Saturday, September 5, 2026
Clarion #40 for C Trumpet with Performance Guidance (18 pp. PDF Link)
Clarion #40 for C Trumpet with Performance Guidance (18 pp. PDF Link)
Friday, September 4, 2026
Clarion #50 for C Trumpet with Performance Guidance (19pp. PDF Link)
Clarion #50 for C Trumpet with Performance Guidance (19pp. PDF Link)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Qrn0X1PJis43bJLAMfrlIEXGzePRBehm/view?usp=sharing
Thursday, September 3, 2026
The Score as a Linguistic Playground: A Conceptual Critique of Notation Itself
The Score as a Linguistic Playground: A Conceptual Critique of Notation Itself
The score, in its most conventional iteration, is often perceived as an immutable decree, a transparent conduit for artistic intent, particularly within the rigid historical strictures of musical performance. Yet, to subscribe to such a reductive view is to overlook its inherent, often fraught, nature: the score is, at its core, a linguistic playground, a semantic terrain where the act of encoding is never a neutral transcription, but a conceptual critique in motion.
In the aesthetic philosophy that re-orients Modernism towards a post-humanist present, the score is liberated from its service to mere replication. It ceases to be a passive instruction set and instead reveals itself as an active syntactic construct, an architectural scaffold of symbols and spaces whose very grammar dictates perception as much as it preserves intention. The lines, dots, and figures are not inert markers; they are phonemes in a visual lexicon, each carrying a weight of historical semiotics and latent potential.
Consider notation through the lens of architectural structuralism: every stave, every ledger line, every time signature forms a load-bearing element in a non-Euclidean edifice. These are the beams and columns of a conceptual building, dictating the flow, the tension, and the inherent spatialization of a temporal art. The traditional grid of the musical score, ostensibly designed for clarity and order, simultaneously imposes a balanced aloofness, a systemic distance between the composer's impulse and the interpreter's realization. This grid, while enabling communication, also constrains the boundless, tactile landscape of pure sound or abstract gesture.
The critique begins here: by acknowledging that even the most 'standard' notation is a highly stylized, culturally embedded diagram, a particular way of seeing sound, and thus, implicitly, a way of not seeing it.
The very act of committing an ephemeral idea to concrete notation is an act of translation, fraught with inherent biases. How does one adequately represent the nuanced timbre of a breath, the unquantifiable decay of a resonance, or the subjective experience of a prolonged silence, within a system designed for pitch and rhythm? This interrogation forces a confrontation with the ontological limits of symbolization. The score, therefore, becomes a site of necessary slippage, a linguistic liminality where the desired ideal perpetually brushes against the pragmatic limitations of its own language.
In this playground, the playful subversion of traditional notation becomes a potent critical tool. When a composer extends the realm of scoring beyond conventional symbols to include architectural diagrams, combustion patterns, hyper-realized photographic fragments, or even textual prose, they are not merely expanding their expressive palette. They are performing a conceptual archaeology of notation itself. They highlight how the conventional musical score, in its very linearity and rigid segmentation, imposes a particular logic onto what might otherwise be a fluid, amorphous, or chaotic experience.
The inclusion of incongruous media, the deliberate layering of disparate signifiers, serves to break down the monolithic authority of standard notation, revealing it as one dialect among many in the vast language of artistic creation.
The "linguistic playground" thus embraces the notion that every notational choice is an interpretive act, a strategic decision to privilege certain aspects of a 'score' while implicitly obscuring others.
The beauty, then, lies not in perfect transmission, but in the richness of the interface, the semantic density of the scaffold itself. It is in the tension between what is prescribed and what remains un-notated, between the explicit instruction and the implicit invitation for radical re-interpretation, that the score truly lives as a dynamic, evolving linguistic system. It challenges us to look beyond the immediate marks, to perceive the deeper architectural structures and the inherent critical stance embedded within the very act of notation.
Wednesday, September 2, 2026
"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. It erupts as a 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. 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, and 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.
“Index Lacuna & Fictive Ledger: Typography as Ontology in the Ready-Made Score”
“Index Lacuna & Fictive Ledger: Typography as Ontology in the Ready-Made Score”
In the domain of contemporary notation, where the score has moved far beyond a neutral medium into a charged field of conceptual engagement, the introduction of two new fonts, Index Lacuna and Fictive Ledger, signals a profound shift in how notation operates, not just as instruction, but as philosophy in form. Designed expressly for a new score grounded in the entangled notions of archaism, banality, antiquity, and the ready-made, these fonts do not merely convey; they perform. They shape the internal architecture of the composition while undermining the very conventions of legibility and historical authority.
Typography as Internal Structure: Not Letters, but Artifacts
Both Index Lacuna and Fictive Ledger are not simply aesthetic choice, but they are structural necessities. Where most scores use typography to support a given system, here the typefaces themselves constitute the system’s skeletal memory. They are the very bones through which the performer must read, misread, and reconstruct intention.
These are not fonts to be read in passing. They are to be inhabited, navigated, excavated.
Index Lacuna: Typographic Erosion as Signifier
Index Lacuna is a font born from absence. Its very name evokes the gaps left in damaged manuscripts, the lacunae that speak louder than the text around them. Each glyph appears as though scraped from a deteriorating surface, partially erased, semi-lithic, and uneven in pressure. Inspired by inscriptions found on temple walls long lost to sand and re-engraved centuries later, its forms are fractured, porous.
The spacing is erratic. Some letters appear to sink into the background, while others seem to float above it echoing the unstable temporality of archaeological recovery. Diacritical marks behave like phantom traces. Ligatures are absent, as though deliberately forgotten.
The font introduces interpretive uncertainty. What is an "E" might be an "F." A fermata could double as a fragmented rune. This deliberate slipperiness allows Index Lacuna to manifest semantic ambiguity as material presence. In the score, it functions as a cryptic invitation: a half-remembered language only the performer’s gesture can resurrect.
Fictive Ledger: The Bureaucratic Script of the Unreal
If Index Lacuna speaks to the spectral erosion of history, Fictive Ledger counters with an entirely different fiction. It is the illusion of order. Borrowing visual cues from obsolete business forms, municipal ledgers, and epistolary records of the 19th century, Fictive Ledger is a font of deception. It mimics clarity while embodying falsehood.
Its serifs are upright and self-assured. Its alignment is suspiciously perfect. And yet, beneath its clerical confidence lies a system of subtle mutations: numerals that change form mid-page, glyphs that tilt just enough to hint at forgery, and punctuation marks that seem borrowed from non-Latin scripts. A ledger that never existed for a civilization that never kept accounts.
When used in the score, Fictive Ledger becomes the notation of bureaucratized imagination. Performance directives appear as if excerpted from an invented state archive. Breath marks resemble tax stamps. Dynamics take on the flavor of censored communications. In this way, the performer is not so much interpreting as fabricating an archive in real time.
The Score as Double Exposure: When Fonts Behave Like Systems
Together, Index Lacuna and Fictive Ledger create a tension that reflects the broader conceptual tension of the score itself. Where one font disappears, the other imposes. Where one enshrines the gap, the other pretends to fill it. And this is precisely the paradox at the heart of the ready-made: the collision of found form and fractured meaning.
The score that houses these fonts is no longer a visual document of sound. It is a palimpsest of systems, a double exposure of contradiction. The fonts destabilize each other, much like the symbols of antiquity jostle against the iconography of banality. The performer is no longer merely deciphering, but they are held in the act of critical witnessing. The fonts are their terrain.
Implications for the Field
By embedding philosophy into the glyph itself, Index Lacuna and Fictive Ledger reassert the performative weight of typographic decisions. These are not just visual accents; they are conceptual provocateurs. Their function exceeds readability. They become the residue of imagined histories and unreliable futures.
In doing so, your score resists the standardization of musical time and textual truth. Instead, it constructs an ontology of practice, a ritual zone where meaning is precarious and performance is speculative archaeology. These fonts are artifacts and agents, collapsing distance between the notated and the beholder.
In the end, the performer must confront what these fonts have inscribed not on the page, but into the act of interpretation itself: the impossibility of neutral reading, the pressure of invented histories, and the strange resonance of the banal made sacred by its frame.
These are not fonts. They are fictions etched in stone, and the music is what grows in their cracks.
W.I.P.>>>>>>> For Guitar
There is a row of pin-up girls at the top of this score.
Each one holds a block of cheese. Each one is accompanied by a sloth.
This is not decoration. This is the piece telling you exactly what kind of attention it requires before you have read a single note.
The notation below is some of the most demanding material I have written for guitar. Four simultaneous staves operating at different logical levels. Time signatures of 08 over 17 and 4000 over 008, which are not errors and not provocations but precise specifications of a temporal experience that conventional meter cannot contain. Tuplet groupings of 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8 in simultaneous deployment across independent voices. Extended techniques rendered in a notational language that borrows from multiple traditions and resolves into none of them. A second clef entry mid-page at 085 over 178, the tempo itself a fraction, the music inside it a further subdivision of something already impossibly subdivided.
And above all of this: women, cheese, and sloths.
The juxtaposition is not ironic. It is not surrealist in the fashionable sense of random image collision. It is a genuine compositional proposition about the relationship between maximum notational complexity and maximum notational absurdity, the idea that the most serious musical demands and the most cheerfully ridiculous imagery belong on the same page because they are both, in the end, asking the same thing of the person who encounters them.
Which is: stay with this. It will not explain itself. But it will reward you.
The sloth knows. The sloth always knows.
Dominos, Steps, Ghostskirt
“Dominos, Steps, Ghostskirt” reads as a chamber of cause and trace. The page stages a chain reaction where notational tiles topple through space, each glyph cueing the next event. Arcing slurs and red dotted connectors sketch paths of transfer, while stacked accidentals and beamed ladders propose steps that climb and buckle. The treble clefs act like wayfinding posts rather than ordinary clef changes, pinning orientation inside a terrain that behaves more like architecture than staff paper.
At left, the pale square is a negative photograph. Look closely and a woman in a skirt appears faintly, her figure ghosted over a staircase whose risers hold domino chips that ascend into the mouth of an industrial tannery. This image anchors the title. Dominos name the chain reaction. Steps name the staircase and the score’s measured ascent. Ghostskirt names the residual body that haunts the mechanism.
Center frame, a vertical strip of sprocketed film becomes a spine for time. Orbiting rings of serrated waveform suggest rotating focus, the ear circling a sound to inspect its grain. The circular gray modules and orange cap in the lower right read as resonant chambers or valves, a reminder that the page is also an instrument diagram waiting to be assembled by breath, bow, and touch.
The score treats notation as choreography. Domino logic organizes entries. Steps measure energy, not only pitch. Ghostskirt records the afterimage of motion that remains once articulation has passed. The result is a lucid paradox. Everything is diagrammed with surgical clarity, yet the performance it invites is tactile, unstable, and vividly alive.
Tuesday, September 1, 2026
Saturation Studies: Overwriting as Compositional Method
Saturation is often treated as something to avoid. We fear the smear of too much information. We worry that lines will blur, that gesture will lose its edge. This post takes the opposite view. Overwriting becomes a deliberate method. Density is not a byproduct. It is the score.
Overwriting can live on the page as a visible engine. Notation is only one layer. The score becomes a site where media collide and leave evidence. The player reads those collisions as instruction, resistance, and invitation. Sound grows out of what the eye must reconcile.
What overwriting means in a visual score
Overwriting is the deliberate stacking of heterogeneous marks and materials on a shared surface. Staff notation sits beside vector scaffolds, photomontage, chromatic fields, stickers, tape, and hand ink. Each layer proposes a rule. None enjoys total authority. The page holds concurrency. The performer edits in real time.
Overwriting distributes agency. The composer sets the ecology. The performers make local law. Credit that labor. Keep space in the parts for performer notes. Invite those notes back into the next edition of the score.
A visual score can conduct by pressure rather than instruction. Multiple media create a field of forces that bends time, touch, and timbre. When spines, gates, fields, and beacons work together, the music acquires continuity without the crutch of a single syntax. The page becomes both archive and generator. Overwriting is not clutter. It is the instrument.Sunday, August 30, 2026
"Silver Stockholm" The Score. Commentary and Analysis by Cormac McCarthy, American Novelist
Vertical Orientation
"Silver Stockholm"
For Bass Clarinet, Cello and Harpsichord
Bil Smith Composer
104" X 10"
A Commission From Sage Group
Commentary by Cormac McCarthy, American Novelist
In the relentless pursuit of dismantling the traditional, of flinging wide the doors to rooms within rooms of musical architecture heretofore unexplored, comes this score, "Silver Stockholm" by composer Bil Smith. Yes, sprawling across a sheet of unprecedented proportions. 104 inches by a mere 10, imagine, as though one were trying to read the horizon itself, and yet within this expanse lies not the familiar, not the comfort of the staves and clefs and black dots neatly arrayed like soldiers, no. Here lies chaos, or so it seems at first blush, a chaos meticulously planned and plotted along axes not of our making but of the composer's, a realm where the Moire, hyperplexic in its complexity, invites, no, demands a recusal from the linear, the sequential, the narrative of music as we know it.
Consider, if you will, the audacity. The sheer, unmitigated gall of pushing notation from edge to edge, as though the very boundary of the page itself were but a mere suggestion, an inconvenience to be acknowledged and then promptly ignored. Within this frame, this canvas, the notes do not march; they cavort, they tangle in dense, wriggling fields, competing striations that defy the eye to follow without succumbing to vertigo. And yet, within this apparent anarchy, there is order, a discipline that speaks to a choreography of the mind so intricate, so private, that one might find oneself whispering of Cunningham, of Cage, those luminaries who too sought to break free from the shackles of the expected, the conventional.
And what of the performers, those brave souls called upon to navigate this maelic maelstrom? For them, the color, the hue of a note, a line, a smudge becomes a signifier, a beacon through the fog of complexity. These ridged, sinuous marks, they are not mere decoration but a language unto themselves, a notation that speaks of timbre and attack and decay as much as of pitch and rhythm. The performers, then, must become not just musicians but translators, interpreters of a script that acknowledges no master, that adheres to no orthodoxy.
Yet, for all its defiance, its reveling in the joyous liberation from form, there remains the grid. Ah, the grid, that imposition of order upon the chaotic, the unruly. It does not rationalize; no, that would be too simple, too pedestrian. It serves rather as a reminder, a concession to the necessity of form, of structure, however tenuous, however fluid. It is both a cage and a key, a means of navigating the vast, uncharted territories that "Silver Stockholm" lays bare before us.
Thus, we stand on the threshold, peering into the abyss that "Silver Stockholm" represents, an abyss not of nihilism but of possibility, of potentiality. For in its refusal to conform, in its daring to dream of a music not yet heard, it offers not just a new way of seeing, but a new way of hearing, a new way of understanding the very fabric of sound itself. It is a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down at the feet of tradition, a declaration that music, like all art, must evolve, must shatter its own boundaries if it is to capture, even fleetingly, the ineffable, the sublime, the truly divine.
In the depths of the score, past the initial shock of the dimensions, this elongated strip of potentiality stretched out like the very horizon line where sky meets earth, lies the heart of the revolution, the Moire notational system. A system, if one dares call it that, where the term itself seems a mockery of the organized, the structured systems of old, where chaos and order dance in such close quarters that to distinguish one from the other becomes an exercise in futility, or perhaps, in enlightenment.
The Moire, with its hyperplexic tendencies, does not simply invite interpretation; it demands an unlearning of the learned, a forgetting of the familiar so that the eyes, and through them, the mind and soul, might see anew. These patterns, these interferences of line against line, shape against shape, create not just visual artifacts but a new language of music. It’s as if the composer, in their wisdom or their madness (often two sides of the same coin) decided that the traditional staves and bars were cages too small, too limiting for the beast they wished to unleash.
To engage with the Moire is to engage with a living thing. It pulses, it breathes, it moves in ways that defy the static nature of ink on paper. The performers, then, are not merely musicians but conjurers, tasked with the Herculean feat of translating this writhing, shifting mass of visual cues into sound. The notes, if one can still call them that, are not fixed points but suggestions, possibilities that exist in multiple states until the moment of performance, where they collapse into a single reality, only to become multitudinous once more in the memory of the event.
What, then, is the performer to make of this? How does one navigate a system where the rules are not broken, for breaking implies that they were ever adhered to, but rather ignored from the outset? It requires a redefinition of the role of the performer, from interpreter to collaborator, an equal partner in the creation of the piece with every performance. The Moire notational system, with its dense, competing striations and arcs that turn in on themselves, offers a multiplicity of paths through the piece, each valid, each unique.
This is not music as we have known it. This is a challenge to the very concept of what music can be, a testament to the composer's vision of a world unbound by the traditional constraints of notation, rhythm, and melody. The Moire notational system is a liberation, yes, but a daunting one, for with unlimited choice comes the weight of those choices, the responsibility for each note played or not played, for the music that is created or the silence that is allowed to speak.
And yet, despite, or perhaps because of, its complexities, its demands on both performer and audience, the Moire notational system represents a pivotal moment in the evolution of musical expression. It is a declaration that music is not merely sound organized in time but a living, breathing entity, capable of infinite change and growth. In "Silver Stockholm," and the Moire system at its heart, we find not the end of music as we know it, but the beginning of something new, something unexplored. A frontier not just to be seen and heard but to be ventured into, with all the peril and promise that such journeys entail.
The very essence, you see, in the hands of Bil Smith transforms... transmutes, if you will, these Moire patterns from mere visual phenomena into a notational ontology, an entire beingness of music notation. It's not just about seeing; no, that's too simple. It's about re-seeing, re-understanding what we perceive as music, as notation. These patterns, these moiré fringes, they're not just interference; they're a language, a complex, ever-shifting language that Smith, in his audacity, has dared to employ as the very foundation of his musical expression.
And what is this if not a challenge? A challenge to the performers, to the audience, to the very fabric of musical academia itself to reevaluate our preconceptions of what music notation is, what it can be. These patterns, born of the overlaying of one partially opaque, ruled pattern upon another, they create something new, something unanticipated. In mathematics, in physics, they represent a phenomenon, an effect. But in the hands of Smith, they become tools, instruments of a sort, for a new kind of musical composition and performance.
This is not merely about notes on a page. Anyone can write notes on a page. No, this is about creating a space where those notes can live, can breathe, can interact in ways previously unimagined. The moiré pattern, with its large-scale interference, becomes a metaphor for the music itself. It is omplex, ever-changing, dependent on the perspective of the observer, or in this case, the performer. Each performance, then, becomes a unique event, a singular interpretation of the patterns before them, shaped as much by the performer's interaction with the notation as by Smith's compositional intentions.
It's here, in this space between intention and interpretation, that Smith's notational ontology truly comes to life. The score, such as it is, becomes a living document, not fixed in its meaning but fluid, open to the influences of time, of place, of the individual peculiarities of each performer. To engage with it, to perform it, requires not just technical skill, but a willingness to enter into a dialogue with the score itself, to negotiate the spaces between the patterns, to find the music hidden within the interference.
This is the genius of Smith's approach. By embracing the moiré pattern, by elevating it from a simple visual artifact to a complex notational system, he challenges us to reconsider our relationship with music, with performance, with the very act of creative expression. It's a daunting task, no doubt. It asks much of those who would engage with it, performers and audience alike. But in that asking, in that challenge, lies the possibility of discovering new realms of musical experience, of exploring the uncharted territories that lie just beyond the edge of our understanding.
In the end, what Smith offers us with his moiré notational ontology is not just a new way of composing or performing music, but a new way of thinking about music itself. It's an invitation to explore, to experiment, to engage with the unknown. And in that engagement, perhaps, we might find something truly new, something genuinely transformative. Not just for ourselves, but for the future of musical expression itself.
- Cormac McCarthy, American Novelist
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