Let's think about the score not as a route to performance, but as an autonomous object: a speculative instrument built to model musical possibility rather than to realize it. Its primary medium is not sound, but the conditions under which sound could be argued into existence. The notation reads like a protocol, a diagram, a legal brief, an index of exceptions, proposing a compact physics in which contradictions are not glitches to be resolved but structural features to be preserved.
By refusing performance intent, the score dislocates the usual hierarchy of “instruction → execution.” What matters here is not whether the work can be played, but what the score makes thinkable. Its procedures test the limits of legibility and authority: directives that over-clarify, rules that contain their own exemptions, measurements designed for phenomena that cannot stabilize. The result is a compositional practice that treats coherence as a kind of theater and treats rigor as something that can be applied to uncertainty.
Viewed curatorially, the score functions as a thought experiment with material consequences. It stages composition as an epistemic event, where the work’s content is the act of specifying, classifying, and authorizing. The page becomes a site where music is imagined with the force of policy: not to be fulfilled, but to be confronted. In this sense, the score is complete at the moment it proposes its impossible terms. It becomes an object that performs its own logic, whether or not any body ever agrees to sound it.
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