What Happens when the Score is Treated as a Constructed Apparatus?

 

What happens when the score is treated as a constructed apparatus, less a prescription for sound than a system for producing it under invented conditions? It privileges the anomaly, the misalignment, and the procedural “failure” as compositional facts, elevating what is usually corrected into primary material. The notation functions like a measuring instrument calibrated for the marginal: hesitation, near-silence, micro-errors, and the gap between instruction and execution.

Rather than expressive interpretation, performers adopt an administrative role, operating rules, issuing authorizations, and enacting corrections that never fully resolve. Form emerges through precise instability: each attempt at clarity generates a new contradiction, each solution becomes the next problem. The performance reads as an experiment that cannot be replicated, a temporary physics in which the overlooked becomes structure and the act of compliance becomes audible.