Sound Morphology Learning Lab - Inside the Score: Agostino Bonalumi and the Mito-Notational Field

 

Sound Morphology Learning Lab

Inside the Score: Surface, Pressure, and the Mito-Notational Field

In this score, I am not using the page as a neutral support. I am using it as a pressure field. I want the work to begin acting before it is performed, before the eye organizes the symbols into anything legible, before the performer decides what counts as event and what counts as atmosphere. The score has to function first as a condition.

That is where Agostino Bonalumi matters to me. What I take from him is not simply a visual reference. It is a structural lesson. His relief works turned the surface into an active spatial body. The plane was no longer passive. It was stretched, stressed, pushed outward, made to hold tension. That logic is central to what I am doing here. I want the score to behave the same way. I want it to feel as though it has been forced into visibility from behind.

The matte-black receding relief in the background establishes that immediately. It is not there as backdrop or mood. It is the first layer of behavior. The protrusions make the page feel swollen, pressured, bodily. They interrupt the fantasy of flat readability. Even before notation appears, the score is already telling the performer that this field has depth, resistance, and stored force.

I think of the black relief as compressed energy. It recedes, but it also insists. That contradiction is useful. It makes the eye work. It slows down the act of reading and turns perception into part of the composition.

The Scuduri font in the upper right reinforces that shift. For me, it is not a decorative flourish or a title marker. It acts as a local code block, a signal that the score operates under its own internal law. It announces a notational jurisdiction. Once that font appears, the page makes clear that it may borrow from conventional systems, but it is not governed by them entirely.

That is the role of what I call the mito-notational system. It borrows from Western notation, but it does not remain obedient to it. Staff fragments, noteheads, beams, rhythmic densities, and gestural clusters all appear, but they no longer behave as parts of a continuous linear syntax. I break them apart, suspend them, compress them, and redistribute them so that they begin acting less like instructions and more like charged objects.

This is the essential move. I am not rejecting notation. I am turning notation into material.

Across the score, the fragments do not form a single sentence. They form a dispersed topography. Some are dense and blackened, almost architectural. Some are thin and unstable, more like tremor bands or residues. Some hover as isolated capsules. The performer does not simply read through them. The performer has to move among them. The score becomes archipelagic. Meaning is produced not only by the symbols themselves, but by the tension between them, the distance between them, and the pressure of the relief field underneath.

That is how the score functions. Each element bends the space around it. A compressed cluster thickens the silence beside it. A stretched line changes the temporal character of an empty zone. A suspended fragment may carry less literal instruction than atmospheric or tactile pressure. In this system, notation is not just symbolic. It is topological.

The purple variant makes that even more explicit. The field becomes more synthetic and less recessive. The metallic circular forms read like resonators, valves, apertures, or pressure discs. The staff lines extending outward from the clef create a sense of projection or transmission, as if notation is being routed into a device. At that point the score stops behaving only like a page and starts behaving like an interface.

That shift matters to me because it shows how the work moves between identities without settling. It can be relief painting, score, symbolic artifact, and apparatus at once. I do not see that instability as a problem. It is the engine of the piece.

For the performer, this changes everything. The score does not ask for passive decoding. It asks for navigation. It asks the performer to decide what is foreground and what is field, what is sounded directly and what remains atmospheric, what behaves as rhythm and what behaves as texture. The page distributes pressure, but it does not close off interpretation. That balance is important. I want the work to remain unmistakably itself while still requiring thought, judgment, and risk from the performer.

So when I say this score functions and acts, I mean that quite literally. It functions as a relief system, a hybrid notational script, and a symbolic object. It acts by delaying legibility, by turning surface into force, by making notation tactile, and by forcing performance to begin as interpretation rather than execution.

That is the larger aim for me. I do not want a score that simply tells a performer what to do. I want a score that changes the conditions under which doing becomes possible. I want a page that thinks spatially, a notation that behaves like matter, and a surface that carries its own internal tension into the room.

That is where this work begins. Not as document, but as pressure.