
Thursday, August 14, 2025
" The Conjunction of Her Thighs..." Bil Smith Composer.
SCORE:
"THE CONJUNCTION OF HER THIGHS WITH THE TITANIUM TIPPED INSTRUMENT HEADS" SCORED FOR VIOLIN, VIOLA DE GAMBA, B FLAT CORNET, SINGLE VOICE (MEZZO SOPRANO), AND VIBRAPHONE
"Conjunction..." is a combinatorial composition of reproducible metaphors, that is a chronology of computational experiments on topics related to music, speech and language. These experiments may involve the analysis of previously published corpus data, or of experiment specific sonorities that are reconciled for the occasion.
Other relevant referential navigational tools include computational simulations, implementations of diagnostic techniques or task scoring methods, methodological tutorials, and reviews of relevant sponsors.
Although "Conjunction" is centered in musical etymology, we aim to contextualize performance from the widest possible range of disciplines that engage music, speech and language experimentally, from electrical engineering and computer science to education, psychology, biology, and speech pathology.
In this interdisciplinary context, combinatorial methodology is especially useful in helping experimental and analytical techniques to cross over from one sub-field to another.
Legends Carved Into the Void's Mantle for Flute
LEGENDS CARVED INTO THE VOID’S MANTLE
6 Pages. 22” X 17”; 55.9 X 43.2 cm.
Replexium®, Pencil, Color Ink, Doped Graphene, Tyvek®, Oracet®, Infrared Charcoal, VIANT®, Turmeric Paste, Moss Pulp on Hahnemühle Torchon
Edition of 5 with 2 APs
Sunday, August 10, 2025
Saturday, August 9, 2025
"ATLAS OF THE FLOODLINE IN THE JUNGLE:" A Speculative Compositional Lexicon
"ATLAS OF THE FLOODLINE IN THE JUNGLE"
A Speculative Compositional Lexicon
The ATLAS OF THE FLOODLINE IN THE JUNGLE is less a notational system than a pre-architectural mythology. A subtextual cartography rendered in diagrams, it reimagines the musical score not as a neutral transmitter of intention, but as an ideological precinct—part reliquary, part hypothesis. It is both machine and mood, a floodplain of expressive debris awaiting performers who are not merely interpreters but settlers, archeologists, and insurgents.
Developed specifically to interface with the Conn (12A) Wonder Parlor Pocket Cornet—an instrument of ornamental brevity and compact bravura—the lexicon forges a language that acknowledges the instrument's historic sentimentality while deploying it as a node of tactical subversion. The score becomes a form of compressed infrastructure: not just notating what is to be played, but why, where, and in what speculative environmental condition it should occur.
The Lexicon as Construct: Vertical Grammar, Diluvial Syntax
At the heart of the ATLAS is a set of archetypes—call them glyphs, indices, or pressure points—that do not merely point to pitch or time, but represent topographic tensions: surge, saturation, stagnation, and exposure. Each symbol is a miniature edifice, a spatialized ideogram that presumes a certain climatology. Notation is treated here not as an artifact of sound, but of weather. In this regard, we have not merely a system of signs, but a hydraulic epistemology—notation as the map of forces, as an inventory of subsurface sediment.
Lines bleed. Margins flood. Boundaries are traced not with clefs and meters, but with sedimentations of musical precedent and imaginary collapse. One archetype—a series of concentric circles punctuated by jagged verticals—signals “post-sonic liquefaction,” a moment in the score when the performer must enact not a note but the idea of structural failure under acoustic strain. This is not a rupture; it is a cultivated deterioration.
The Jungle as Pretext, The Cornet as Mythology
To speak of the “jungle” in the title is not to evoke a geography but a semiotic thicket—a deliberately overgrown referential field in which signals tangle and drown. The ATLAS does not aim to clarify the jungle but to honor its resistance to monocultural order. The Cornet, small and deceptively playful, is weaponized as a proxy for the explorer's voice: sometimes declaring, other times camouflaging, or simply mirroring the lush, wet disorientation of the surrounding system.
Rather than using traditional dynamics or articulations, performers are instructed through geotemporal directives: play as if beneath a canopy in monsoon; intonate with the weight of sunken architecture; emit tone as if interrupting fungal growth. These are not metaphors, but procedural truths of the new lexicon.
Towards the Future -Isms: Adaptive Musics for Discontinuous Times
The ATLAS does not end with the Cornet. It anticipates future -isms—musical, architectural, and ecological—that it will seed rather than merely predict.
Fossilist Expressionism might arise, where compositions simulate the slow pressure of mineral time upon musical form. Here, the ATLAS’s layered strata of notation could guide performers in mimicking deep compression: phrases fold inward, intervals erode into drone sediment.
Post-Urban Echoism could leverage the ATLAS as a blueprint for soundwalks in decommissioned spaces. With its glyphs serving as ritualized sonifications of forgotten civic plans, the work extends into the spatial politics of acoustic memory—abandoned metros, flooded libraries, brutalist relics used as natural reverb chambers.
Hydrographic Serialism, too, might develop: a compositional mode based entirely on tidal and weather-based cycles, scored with symbols derived from the ATLAS’s floodline index. This -ism would require performers to use NOAA data or speculative climate models to generate musical action.
The Performance as Cartographic Incursion
A performance of a work under the ATLAS rubric is a ritual incursion, a temporary claim staked in the interpretive wilderness. The cornetist must approach the score as an urbanist might a half-sunken city—charting submerged transit lines, listening for reverberations in collapsed concrete halls. Practice becomes excavation, and the page a palimpsest of submerged strategies. There is no singular reading. The ATLAS demands residency in the material. It’s a dwelling score.
Each score is site-specific by default: not to place, but to climate, contour, tension. The player’s breath is not merely air—it is pressurized atmosphere, pushing against the ecology of notation, altering weather patterns on the page.
Concluding Ruins: The Score as Memorial and Prototype
To engage with the ATLAS OF THE FLOODLINE IN THE JUNGLE is to situate oneself in a speculative history that is already decomposing. It is not a map of what music has been, nor what it might be. It is a score of losses, forecasts, and interstitial domains.
The Conn Wonder Parlor Pocket Cornet becomes the instrument of choice not because of its tradition, but because of its ability to sound like memory—compressed, evaporating, almost nostalgic for futures it never had.
In the end, this is not a system. It is a weather model.
Not a lexicon, but a field guide.
Not notation, but territory.
Friday, August 8, 2025
"Reality Bends to the Whim" for Viola
"Reality Bends to the Whim"
for Viola
Bil Smith Composer
2024
Link to Full Score PDF
This piece for Solo Viola presents a complex notational architecture, where each symbol and line transcends its aesthetic form to become a battleground of expression and resistance.
At the very outset, "Reality Bends to the Whim" confronts traditional notions of musical scores as mere repositories of neutral instructions. The piece actively eschews any semblance of formalism, universal language, or the flatness typically associated with conventional scores. Instead, the score's tablature asserts itself through a philosophy of negation and criticality. This is not a passive resistance characterized by indifference or absence, but an active confrontation, marked by a tangible presence and emotional attachment.
The physical presentation of the score further underlines its thematic defiance. In the uneven motific constructions, the notational elements recall the rugged, hand-built walls of ancient civilizations—gridded, girded, gritty, and grouted. Yet, within this seemingly impenetrable structural density, there exists an airiness brought about by deliberate gaps and reveals in the score's construction.
This juxtaposition of solidity and permeability serves as a metaphor for the Violist's ability to oscillate between intense compactness and expansive liberation,
The notational construct is characterized by a duality of being both taut and at times drooping or tangling, where the jagged parts are pieced together in a manner akin to a potchkie—an improvised, often clumsy, yet endearing construction. This textural diversity within the score mirrors the variegated emotional landscape that the composition aims to evoke. The score is scrubbed and stained to various degrees of finish or unfinish, much like an artist's canvas, bearing the marks of its creation process, and in turn, influencing the interpretative journey of the Violist.
The tone of the score carries what might be described as a barometric pressure of moods, shifting across its duration like weather fronts sweeping across a landscape. This meteorological analogy captures the fluid, often unpredictable emotional shifts that the piece demands, engaging the performer in a constant adjustment to the evolving tonal atmosphere.
The hyphenated musical identities hold multiple allegiances. This aspect speaks to a broader, almost cosmological exploration of cultural and musical identities, compressed and expanded within the mosaic of the score. Each note, each marking, each symbol does not merely denote a sound but also encapsulates a universe of historical, cultural, and personal significances that the performer must decode and embody.
Friday, August 1, 2025
A Radical Lexicon of Sound: Introducing a Word-Based Notational System for Music
A Radical Lexicon of Sound: Introducing a Word-Based Notational System for Music
For centuries, Western musical notation has relied on an intricate, highly abstract system of dots, lines, and symbols to represent sound. While this approach has served composers and musicians well, its reliance on abstraction has sometimes alienated those seeking a more intuitive or emotionally resonant connection to music. What if, instead of note heads and staves, we used words—rooted in meaning, sensation, and context—to represent musical ideas?
This essay introduces a new notational system that replaces traditional note heads with words, offering an evocative and intellectually rich alternative. These words, derived from a neologistic pharmacopeia, are designed to convey both the sonic character and emotional intent of each musical event. By blending linguistics, semiotics, and musical philosophy, this radical departure promises to reframe our relationship with musical composition, performance, and interpretation.
Damien Hirst's Pharmacy, exhibited at the Tate in 1992, serves as a compelling parallel to the conceptual underpinning of a word-based notational system for music. Hirst, a polarizing figure in contemporary art, used the pharmaceutical motif to blur the lines between healing, mortality, and commercialism. His work invites viewers into a sterile yet charged environment where the promise of recovery is juxtaposed with the inevitability of death. This dichotomy mirrors the dual nature of music itself\u2014at once an ephemeral art and an enduring emotional language.
Hirst's approach is not merely critical of the pharmaceutical industry's commodification of medicine. Instead, it delves deeper into the human psyche, exploring how symbols of healing can simultaneously evoke trust and fear. Similarly, the proposed word-based notation system uses pharmaceutical-inspired neologisms to encapsulate a dual meaning: the tangible structure of sound and the intangible emotional resonance it conveys.
For instance, in Pharmacy, the meticulously arranged rows of medicinal products evoke order and precision, much like traditional music notation. However, the sterile environment and the clinical presentation provoke unease, reminding viewers of the fragility of human existence. This resonates with the word-based notational system, which aims to transcend technicality by embedding evocative meaning into musical instructions. A term like "Auralyn Creson" could symbolize not just a specific melody but also the sensation of transcendence and the bittersweet passage of time, much like how Hirst's works transcend their material form to evoke existential contemplation.
The connection between Hirst's Pharmacy and this innovative notational system also lies in their shared challenge to conventions. Just as Hirst redefined art by using unexpected mediums and themes, the word-based system reimagines music composition by prioritizing semantics and emotional depth over traditional abstraction. Both serve as reminders that artistic expression is most powerful when it reflects the complexity and duality of human experience.
In bridging these realms, the dialogue between art and this musical system suggests that the lexicon of creativity knows no disciplinary boundaries. By integrating the evocative power of words with the structural demands of music, this notational archetype transforms sound into a multidimensional language, one that echoes the human condition as poignantly as Hirst's Pharmacy reframes the role of medicine in our lives.
The Philosophical Underpinnings
The Limitation of Abstract Symbols
Traditional notation excels in precision but often lacks immediacy in emotional and sensory communication. The note "C," for instance, tells us its pitch and duration but nothing of its timbre, affect, or intended psychological impact. Words, on the other hand, carry semantic and phonetic weight, making them inherently richer vessels for artistic expression.
The Power of Language
Language is humanity’s most intimate and expressive medium. By embedding music in language, a composer creates a system that resonates beyond the ear to evoke vivid emotional, sensory, and even cultural associations. Words bring subjectivity and imagination into the interpretative process, allowing performers and listeners to engage with the music on deeper levels.
The Pharmacopeic Neologism
The proposed system draws its vocabulary from a pharmacopeic lexicon—a repository of invented words inspired by the naming conventions of pharmaceuticals. Why pharmaceuticals? Because their nomenclature exists at the intersection of science, imagination, and affect. Words like "Xantral" or "Lunivis" suggest action, mood, and transformation, echoing the evocative potential of music itself. In this system, a word such as "Melifex" might signify a lush, legato phrase in a major mode, while "Cryston" could represent a brittle, staccato motif.
The Mechanics of Word-Based Notation
Lexical Structure and Syntax
Word Construction: Each word combines phonemes and morphemes that signify pitch, rhythm, dynamics, articulation, and emotional intent. For instance:
Prefix: Indicates pitch (e.g., "Mel-" for middle range, "Bass-" for lower tones).
Core: Encodes timbre or instrument family (e.g., "-ivis" for strings, "-ex" for brass).
Suffix: Denotes emotional or dynamic nuance (e.g., "-ion" for crescendo, "-il" for pianissimo).
Syntax: Words are sequenced into "lexical staves" that preserve the linearity of traditional notation while adding layers of interpretive detail. Phrases are punctuated by markers (like commas or colons) to indicate phrasing or transitions.
Benefits of the System
1. Emotional Resonance
By using words instead of symbols, the system creates an immediate emotional connection between composer, performer, and audience. A performer reading "Auralyn Creson" instinctively understands the intent in a way that "C4, mezzo forte" might not convey.
2. Multidimensionality
Words encapsulate multiple dimensions of musical expression in a single unit. A term like "Spherion" could simultaneously suggest a circular, ethereal melody played with a soft dynamic and an airy timbre, integrating layers of meaning into one term.
3. Accessibility and Inclusivity
For those unfamiliar with traditional notation, the word-based system offers a more accessible entry point. It welcomes interpreters from diverse backgrounds by emphasizing imagination and emotional intuition over technical training.
4. Contextual Adaptability
Words are inherently adaptable to cultural and linguistic contexts. The system could be tailored to different languages and traditions, allowing for a more global and inclusive approach to notation.
5. Disruptive Creativity
By abandoning rigid conventions, this system invites composers to rethink how they conceptualize and communicate music. It encourages innovation not just in sound but in the very act of notation.
Challenges and Solutions
1. Standardization vs. Creativity
Challenge: The system risks losing the precision of traditional notation.
Solution: Introduce a supplementary codex or glossary for performers, detailing the semantic range of each word.
2. Learning Curve
Challenge: Musicians accustomed to traditional notation may resist adoption.
Solution: Provide hybrid scores combining word-based and traditional notation during the transition phase.
3. Linguistic Bias
Challenge: Neologisms may carry unintended connotations in different languages.
Solution: Develop culturally specific lexicons to ensure universality.
A word-based notational system offers an unprecedented opportunity to rethink how we communicate music. By prioritizing emotional resonance, multidimensionality, and inclusivity, it bridges the gap between sound and meaning in a way that traditional notation cannot. Rooted in the evocative lexicon of a neologistic pharmacopeia, this approach represents a bold step toward a more imaginative and human-centered musical language.
As we enter an era of increasing interdisciplinarity in the arts, this notational archetype invites us to reconsider not just how music is written but how it is felt, shared, and understood. The question is no longer whether such a system is possible but whether we are ready to embrace its radical potential.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)