On Multimodal Stimuli, WordPlay, and the Notational Unconscious. By Bil Smith

 

On Multimodal Stimuli, WordPlay, and the Notational Unconscious

by Bil Smith

There is a moment, and every serious practitioner of extended notation knows it,  when the score stops being a set of instructions and becomes something else entirely. A field. A pressure system. A weather event that happens inside the performer before a single sound has been made.

This work operates in that moment and refuses to leave it.

The composition you are looking at, or rather, the composition that is looking at you, deploys what I have come to call multimodal stimuli: a deliberate collision of sign systems that activates not one reading faculty but several simultaneously, producing a cognitive dissonance that is itself the first performance instruction. Before the hands move. Before the breath is taken. Before the body decides what it is about to do.

The Kay Rosen Proposition

Kay Rosen's SIGNIFICANT, rendered here as SIGN IF I CANT,  is not a pun. I want to resist that diminishment immediately. It is a structural revelation: the discovery that a word already contains within it a conditional proposition about the limits of language, the failure of signing, the paradox of significance itself.

Sign if I can't. The word SIGNIFICANT has been carrying this sentence inside it for centuries and no one noticed. Or everyone noticed and no one said it.

Rosen's intervention and her particular form of WordPlay, operates exactly the way the best extended notation operates: it shows you that the container and the contained are not separate things. The word is the meaning. The notation is the sound. The score is the music. These are not vehicles for something else. They are the thing.

What happens to a performer who reads SIGNIFICANT and then reads SIGN IF I CANT in the same glance? Something irreversible. The word has been opened. It cannot be closed again. The act of reading has become an act of performance which is precisely the condition I am trying to install in the performer before they encounter a single notational element.

The Traditional and the Opalcite: A Productive Collision

The score you are examining holds two notational systems in deliberate tension.

The first is the inherited vocabulary of contemporary classical notation; the apparatus of accidentals, glissandi, tremolos, microtonal inflections, multiphonics, and extended techniques that the new music tradition has spent the better part of a century developing and codifying. These elements carry weight. They carry history. They carry the memory of everyone who has ever sat before them with an instrument and tried to understand what they were being asked to do.

The second is Opalcite, a notational font of my own construction, built from a logic that is not borrowed from any existing system. Opalcite does not replace traditional notation. It does something more interesting: it creates a notational interference pattern when placed alongside it. The eye moves between the familiar and the invented and must constantly renegotiate the terms of its own reading. This negotiation, this perpetual re-entry into the question of what a symbol means and how it means,  is not a problem to be solved. It is the cognitive space in which the performance gestates.

Opalcite was developed from the conviction that notation is never neutral. Every notational system embeds assumptions about what music is, who performs it, what the performer's relationship to the composer is, and what a score is for. By constructing a new system from first principles and building letterforms and notational symbols that carry no prior obligation to any existing convention, I am not simply adding a new tool to the performer's vocabulary. I am asking the performer to become, temporarily, illiterate. And in that temporary illiteracy, to listen differently.

The Title as Score: IN FORM ANT

The word INFORMANT broken as IN FORM ANT performs the same operation as Rosen's SIGNIFICANT, but with a different charge.

An informant is someone who tells. Someone who is inside the form and reports from within it. An ant is the emblem of collective labor, of work distributed across many bodies, of information carried along paths whose total logic no single carrier understands.

IN FORM ANT: to be within form. To be shaped by the container while carrying something out of it. To be simultaneously the message and the messenger. To be, in the oldest sense, the performer.

This is what I am asking of the musician who sits before this score. Not to decode it. Not to execute it. But to be in form shaped by the encounter with these symbols, these texts, these colliding sign systems and to carry something out of that shaping into sound.

Multimodal Stimuli

The conventional score assumes a hierarchy: composer above performer, notation above interpretation, instruction above response. Multimodal stimuli defined as the deliberate layering of verbal language, visual language, traditional notation, invented notation, and typographic intervention  refuses that hierarchy at the structural level.

When Rosen's text sits inside the notational field, it does not caption it. When Opalcite symbols sit alongside traditional accidentals, they do not supplement them. When the heavy horizontal bars of this score,  those thick black lines that function simultaneously as staff lines, as architectural elements, as tempo-spatial dividers, and as pure graphic weight,  interrupt the notational flow, they are not decoration.

Every element is doing primary work. Every element is generating a claim on the performer's attention that is equal to every other element's claim. The performer cannot prioritize. The performer must hold everything simultaneously and then (and this is the act, the irreducible act of performance) decide.

That decision, made under the pressure of simultaneous and incommensurable stimuli, is where the music lives. Not in the sounds that result from it. In the decision itself. In the moment when a human nervous system, saturated with competing sign systems, each drawing on different cognitive and somatic registers, resolves into action.

The score is a machine for producing that moment.

Opalcite as Philosophical Position

I want to say something more precise about what Opalcite is and what it is not.

It is not a decorative system. It is not a private language invented to signal sophistication or to mystify. It is not an improvement on existing notation.

Opalcite is a phenomenological intervention. Its letterforms and symbols were constructed to be partially recognizable and to carry enough visual resemblance to known notational elements that the performer does not experience them as entirely foreign, but to differ from those elements in ways that are precise and considered. The partial recognition is deliberate. It installs the performer in a state of productive uncertainty: I know what this almost is. I know what it almost means. The almost is where I need to work.

This is the same cognitive state that Rosen's WordPlay produces. SIGNIFICANT almost says SIGN IF I CANT. It takes one more act of attention...one more willingness to look at what you are already looking at  for the embedded sentence to emerge.

Both Rosen's strategy and Opalcite are, at bottom, pedagogies of attention. They teach the reader and the performer to look again. To not settle for the first reading. To understand that the first reading of anything, be it any score, any word, any situation,  is always provisional, always subject to revision by the act of sustained attention.

The Score as Total Field

What you are looking at, the full composite of traditional notation, Opalcite, WordPlay typography, graphic weight, spatial distribution across the page,  is a total field. Not a sequence of instructions but a simultaneous environment.

The performer enters it the way you enter a room: all at once, with every sense, before any single element has been consciously processed. The initial encounter is gestalt. The subsequent work of reading is the performer's negotiation with what the gestalt has already deposited in the body.

I think of this as the notational unconscious.  It isthe stratum of information that the score communicates below the threshold of deliberate decoding. Traditional notation has a notational unconscious too: centuries of convention have loaded every symbol with associations, memories, and physical habits that activate in the performer before they consciously choose to activate them. Opalcite creates a different notational unconscious: one that has not yet been conventionalized, one that the performer must construct in real time, one that will be different for every performer who encounters it.

This is not chaos. It is a different kind of order .  It is one that places the generative intelligence of the performance inside the performer rather than inside the notation.

Coda: What Significant Signs

SIGN IF I CANT.

The score signs. It makes signs. It is the act of signing even when the conventional resources of signing have reached their limit.

IF I CANT: the conditional acknowledges the limit. It does not pretend that notation is omnipotent, that any system of symbols can fully capture what a piece of music is or what a performance should be. The score knows its own incompleteness. It builds that incompleteness in. It makes the incompleteness generative.

Opalcite, then, is not a solution to the limits of traditional notation. It is a companion to those limits. It says: here is another set of gestures toward something that neither of us can fully notate. Here are more signs. Sign if I can't.

And the performer, holding all of this;  the inherited vocabulary, the invented vocabulary, the broken word that turned out to be a sentence, the thick bars and the scattered symbols and the weight of all these simultaneous demands on attention, the performer signs.

In whatever form the music finds that day, in whatever body is doing the work, in whatever room is holding the sound: the performer signs.

That signing is the piece.

Bil Smith Laboratorie New Music