Zero-Mode Composition: Palindrome, Inversion, and the Art of Cancellation

 

Majorana zero modes → self-conjugate motifs. Palindromic, sign-reversing lines that annihilate on superposition.

This essay proposes a compositional paradigm that fuses the physics of Majorana zero modes with the musical idea of self-conjugate motifs: lines that are their own inverse under time reversal and designated sign changes. Palindromic structure supplies the temporal geometry; sign inversion supplies the energetic algebra. When the original and its conjugate are superposed under precise conditions, they annihilate. The result is a practice where sound is composed together with its own engineered disappearance, so the work articulates presence as the management of absence.

Primer: from Majorana to motif

In condensed-matter physics, a Majorana mode is a quasiparticle that is its own antiparticle. At zero energy it behaves like a real degree of freedom, not paired with a distinct complex conjugate. Two such modes separated in space can encode nonlocal information; bringing them together allows fusion that yields either occupancy or vacuum. Translating this: a musical motif can be written to equal its own conjugate under a defined involution, and two spatially or formally separated instances may be made to fuse (cancel) when brought into coincidence.

• Time involution: $\mathcal{T}[m](t) = m(T-t)$

• Sign conjugation: $\mathcal{C}[m]<span\; style="font-family:\; times;">flips\; a\; chosen\; subset\; of\; parameters\; (phase,\; spectral\; centroid,\; dynamic,\; or\; registral\; inversion).</span>$

• Majorana condition: a motif $m$ is self-conjugate when $\mathcal{C}\mathcal{T}[m] = m$ up to a small tolerance.

Annihilation then targets the superposition

$$s(t)=m(t)+\phi\,\mathcal{C}\mathcal{T}[m](t), \quad \phi=-1,$$

achieving $s(t)\approx 0$ under practical thresholds.

2) Theoretical assumptions (axioms for composition)

1. Realness: Notation selects a parameter set whose conjugation is involutive and audible. Examples: phase inversion in electronics, pitch inversion around an axis, dynamic inversion around a reference, timbral complementarity defined by a spectral mask.

2. Locality and nonlocality: Conjugate material may be remote in page space, stage space, or time, but is addressable through explicit links.

3. Tolerance: Perfect annihilation is a limit case. The score encodes an error budget $\epsilon$ for timing, tuning, and energy; partial annihilation is used dramaturgically.

4. Palindromic governance: Time is tiled so that returns are not repetitions but returns as negations.

5. Energetic accounting: The work is a ledger. Every increase of intensity demands a matched negative in its conjugate layer.

6. Reversibility with memory: Even canceled sound leaves procedural residue (breath debt, bow pressure bias, standing feedback). The piece writes, cancels, and then lives with the dent.

3) Philosophical ground

• Identity and difference: A self-conjugate motif is an object whose identity includes its own undoing. The figure does not oppose its other; it contains its other as a rule of transformation.

• Temporal ethics: Palindromic time reorients authorship from accumulation to accountability. Form does not grow, it balances.

• Presence as decision: Sound becomes a decision among mutually exclusive states. The silence that results from cancellation is not void; it is evidence of a fulfilled constraint.

• Archive and erasure: The score acts as an archive of procedures, not a repository of sonic tokens. Erasure is not deletion but the last, most disciplined mark.

4) The algebra of annihilation (usable metrics)

Let $\langle \cdot,\cdot\rangle$ be an energy-weighted inner product over the realization space (time–frequency–amplitude). Define the annihilation index

$$\mathcal{A}(m) \;=\; 1 - \frac{\|m + \phi\,\mathcal{C}\mathcal{T}[m]\|}{\|m\|+\|\mathcal{C}\mathcal{T}[m]\|}, \quad \phi=-1.$$

Values near 1 indicate near-perfect cancellation. For performance notes, display $\mathcal{A}$ targets at sectional boundaries. A spectral variant weights bands by masks so you can cancel only the band you choose and leave the scar elsewhere.

5) Notational toolkit (traditional to radical)

Anchors

• Conventional staves, clefs, articulations, microtonal accidentals; tuplets and irrational meters for palindromic tessellation.

Self-conjugacy devices

• Self-conjugate rune (◊) on a motif head: declares that its printed companion is $\mathcal{C}\mathcal{T}[m]$.

• Palindrome gates: vertical mirrors. Material between mirrors is performed forward and backward with specified inversion rules.

• Sign bars: thin overlines with ± icons that label which parameter flips on return: phase, dynamic, spectral tilt, bow pressure.

Superposition & erasure

• Annihilation brackets ⟦ ⟧: when two bracketed lines align temporally, performers enforce the superposition $+\,$ and $−$ states.

• Zero glyph (∅): marks the expectation of null output at a bus, mic, or acoustic focus.

• Memory ledgers: faint lines that persist after an impact, biasing subsequent intonation or color until cleared by ∅.

Linkage & locality

• EPR-IDs on ties to connect remote instances; electronics cross-route those channels for phase inversion and latency compensation.

• Axis stamps: note the inversion axis for pitch or spectrum on the system margin.

Electronics

• Phase-flip cues: small ▷± tags aligned with noteheads, triggering 180° phase inversion or complementary filtering.

• Correlation meters: miniature dials printed at staff edges; when the needle reaches the mark, the section may proceed to cancellation.

6) Temporal design: palindromic, sign-reversing time

Structure the work as tiled panels $P_1, P_2, …, P_n$. Each $P_k$ carries:

• a forward script $F_k$ and its conjugate $F_k^\*=\mathcal{C}\mathcal{T}[F_k]$,

• a defect map that deliberately misaligns select parameters on the return, ensuring controlled partial survival after annihilation.
  This yields a dramaturgy of returns that do not restore, only reconcile.

7) Performance practice

• Calibration: begin rehearsals by nulling pairs with electronics. Tune latency so summed signals produce audible minima at the designated focus.

• Breath and bow economy: teach players to feel the ledger—after a loud forward stroke, the return performs with an inverted pressure to match mechanical conditions of cancellation.

• Micro-alignment: assign one performer per subgroup as the conjugation captain to cue mirrors and sign flips.

• Error as contour: the work tolerates controlled error $\epsilon$. Drift becomes a halo around the annihilation instant; score it as intended aura, not failure.

8) Transformational implications

1. Form as conservation: You compose a conservation law, not a sequence of episodes. Energy is borrowed in the forward pass and repaid in the return.

2. Nonlocal counterpoint: Musical meaning propagates through portals. A gesture on one stand carries a debt that can be discharged across the hall minutes later.

3. New virtuosity: Mastery shifts from passagework to precision of negation. The most difficult feat is to make something not sound.

4. Audience phenomenology: Cancellations localize; the “black spot” of silence moves through space as a choreographed object.

5. Ethic of attention: The piece refuses excess. Every gesture is accountable to its own unwriting.

9) Three models for immediate use

Model A: Majorana Canon

• Two lines begin at opposite margins; one is printed, the other only as an MCB code ring. As players decode and realize the conjugate, the lines meet mid-page under ⟦ ⟧ and ∅. The null is staged at a single loudspeaker; the hall hears the approach and the disappearance.

Model B: Palindromic Fault

• A five-panel palindrome $P_1 P_2 P_3 P_2^\* P_1^\*$ where only spectral bands 1 and 3 cancel. Bands 2 and 4 are deliberately mis-signed, leaving a colored seam. The audience learns to hear what remains when history is repaid.

Model C: Self-Conjugate Solo

• One performer with live electronics performs a motif set bearing the ◊ rune. The rig auto-generates $\mathcal{C}\mathcal{T}[m]$ with programmable tolerances; the player’s job is to catch the null by micro-timing. A moving ∅ focus sweeps the space.

10) Implementation crib (practical)

• Electronics: parallel buses per motif; one stays dry, one passes through a phase-flip and complementary EQ; summed to a target. Use cross-correlation to drive a meter that the performer can read.

• Tuning: if pitch inversion is used, choose an axis that respects fingerings or slide positions; print it as an “axis staff” above the line.

• Page design: wide margins carry the conjugation code; keep core notation 65–70 percent density for overlays.

• Legend: include a one-page symbol sheet for ◊, ∅, ⟦ ⟧, ± bars, axis stamps, and EPR-IDs.

11) Coda

The promise of the Majorana metaphor is not sci-fi optics; it is discipline. A self-conjugate motif is a contract: whatever is set in motion must be met by its precise counter-motion. Palindrome makes time hospitable to this contract; sign reversal makes it audible. The score stops being a map of events and becomes a law the performance enforces. When annihilation happens and the room tips into cultivated nothing, that nothing is not absence; it is the trace of a perfectly kept agreement.

 

Glossary of Post-Conceptual Terms for Contemporary Composition & Intermedia Practice

Destructural Narratology

noun

A critical and creative strategy that dismantles conventional narrative forms in favor of fragmented, non-linear, or recursive structures. It rejects plot hierarchies and fixed sequencing, enabling open-ended or rhizomatic realizations. In musical or performative contexts, it challenges continuity and causality, emphasizing rupture, entropy, or unstable agency.

→ See also: anti-narrative, indeterminacy, rhizomatic form.

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Hypo-Atomism

noun

A compositional and notational approach that works beneath the level of traditional musical atoms (notes, beats, intervals), engaging with micro-gestures, timbral impulses, and pre-symbolic fragments. Hypo-atomism avoids discrete events in favor of proto-musical textures typically expressed through graphic or gestural scores where notation operates as implication rather than instruction.

→ Contrast with: pointillism, granular synthesis (as metaphor).

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Post-Notation

noun

An umbrella term for notational practices that operate beyond the conventions of Western staff notation. Post-notation includes graphic scores, spatial diagrams, algorithmic instructions, visual-poetic systems, and non-visual (e.g., tactile or conceptual) directives. These scores prioritize process, interpretation, and context over fixed content.

→ Related: performative notation, meta-score, open form.

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Pharmacoform

noun

A speculative or aestheticized delivery mechanism for a conceptual "dose" often modeled after pharmaceutical forms (capsule, tablet, vapor, patch), but used metaphorically or sculpturally in compositional or exhibition contexts. Pharmacoforms carry meaning not just in what they deliver (sound, scent, text), but in how the form itself encodes ritual, regulation, or affective experience.

→ Coined in speculative pharmaco-aesthetics and biodesign.

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Semantic Drift (in Score-Based Work)

noun

The gradual displacement or mutation of a symbol’s meaning as it travels across time, media, or interpretive acts. In post-conceptual music, semantic drift allows notational elements to act as semi-stable carriers  open to reinterpretation, distortion, or recombination. Often used intentionally in modular scores, iterative works, or collaborative installations.

→ See also: score erosion, interpretive entropy.

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Inscriptive Field

noun

The total visual-textual space of a score, including marks, margins, non-verbal cues, and absences. An inscriptive field functions as a performance ecology rather than a directive object. In post-conceptual practice, attention is paid not just to the notation but to the material, topological, and atmospheric qualities of the field.

→ Related: paratext, score as object, field-based composition.

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Meta-Score

noun

A score that describes or generates other scores. It may take the form of instructions, rule sets, conditions, or algorithms that define the parameters for score creation. Meta-scores operate at a structural level and often produce different outputs per iteration. They function as compositional frameworks rather than finished works.

→ Associated with generative systems, procedural music, and AI-informed practices.

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Sonic Ficta

noun

Borrowed from the medieval term musica ficta, this post-conceptual term refers to sonic or performative content that is not notated but implied often existing between interpretation and invention. Sonic ficta plays with expectation and insinuation, inviting the performer to interpolate gestures not explicitly present in the score.

→ Related to: implied voicing, interpretive invention, ghost notation.

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Paranoiac Reading (of Score)

noun

A mode of score interpretation in which the performer assumes hidden codes, misdirections, or double meanings within the notational system  often drawing from surrealist or psychoanalytic frameworks. This reading strategy encourages non-literal, affective, or symbolic interpretation of scores.

→ Inspired by Salvador Dalí’s “paranoiac-critical method.”

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Archive-as-Performance

noun

The practice of treating archival material (texts, sketches, past scores, data, failed ideas) as active compositional matter. In this approach, the archive is not static, but performative.  It becomes a site of iteration, remix, or reanimation. Often used in posthumous collaborations, re-scoring, or durational installations.

→ Related: living archive, curatorial composition, memory-based notation.

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Temporal Scaffold

noun

A structural framework within which time is suggested but not dictated. A temporal scaffold may include proportional spacing, visual pacing, or environmental triggers rather than metrical cues. It provides enough shape to orient performance without determining rhythmic behavior.

→ Often found in spatial scores, durational installations, or time-adaptive works.

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Gesture Archive

noun

A collection of non-notated or semi-notated micro-actions  {sonic, visual, or embodied} that function as a reservoir for improvisation or re-composition. A gesture archive may appear in a score as a legend, index, or rotating palette, and often grows or mutates with each performance.

→ Related to embodied notation, modular vocabularies.

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Negative Score

noun

A score defined by what it omits  (i.e., silence, void, erasure, or restriction). A negative score might be a redacted document, an instruction to avoid certain actions, or a field marked only by absence. These works rely on inferred structure, tension, or paradox.

→ Echoes conceptual art’s use of negation as content.

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Rhizomatic Form

noun

A non-hierarchical, non-linear structure in which elements are linked through multiplicity rather than sequence. Borrowed from Deleuze & Guattari, rhizomatic scores allow for multiple entry points, rearrangements, and relationships without fixed origin or resolution.

→ Frequently used in modular, improvisational, or digital works.

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Parametric Notation

noun

A system in which musical parameters (pitch, duration, timbre, dynamics, etc.) are represented independently, often through visual encoding (e.g., color, shape, opacity). Performers interpret intersecting parameters holistically, rather than from a single unified symbol.

→ Used in spectral, electronic, or graphic notation systems.

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Post-Legible Notation

noun

A visual score that prioritizes aesthetic density, abstraction, or affective texture over literal readability. Often exists at the edge of legibility, but not entirely symbolic, not entirely graphic. These scores resist decoding, instead generating atmosphere or sensation.

→ Example: blurred glyphs, layered text, noise-as-notation.

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Interpretive Overfit

noun

The phenomenon in which a performer or ensemble reads too precisely into an ambiguous or open score reducing its multiplicity by anchoring it in overly deterministic choices. Often results in flattened outcomes that miss the conceptual or improvisational intent.

→ Warning against over-rationalizing indeterminacy.

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Hypernotational Field

noun

A dense, multidimensional plane of symbols, fragments, and spectral data where notation exceeds legibility and enters saturation. In a hypernotational field, semiotic overload becomes the medium where performers do not read the score, they navigate it.

→ Think of notation as environmental immersion, not instruction.

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Auto-Liquefaction

noun

The built-in tendency of a compositional structure to collapse or dissolve under the weight of its own logic. Auto-liquefying scores may start with formal clarity but rapidly become unstable deteriorating via entropy, contradiction, or recursion.

→ Similar to “planned failure,” but encoded in the score’s design.

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Noetic Reverb

noun

The echo effect of speculative meaning that lingers around a score or compositional gesture even when that gesture is inaudible, invisible, or unrealized. Noetic reverb is how the idea of a sound continues to shape performance long after its formal absence.

→ The score becomes a site of conceptual resonance, not just instruction.

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Non-Euclidean Score

noun

A score whose temporal and spatial logics are warped, folded, or topologically disobedient. These scores may operate in curved time, irrational proportions, or impossible geometries. Navigation is nonlinear and may loop or contradict.

→ Inspired by spatial computing, deep mathematics, and speculative architecture.

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Occluded Lexicon

noun

A vocabulary or symbol set embedded in a score that is deliberately obscured, private, or incomplete  functioning more as ritual or myth than as transmission. Its purpose is not to be decoded, but to construct an atmosphere of uncertainty, invitation, or intimacy.

→ Language becomes residue, not instruction.

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Infrasonic Grammar

noun

A compositional language built from below-threshold, sub-perceptual gestures notated through compression, scale reduction, or spectral ghosting. These scores prioritize tactile, vibrational, or speculative listening, rather than sonic clarity.

→ Typicaly rendered through body, space, or installation rather than through sound itself.

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Signal Ruin

noun

A technique or aesthetic state where a once-coherent notational system decays into corrupted signals — glitches, compression artifacts, illegible layers. A form of digital entropy that celebrates the breakdown of symbolic authority.

→ The score is not read ;  it is excavated.

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Spectral Refusal

noun

A compositional stance or tactic wherein the work resists being sounded existing instead as a potential, a threat, or an afterimage. Spectral refusal involves withholding resolution, denying climax, or making itself conditionally unperformable.

→ Similar to poetic negation or deferred presence.

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Recursive Illegibility

noun

A notational condition in which attempts at interpretation only generate deeper uncertainty. Each decoding opens new contradictions. The performer enters a loop where meaning becomes a moving target — the score performs them as much as they perform it.

→ Inspired by autopoiesis, paradox logic, and asemic writing.

Toward a Notation: The Pharmacological System in the Shadow of the Pharmaco-Aesthetic

 

Toward a Notation: The Pharmacological System in the Shadow of the Pharmaco-Aesthetic

Cabinets, Codices, and the Architecture of Belief

If the 20th-century artist once turned to the grid as a site of aesthetic order and ontological inquiry, the 21st-century artist-composer may be said to turn to the pharmacy. The shelves, the doses, the packets and capsules...symmetrical, seductive, and vaguely tyrannical form the contemporary altar of certainty. We find a profound and meticulously developed extension of this pharmaco-aesthetic tradition, now rendered through a new notational system: a compendium of circular, color-coded diagrams accompanied by invented pharmacological profiles. These are not merely visual provocations or poetic conceits; they are the structural glyphs of a musical language built atop the logics of compulsion and cure, diagnosis and transformation.

What I assemble, piece by piece, is the sonic corollary of a pharmacy shelf. It metaphoriclly translates to an immense, semiotic archive in which every diagram is at once a sign, a score, and a symptom. While I do not mimic the gallery-space-as-drugstore installations of my visual predecessors, the genealogy of this work is clear. It emerges in the long shadow of an artistic tradition that transformed the medicinal object into a fetishized symbol of faith, addiction, seduction, and the failure of reason.

We do not need to mention names to recognize this inheritance. There exists a well-known artist whose pill cabinets, pharmacy reconstructions, and seductive vitrines of drug paraphernalia have turned the act of medical consumption into a spectacle of aesthetic and existential reflection. Where that artist builds rooms out of dosage forms, I build an entire language. Where that earlier work invited the viewer to gaze into the spectacle of cure, mine invites us to perform it as an act of sonic inscription.

The Diagram as Dose: Score as Pharmakon

The circular notational diagrams that form the basis of my systems are more than visual devices. They are prescription objects, analogues to capsules intended not for ingestion but for interpretive release. Each one is layered with affective valence, its concentric color fields operating like chemical rings, each with its own temporal and physiological implications. Their titles, Azarthræquineticyn™, Glavendral™, Beurovenza™ echo the naming conventions of commercial pharmaceuticals: polysyllabic, vaguely Latinate, simultaneously authoritative and hallucinatory.

What Hirst achieved by stockpiling hundreds of manufactured pills into sterilized cabinets (inviting both fetish and critique), I achieve by transposing the logic of the dosage unit into the syntax of musical performance. In both cases, the viewer (or performer) is suspended between trust and doubt. The thing before them is a diagram, a promise, a warning. It does not say, “play this,” but “this is how the condition is structured.” The performer becomes a pharmacologist of sound, administering meaning through interpretation, dosage through gesture.

This shift from cabinet to codex is more than formal. Hirst’s works, particularly in Cathedrals Built on Sand, render pharmaceuticals as objects of religious devotion.  They are altarpieces of addiction and misplaced belief. My systems internalize this structure and turns it outward again as process. The circular score is the shrine; the performance, the liturgy. Interpretation becomes a sacramental act: precise, ritualized, opaque, and absolutely necessary.

Clinical Erotics: Color, Repetition, and Semantic Overload

Both my lexicon and its aesthetic predecessors share a visual and linguistic logic governed by overabundance. In the cabinets: hundreds of pills, nearly identical, each alluring, mysterious, absurd in number. In my diagrams: infinite rings of color, some harmonious, others jarring are coded with invented afflictions and implausible protocols. We are offered not clarity but controlled excess: too many pills to comprehend, too many rings to parse, too many diseases to ever master.

And yet it is in this overload that a strange erotics of interpretation emerges. In Hirst’s displays, the temptation was literal, candy-colored pills arranged like offerings. In my scores, the temptation is hermeneutic. The performer is seduced by the complexity of the diagram, the possibility that, with enough time, one could learn this language. One could treat it not as an image, but as a functional grammar, a system of keys unlocking rare sonic truths.

Indeed, my naming strategy mimics the very cultural machinery of pharmaceutical branding of names that suggest efficacy, softness, potency, mystery. Like the Prozac and OxyContin of the marketplace, Evinectys™ or Bravencurialthrum™ draw the eye and mouth toward them, even before meaning is affixed. They beg to be said aloud, performed, tasted. Just as the pill is engineered to appeal to the consumer’s desire for immediate resolution, these notational compounds appeal to the performer’s desire for a fix which becomes a stable symbol, a totalized prescription for what the work “means.”

But no such fix exists. This is perhaps the most profound tie between my work and my artistic predecessor: we both structure our works as closed systems with no exit. You are inside the logic now. There are no translations. You can catalogue the pills, count the rings, say the names, but no revelation will come. The meaning lies in the act itself: to classify, to name, to administer, to repeat.

Rare Affliction as Genre: The Disease as Form

What I offer, ultimately, is a shift in what it means to compose. I do not write melodies. I names syndromes. I dos not orchestrate textures. I code regimens. Each diagram corresponds not to a piece, but to a condition...real, invented, or misdiagnosed. And in doing so, I place composition squarely in the realm of pathological poetics. What the cabinets suggest as symptoms (overuse, addiction, fetishism), I install as genres.

Every syndrome is a musical condition. Systemic Delay Echo Syndrome implies recursive, ghosted materials. Somatic-Lexical Reversal Syndrome demands confusion between text and gesture, between utterance and touch. Narrative Urine Saturation, despite its absurdity, suggests saturation as form (flow, blockage, flood). These are not metaphors for music. They are music, at the level of diagnosis. To play the score is to enter the affliction, to inhabit it as form.

Just as Hirst’s works demanded the viewer confront their own belief in medical certainty, while never actually providing it, my lexicon offers musical conditions that cannot be resolved. They must be endured. Interpreted. Played. Over and over.

The Score as Clinical Fiction

The most radical gesture of this system is its commitment to clinical fiction. It borrows the format, tone, and formality of medical documents.  This is not a critique of medicine, but to propose that musical notation could be as prescriptive, as terrifying, as bureaucratically beautiful as a pharmaceutical label. Each diagram functions as both a fantasy and a warning: “This may treat your condition, but we can’t say how.”

In doing so, I implicate the composer in the same apparatus as the pharmacologist or the brand strategist (a curious analogy). The act of naming a new syndrome complete with invented therapy and regimen is not unlike naming a new musical form, with genre, idiom, and duration. My work suggests that composition is already prescription, that every piece of music is already a treatment protocol for a condition we may not yet have diagnosed.

From Vitrine to Lexicon

Where one artist offered vitrines filled with color-coded salvation, another has offered a lexicon filled with symbolic affliction. What was once displayed to seduce the eye is now encoded to seduce the mind, the body, and the interpretive drive of the performer. My pharmacological notation system is not a commentary on that earlier pharmaco-art, it is its mutation. It is what happens when the pills stop working, and you begin writing new ones yourself. When art ceases to display the object of desire and instead becomes the manual for how to administer meaning.

We are, in the end, left not with a cabinet but a codex. Not with belief, but with practice. This is not the death of notation, nor its resurrection.  It  is its reformulation as a speculative clinic, a registry of undiagnosable sound, a pharmakon of pure musical contagion.

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Regarding Certain Faces Inserted Into the Score, and the Compositional Implications Thereof

 

Regarding Certain Faces Inserted Into the Score, and the Compositional Implications Thereof

In the early stages before the lines grew thick with non-linear debris and before the glyphs misbehaved, I began collecting faces. I don’t mean this in the romantic or forensic sense (though either would be true in certain light conditions), but as a method of extracting symbolic residue from the already-symbolized. These were not just models. They were selected persons, posed and misposed, whose captured visages could serve not only as index but as topology: the high cheekbone not as contour but as crescendo; the tight brow not as mood but as timbral event; the misaligned eye as a notational fulcrum where meaning drops out and another, less nameable thing, enters.

I chose them carefully, though "choice" is perhaps too confident a term. I sifted through endless near-people. Candidates, stand-ins, facial proxies. They failed by being too knowable. I needed the ones whose identities had already eroded. Whose faces gave away nothing except the fact of being watched. Which is to say, I sought faces with no signal but pure reception.  Think faces as devices. Instruments of indeterminacy. Machines for the generation of compositional doubt.

Of Image as Score

The face, once captured and flattened, becomes no longer face but field. There’s a duration to a stare that cannot be transcribed, and yet it persists in the notational surface as a pressure.  It is like a thumb left too long on sheet metal. I inserted their portraits not as illustration, but as event structure. Their eyes became clefs. Their mouths served as entry points for performative impulse. Some had names. Most didn’t. The score didn't require them. Names suggest a singularity of reference, and that’s not what this work is for.

I photographed them in silence, though not without sound. A low electrical buzzing (from the ballast or the aging lens motor). Their stillness was not peace but posed resistance. The way a subject prepares to become someone else.

Once embedded in the score, they began to behave poorly at first, and then with more confidence. Their cheeks aligned with phrase curves. Their hairlines matched the contour of pitch blocks. Sometimes their faces had to be mutilated to make room for the music. Sometimes the music had to be rewritten to let the face breathe.

The Problem of Recognition

I never wanted them to be recognized.  At least not by audience, not by performer, not even by themselves (should they stumble upon their inclusion in a gallery or backroom archive). To recognize is to resolve, and resolution is the enemy of sound in this language.

Let me say it plainer: I do not score likeness. I score pressure.

Each face is a mask is a mirror is a metaphor that resists. The performer's task is not to reproduce but to negotiate. How do you play a jawline? How do you translate a squint into bowing direction? These are the questions that make the piece a piece.

Regarding Influences, Or, The Other Faces in the Room

You ask, where did this begin? Who gave you permission?

Was it the high-gloss banality of the archivist-photographer, who stripped the personhood from the portrait by calibrating it to forensic light and neutral backdrop? Was it the constructed woman who could never quite locate herself across wigs, or the mythographer of light who staged reality so convincingly that the narrative bled from the image’s surface?

Yes, it was all of them. And more. Those who stitched number to voice. Those who ruptured canvas to admit the wound. Those who folded the material until it spoke another name. I learned from them all: how to withhold, how to blur, how to stage the face as field. But none of them made scores out of faces. That part, I had to invent.

The Composer as Interrogator of Expression

I do not ask the performer to interpret the face. I ask them to interrogate it. Assume it lies. Assume it’s a stand-in. Assume it’s you.

Once placed on the page, the portrait becomes instrument, becomes warning, becomes temptation. Some performers weep. Others ask if they can remove the image from the part. They say it feels like being watched by someone they failed to understand. I tell them that’s the point.

There are no instructions. Only placement. The score is not a map.  It is a staging of collisions. Sound against silence. Identity against absence. Legibility against suggestion.

Mis-Identity as Methodology

Let’s talk about the mis-identified.

They proliferate in this work. Not mistakes. Not errors. But intentional slippages. The subject who was cast for her neutral expression becomes, in the layering process, a tyrant. The young man photographed in profile is mirrored and inverted until he becomes a glyph indistinguishable from an 18th-century clef. The face was never the goal. It was the event through which notation emerged.

You read the score, and the face reads you back. You bow, breathe, strike, hesitate and the score shrinks from interpretation like a trap door. This is the structure. This is the invitation.

Toward a Lexicon of Facial Notation

There is no legend. No chart. No semiotic key that reveals how to read these faces into phonation. But there is an emerging grammar. A curvature repeated. An eye placed at 33% down the page. A mouth inscribed with hypo-neologic text consisting of letters that almost form a command, a breath-mark, a slur.

The performer must listen to the face. Not read it. Not know it.
And in doing so, something very old occurs: the face becomes sound again.