What a Score Can Be: The Expansion of Musical Form
In my work, the score is not a neutral page waiting to be activated by performance. It is already active. It is already composing. Before a performer makes a sound, the score has begun to organize attention, pressure, hesitation, resistance, and projection. That is why I do not think of the score as a transparent container for music. I think of it as one of the primary sites where the music actually happens.
This matters because much of what I build as a score no longer depends on inherited notation to carry formal meaning. The staff, the notehead, the barline, and the conventional hierarchy of musical instruction are no longer the only available means of structuring time and action. In my practice, form can emerge through typography, photographic presence, relief surfaces, material friction, pharmacological coding, verbal cueing, object construction, and the unstable relation between reading and looking. The score is not simply a record of a composition. It is the composition’s first body.
The score as constructed surface
Many of my scores begin with a question of surface before they arrive at a question of sound. What does the page or object do to the eye? How does it delay access? How does it establish force? How does it position the performer as reader, handler, witness, or intruder?
This is why I am drawn to materials that refuse neutrality. Metallic finishes, reflective films, embossed layers, relief structures, high-gloss substrates, dense paper stocks, photographic surfaces, and mixed-media accumulations all change the way a score is encountered. A mirrored or semi-reflective field interrupts straightforward legibility. A raised surface casts shadows and produces a reading event that depends on angle and movement. Thick materials and layered constructions slow the eye down. They ask to be negotiated rather than merely decoded.
These are not decorative decisions. They are structural. A surface that resists immediate access alters musical form because it alters how the performer enters time.
Typography as performance pressure
Text plays a central role in many of my scores, but I do not use language as annotation. I use it as a compositional engine. The technical behavior of text is shaped not only by what it says, but by how it is built typographically.
A phrase set in compressed uppercase behaves differently than one given room to breathe across a white field. Tight spacing creates pressure. Wide spacing creates suspension. Clinical type can produce the affect of dosage, instruction, or sanction. More eccentric treatments can push language toward theatricality, rupture, or instability. Alignment matters. Scale matters. Placement matters. A phrase isolated low on a page is not the same event as a phrase embedded inside a dense cluster of visual information.
In my work, typography is a time-bearing device. It determines pace before any sound occurs. It can function as attack, residue, interruption, overload, or delay. The eye experiences form through the score’s verbal architecture.
Verbal notation and precise instability
One of the reasons I continue to work with language is that it allows a form of precision that conventional notation often cannot produce. A conventional musical sign tends to specify location and duration. A verbal cue can specify climate, behavior, intensity, emotional contamination, and conceptual frame all at once.
I am interested in instructions that remain exact in syntax while unstable in realization. That instability is essential. I do not want the score to collapse into either total prescription or atmospheric vagueness. I want it to carry enough formal pressure that the performer must make consequential decisions inside a clearly shaped field.
This is why many of my cues are built through controlled contradiction. Technical language collides with poetic phrasing. Pharmaceutical or bureaucratic tones intersect with something volatile, lyrical, or damaged. A score may sound procedural while behaving emotionally. It may appear objective while demanding something theatrical or precarious. These collisions are not incidental. They are part of the score’s compositional logic.
Pharmacological aesthetics as formal system
A recurring aspect of my work is the use of pharmacological language, dosage structures, labeling formats, and clinical visual codes. I am not using these simply as stylistic borrowings. I am interested in them because they already carry systems of authority, caution, administration, and bodily consequence. When brought into the score, they reorganize the performer’s relation to instruction.
Dosage hierarchies, serial notations, product-style naming, warning structures, and procedural formatting create a field in which the score feels sanctioned, administered, or controlled. That psychological shift matters. The work begins to operate in the tonal register of a package insert, a clinical form, a bureaucratic directive, or a restricted object. The score no longer feels like a neutral sheet of music. It feels like something issued.
Technically, this means I often build formal systems through the alignment of labels, numerical structures, boxed language, compressed text blocks, and naming conventions that echo the logic of medicine and regulation. These borrowed systems allow me to construct musical form through classification, dosage, repetition, and procedural sequence rather than through melody and meter alone.
Image as instruction, witness, and destabilizer
Photography and image-based materials are also central to my scores. I do not use images to illustrate a pre-existing musical idea. I use them to complicate and restructure the score’s field of action.
When a photographed figure, object, or constructed image enters the score, it changes the work’s center of gravity. The performer is no longer dealing only with abstract notation or verbal command. The performer is also dealing with presence, posture, identity, texture, and social reading. An image can function as instruction, but it can also function as witness or obstruction. It can redirect attention. It can create tension between what is seen and what is said. It can force a different tempo of encounter.
This is especially important in my work with photographed models and visual personae. Identity is not neutral in those scores. Presence carries force. The figure inside the score is not merely content. It becomes part of the interpretive event. The performer has to negotiate not only musical instruction, but also the social and visual charge of being seen by the work.
Relief, objecthood, and the score as artifact
I have long been interested in the score as object rather than as flat document. This means that relief, depth, texture, and sculptural construction are not secondary attributes. They are part of how the score functions.
A score with raised elements, layered inserts, dimensional attachments, metallic coatings, photographic laminations, or physically embedded materials does not permit passive reading. It must be approached differently. It occupies space differently. It belongs as much to objecthood as to notation. In some cases, it can sit in a room like a visual artifact before it is ever treated as performable material.
This dual status is important to me. I want the score to sustain itself as an autonomous visual and conceptual work while also remaining capable of activation. That is a difficult balance. If the work becomes only image or only sculpture, it risks losing the behavioral charge of a score. If it becomes only utility, it loses the density and pressure that make it fully itself.
The technical problem, then, is not whether the score is art object or performance document. It is how to make those two conditions remain productively unresolved.
Traditional scores teach the eye to proceed in a disciplined line. Much of my work instead asks the eye to navigate a field. Spatial distribution becomes a way of organizing time.
Blank zones can function as withheld action. Dense clusters can act as compression or simultaneity. Vertical stacking can suggest competing temporal lanes. Image blocks, verbal fragments, and material interruptions can make reading recursive rather than linear. The performer has to decide not only what something means, but when and how it enters the event.
This is one of the key ways my scores expand musical form. Time is not always delivered through measure and pulse. It is built through spacing, recurrence, density, and interrupted access. The page becomes architectural. The reader moves through it less like a dutiful decoder and more like a body negotiating a constructed environment.
Multimodal layering as compositional method
My scores often rely on the simultaneous use of multiple systems that do not fully resolve into one another. Text, image, object, surface, and procedural formatting coexist without collapsing into a single code. This is not overload for its own sake. It is a way of keeping the score alive as a site of tension.
A verbal instruction may sit against a photographic field that complicates it. A material surface may delay access to language. A typographic block may feel clinical while the image beside it feels intimate or volatile. A metallic finish may introduce seduction while the phrasing remains cold and procedural. These are formal relationships. The score produces meaning through the pressure between systems.
This multimodal construction is one reason I think of the score less as notation and more as a compositional ecology. Each element modifies the others. The performer does not simply extract instructions. The performer enters a field of competing signals.
Specific material techniques in my practice
Certain techniques recur across my work because they allow me to build formal and interpretive pressure with precision.
Each of these techniques changes not only the appearance of the score, but its behavior.
The performer as co-designer of form
Because my scores often refuse total prescription, the performer becomes responsible for constructing part of the form. I do not mean this in the casual sense that the performer is “free.” I mean that the performer has to bear compositional responsibility.
The score may establish pressure, atmosphere, syntax, visual hierarchy, and material conditions without specifying a single irreversible outcome. The performer then has to determine pacing, emphasis, sequence, bodily relation, or sonic translation in response to those conditions. This is not a surrender of authorship. It is a reallocation of formal labor.
What interests me is the threshold where a score remains unmistakably itself while still requiring thought, risk, and judgment from the performer. I want the performer to do more than execute. I want the performer to enter the score as an active intelligence.
The score before sound
One of the most important things I have learned through this work is that a score does not need to wait for sound in order to begin performing. It performs through its construction. It performs through the way it organizes looking, reading, handling, delay, uncertainty, and desire. It performs through its material atmosphere. It performs through the assumptions it borrows from other systems and then corrupts.
This is why I continue to think of the score as a site where musical form expands far beyond notation. Form can live in a dosage grid. In a laminated photograph. In a raised surface. In a metallic glare. In a typographic compression. In a bureaucratic block of language. In a score-object hung like an artwork. In a performer’s hesitation before a field that does not immediately yield.
The expansion of musical form begins there. It begins when the score stops being treated as secondary and is recognized instead as one of the central places where composition thinks.
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