The Sign That Comes Before

Most notes in the Clarion pages are preceded by an accidental. Before each notehead sits a small mark telling you how the pitch is bent, by a quarter tone, by a comma, by some fraction of a cent, up or down, and the marks are not the five or six accidentals you learned. There are dozens. Some are borrowed from the microtonal traditions that already exist, the Helmholtz-Ellis arrows, the Sagittal flags, the Johnston pluses and minuses. Many are not borrowed from anywhere. They were made for these pages, and they exist nowhere else.

This has become the thing people ask about once they have exhausted the tuplets. What are these symbols. Who is supposed to read them. And underneath both questions, unspoken but audible: by what right does a composer invent a sign and expect it to mean something.

It is a fair challenge, and answering it means saying what an accidental actually is, which turns out to be stranger than the word suggests.

An accidental is a correction. That is its history and its humility. The staff gives you seven pitches per octave, the white keys, the diatonic set, and everything outside that set has to be flagged as a deviation from it. Sharp: raise it. Flat: lower it. Natural: never mind, put it back. The accidental exists because the notation it corrects is inadequate to the music it carries. It is an apology the staff makes for its own coarseness. Every sharp is the system admitting it cannot say what it means without a patch.

Hold that thought, because it reframes the whole enterprise. If the accidental is the staff apologizing for its coarseness, then a music finer than the semitone will need finer apologies, and more of them. The twelve-tone grid is a coarse instrument. It rounds every pitch to the nearest of twelve boxes and throws away the remainder, and for most of the music ever written the remainder did not matter, because the music lived in the boxes. But the moment you become interested in the remainder, in the space between the boxes, the space where intonation actually lives, the standard accidentals run out almost immediately. Sharp and flat can only move you from one box to another. They cannot place you between. For that you need a sign the tradition never made, because the tradition never needed it.

So the invented accidentals are not decoration and they are not provocation. They are the continuation of the oldest function in notation, the correction of the grid, carried to the point where the grid corrects almost everything. On these pages the accidental is no longer the exception. It is the rule. There is one before every note because every note is between the boxes. A pitch that landed cleanly on a named degree would be the anomaly, and it would need no sign, and its absence of a sign would itself be information. The accidentals are dense because the music is nowhere near the white keys, and it is nowhere near them on purpose.

But why invent new signs at all, when the microtonal systems already exist. Why not simply use Helmholtz-Ellis throughout and be legible to the people who have learned it. This is the sharper version of the objection and it deserves the sharper answer. The existing systems are magnificent and I use them where they serve. But each of them was built around a particular theory of intonation, just intonation, a specific comma structure, a fixed set of prime limits. They are notations with commitments. They carry an argument about which pitches are the real ones. And there are inflections I want that none of them was designed to name, because they do not belong to any single tuning theory. They belong to the trajectory of a particular gesture, the exact bend a particular phrase requires at a particular speed. For those I have had to make the sign, because the sign is the only place that pitch has ever existed. It was never a degree in a system. It was a decision, and the mark is the record of the decision.

This is the point at which the earlier arguments in these pages converge. If the notation is the work, and not a set of instructions awaiting sound, then inventing a notation is not a convenience to be justified by legibility. It is composition itself. The sign that comes before the note is not a label pointing at a pitch that exists independently of it. The pitch does not exist independently of it. The mark brings the pitch into being as a specified thing, at a resolution no keyboard and no ear invented before it was written down. To make the accidental is to make the note. There is no prior pitch waiting to be transcribed. There is the decision, and its record, and they are the same act.

Which returns the objection to its senders, gently. By what right does a composer invent a sign. By the same right anyone ever inscribed a mark and asked it to hold a meaning, which is the only right there has ever been in notation, and the right by which the sharp itself was once a novelty that someone had to explain to a skeptical room. Every accidental was invented. The familiar ones simply had their arguments won so long ago that we mistake them for nature. The staff is not nature. The twelve boxes are not nature. They are a settled convention, and the settling was once exactly as strange as this.

There is one more thing the density of these signs does, and it is the part I find myself least able to argue and most sure of. A page where every note carries its own correction is a page that refuses to round anything off. It insists that each pitch is exactly itself and nothing near it, that there is no such thing as close enough, that the space between the boxes is not a margin of error but the field of the music. The forest of accidentals is a moral position stated in ink. It says: attend to the remainder. Everything you were trained to discard is where the piece is.

You will not play these signs perfectly. No one will. That was true of the sharp too, once, when it was new and the room was skeptical and the pitch it named sat a little beyond what the hand could reliably find. The signs go on the page anyway, at the resolution the music needs and not the resolution the hand can guarantee, because the page is where the pitch lives, and the mark that comes before the note is not describing the music. It is the music, deciding, in the only place it ever gets to decide.

Clarion # 37 for C trumpet (Introducing The Asymptote Accidental System)

 

Fifty-Nine Calls and Counting: More pages from the Clarion series for solo trumpet

 

Fifty-Nine Calls and Counting

More pages from the Clarion series for solo trumpet

When I first wrote about Clarion, the series had grown from one page to six, and six had somehow announced that it intended to become fifty-nine. That seemed excessive at the time. It still does, which is probably why I am continuing.

The basic rule remains unchanged: one trumpet, one page, one call.

Each work is complete on a single sheet. Nothing turns over, nothing continues on the back, and nothing asks the performer to return to the beginning. The entire piece is visible before it is played. The eye can see where the call starts, where it rises, where it gets itself into trouble, and where it finally stops.

The new score images make clear that the series has become less like a collection of fanfares and more like a population of strange little machines.

Every page has the same essential materials: a five-line stave, notes, breath, valves, mutes, articulations, dynamics, rhythmic ratios, microtonal signs, and a player trying to make the whole contraption work. But each page organizes those materials differently. One becomes a tower. Another becomes a staircase. Another looks like it has been assembled from brackets, cables, and badly behaved plumbing.

This was not entirely planned.

One stave, many attachments

The stave remains the main structural line in each Clarion. Everything else clips onto it, grows from it, hangs beneath it, or threatens to bury it completely.

A trumpet note is rarely just a trumpet note in these works. It may arrive with a valve combination, a cent deviation, a partial number, a tongue pattern, a breath instruction, a vibrato rate, a bell direction, a mute position, and several reminders that all of this must happen very quickly.

The result can look disproportionate. A note lasting less than a tenth of a second may require an alarming amount of printed machinery. A long high note may appear simple until the surrounding instructions reveal that the player is expected to alter almost everything about it while pretending it is still one sustained sound.

This imbalance is part of the fun.

The score shows the amount of work hidden inside a small event. The audience may hear one bright attack. The player sees a construction project.

Not every call behaves properly

The traditional fanfare is confident. It announces the king, the ceremony, the victory, the beginning of something important.

The Clarion calls are not always so sure of themselves.

Some rise magnificently and then stumble. Some arrive at a high note and refuse to leave. Some begin with great authority and end in a tiny exhausted click. Others seem to spend so much time preparing to make an announcement that the actual announcement is nearly over before it begins.

This does not make them anti-fanfares. They still project outward. They still summon, signal, interrupt, and make themselves heard. They simply acknowledge that a call can be awkward, damaged, overprepared, misdirected, or slightly ridiculous.

A trumpet can declare. It can also panic.

Why fifty-nine?

Fifty-nine is large enough to be unreasonable but not large enough to become infinite.

Sixty felt too tidy. It sounds like a complete set, a commemorative edition, or a box containing exactly the right number of objects. Fifty-nine keeps the series one page short of that comfort.

It also allows the individual pieces to behave very differently. One can be nearly empty. Another can be crammed with nested tuplets and accidental towers. One can be ceremonial, another comic, another stubborn, another almost silent. No single page has to explain the entire project.

The volume carries the identity. The pages are free to misbehave.

Scores as images

The new images also emphasize something that performance cannot: the whole call can be seen at once.

Sound moves through time. The page does not. On the page, the opening attack, the central high point, the descending cascade, and the final isolated note all coexist. The viewer can jump between them, notice repeated shapes, compare densities, and spot small visual jokes before hearing anything.

This is especially useful in a series where the notation sometimes becomes architectural. Beams turn into cantilevers. Brackets become frameworks. Curves resemble ducts, cables, or pressure lines. Accidental signs stack into small totems beside the noteheads.

The pages are visual objects, but they remain scores. The marks are not simply there to make an interesting picture. They ask for specific actions, or at least for very specific attempts.

That last distinction matters.

The performer gets the final word

However detailed the notation becomes, the player is never just operating a machine.

At a certain point, several demands collide. A fingering complicates an articulation. A mute change interferes with a rapid passage. A microtonal deviation becomes difficult to stabilize while the pitch is moving through several partials. The notation may be precise, but the performance still requires judgment.

The player decides what must remain exact, what can bend, and how an apparently simultaneous collection of instructions can become one physical gesture.

This is not a flaw in the score. It is where the score becomes interesting.

The page proposes an event. The performer discovers what kind of event it can actually become.

A growing crowd of calls

As more pages are added, the works begin to answer one another.

A gesture from one piece returns in another, slightly altered. A high note that once served as an ending becomes an opening. A rhythmic shape migrates to a different register. A mute instruction reappears in a new context and seems to have acquired a different personality.

The connections are not organized into a grand narrative. They are closer to echoes, misremembered signals, or messages picked up from somewhere else in the volume.

That may be what the series has become: not one long statement, but fifty-nine attempts to get someone’s attention.

Some calls are clear. Some are overloaded. Some are heroic. Some are comic. Some appear to have been designed by an engineer who had never met a trumpet player.

Together they form a volume of announcements, alarms, summonses, interruptions, and small acts of unreasonable confidence.

The first Clarion stated itself and stopped.

The others apparently heard it.

Clarion #48 for C Trumpet

 

My Compositional Approach: Visual Aesthetics and Morphological Sound in Notation

Introduction

My compositional approach is grounded in the interplay between visual art aesthetics and sonic morphology. Rather than treating musical scores as mere instructions, I see them as conceptual landscapes.  They become spaces where sound and image converge, interact, and transform. This paper expands on the principles of my approach, drawing analogies with visual art, reimagining traditional notational systems, and positioning the performer as both interpreter and co-creator.

Conceptual Foundations

At the core of my compositional philosophy is a rejection of linearity and uniform interpretation. Traditional Western notation often encodes time and pitch in fixed, hierarchically structured ways. My work challenges this by embracing non-linearity, visual abstraction, textual layering, and an open-ended semiotic framework. This aligns more closely with contemporary visual art than with conventional musicology.

Non-linear Structure: Refracting Time and Narrative

Much like the fractured narratives of postmodern visual culture, my scores unfold through fragmentation, simultaneity, and multiplicity. Rather than progressing from left to right or top to bottom, they may:

• Exist in spatial clusters

• Allow for multiple entry and exit points

• Encourage repetition, recursion, or omission based on performer judgment

This reflects a philosophy of perception: time is not fixed, but experienced differently across moments and individuals. My scores invite the performer to navigate these landscapes as one would navigate a gallery installation...non-sequentially, intuitively, and responsively.

Graphic and Abstract Notation: Image as Instruction

Inspired by the works of visual artists such as Locher and Wolfgang Plöger, I incorporate abstract geometries, drawn textures, gestural markings, and photographic overlays. These symbols do not correspond to fixed pitches or durations but instead evoke sonic gestures, densities, intensities, and spatial qualities.

Examples include:

• Thick black lines indicating intense timbral focus

• Diaphanous shapes suggesting ethereal textures

• Intersecting polygons representing polyphonic intersections

Such notation resists immediate translation, requiring the performer to engage in interpretive acts that are both intuitive and analytical.

Lexical Idioms, Textual Material, and Hypo-Neology

Central to my notational language is the incorporation of textual forms: words, fragments, invented idioms, and constructed vocabularies. These serve not merely as annotations but as compositional elements with ontological weight.

• Lexical idioms function as sonic triggers or affective markers, guiding the performer through states of articulation or gesture (e.g., "fracture-breath," "spill-rest").

• Text appears in multiple typographic registers.  It may be handwritten, digital, and/or stenciled with each encoding different semantic pressures.

• Hypo-neology, or the creation of semi-words or almost-words, opens interpretive space while resisting fixed meaning. These hypo-words are meant to be sounded mentally or verbally, offering ambiguity as an invitation to embodied cognition.

Text operates as score, score as text. The visual and verbal coalesce into a singular notational logic, extending the boundaries of music notation into the realms of poetry, concrete language, and conceptual art.

Dynamic Interaction: Performer as Co-Creator

Just as visual art is not passively consumed but actively interpreted, my scores demand an embodied, responsive interaction. The performer becomes an essential co-creator, using the visual cues and textual idioms as springboards for sonic exploration. This involves:

• Moment-to-moment decision-making

• Internalizing visual rhythm and spatial layout

• Embodying the affective state implied by the graphic and textual form

This process resembles performance art as much as it does traditional music-making. It prioritizes presence, risk, and responsiveness.

Score as Object and Space

The score, in my practice, is both an object of contemplation and a space of potentiality. It is simultaneously artwork, map, and temporal script. This triadic identity enables a rich multivalence, offering layers of meaning and interpretation that unfold over time and through performance.

Rather than encoding music in a deterministic way, the score becomes a prompt for phenomenological experience.  It is a a site where sight, sound, and word merge, where performer and material converse.

Theoretical and Artistic Influences

My approach is deeply informed by cross-disciplinary artists and thinkers:

• Hanne Darboven: for her use of textual and numerical structure as both visual rhythm and time code

• Ed Ruscha: for his deadpan use of words as image, and the semantic instability of typographic display

• Tacita Dean: for her visual poetics, erasure, and site-specific temporalities

• Cornelius Cardew: for his revolutionary graphic notation and openness to performer agency

• Enrico Castellani: for his manipulation of surface and dimensionality in spatial rhythm

• Alberto Burri: for his material ruptures and the affective properties of physical textures

These influences help situate my work within a broader intellectual and aesthetic continuum, one that spans sound, text, image, time, and materiality.

Toward a New Syntax of Listening and Reading

My compositional method seeks not to direct but to suggest; not to prescribe but to provoke. By fusing visual art aesthetics with sonic morphology and lexical experimentation, I aim to create a syntax of listening and reading that is open, dynamic, and profoundly human. In this framework, the score is not a barrier but a bridge between disciplines, between senses, between people.

Redefining Composition and the ART Score: Dynamic Integration of Art Aesthetics from Locher to Ploeger

 

Redefining the Score: Dynamic Integration of Art Aesthetics from Locher to Ploeger

One of the most striking developments in the interpretation of the contemporary music score is the integration of visual art aesthetics into compositional frameworks.  My approach goes beyond traditional music notation to incorporate the conceptual and aesthetic methodologies of influential visual artists, such as Thomas Locher, Barbara Kruger, Ed Ruscha, and Wolfgang Ploeger.

By drawing from the fragmented language of Locher, the provocative visual statements of Kruger, the conceptual wordplay of Ruscha, and the geometric abstraction of Ploeger, I redefine the score as an interactive, multifaceted system. The fusion of these diverse art forms creates a paradigm shift, one that transcends auditory expression to become a conceptual experience.

---

The Evolution of the Score in Contemporary Music

Traditional vs. Experimental Music Scores

In traditional Western music, the score serves as a precise guide for performers to follow, encoding specific instructions regarding pitch, rhythm, and expression. The clarity and specificity of standard notation allow for consistent execution across different performers and ensembles. However, the rigidity of this system becomes an obstacle to expressing the complexity of modern ideas.

My work represents a shift away from conventional notation, embracing instead graphic scores, symbolic representations, and abstracted notational systems. This new approach is heavily influenced by visual arts that use open-ended structures, ambiguity, and multiplicity of meaning, offering a fresh perspective on how music can be represented and experienced.

Art and Music as Interactive Disciplines

The boundaries between art forms are increasingly fluid, especially in the digital age. The integration of visual arts with sound is not new, but artists like Locher, Kruger, Ruscha, and Ploeger have brought new dimensions to this relationship. These artists use abstract imagery, textual manipulation, and conceptual forms to challenge perception and convey meaning. My scores, in turn, mirror this tendency, offering performers multiple layers of meaning, much as a visual artist might present a piece that requires the viewer to actively engage with the work to fully understand its depth.

My Approach

My compositional approach blends visual art aesthetics with the principles of sound morphology, creating scores that are conceptually rich and open to interpretation. My work incorporates elements such as:

• Non-linear Structure: Much like modern visual art, this notation do not follow a linear, traditional progression. Instead, they offer fragmented or overlapping notations that reflect the complexity of human experience and perception.
• Graphic and Abstract Notation: Inspired by artists like Locher and Ploeger, I use visual symbols, geometric forms, and graphic cues to represent musical elements, allowing performers to experience the score as both a visual and aural representation of sound.
• Dynamic Interaction: Just as visual art often involves a dynamic interaction between the viewer and the piece, the scores demand that performers actively engage with the material, interpreting both the visual and musical aspects of the composition.

Art Aesthetic Integration in My Compositional Framework

Thomas Locher: Fragmentation and Symbolic Language

Thomas Locher is known for his exploration of semiotics and the fragmentation of language in his artwork. Locher’s abstract symbols and disruptive text systems challenge the viewer to reconsider how meaning is constructed and interpreted. This conceptual approach directly influences my compositional structures, where abstract symbols serve as a point of departure for sonic exploration.

In Locher’s art, disjointed elements and non-linear text force the viewer to engage with the piece in a non-traditional way. Similarly, my graphic scores often present overlapping, fragmented sections that require performers to decipher the structure and meaning of the piece, blurring the lines between visual aesthetics and musical execution.

Barbara Kruger: Provocative Text and Visual Directives

Barbara Kruger’s conceptual art relies heavily on text-based visuals that challenge authority, identity, and social norms. Kruger’s iconic works like “Your Body Is a Battleground” use bold typography and stark imagery to make provocative statements, inviting viewers to reconsider their perspectives on power and control.

I embrace the use of bold graphical elements and strong visual contrasts mirrors Kruger’s approach. For example, a score might include large, dominant symbols or contradictory visual cues that force performers to interpret the meaning behind the image, akin to how Kruger’s art forces the viewer to decode the underlying message. This method encourages an engagement with both the visual and the conceptual, giving musical instruction through a visually evocative framework.

Ed Ruscha: Wordplay and Conceptual Narratives

Ed Ruscha’s work often focuses on textual exploration and wordplay, where the graphic treatment of words creates a new visual language. Ruscha’s use of language is often ironic or conceptual, pushing the boundaries of literal meaning and cultural signifiers. This playfulness and non-literal approach to language is something that deeply resonates with my compositions, where words and symbols are used not just to represent sound, but also to express broader concepts.

We see similar wordplay and conceptual language that invites reinterpretation. For instance, I might use symbols that represent non-musical elements such as time, space, or emotion, allowing performers to explore these ideas through musical and physical gestures.

Wolfgang Ploeger: Geometric Abstraction and Digital Art

Wolfgang Ploeger’s work is renowned for its geometric abstraction and integration of digital elements. His visual works often rely on precise, abstract forms that evoke movement, space, and light. Similarly, My scores utilize geometric shapes and digital forms to represent musical textures and spatial dynamics.

Ploeger’s use of digital media and interactivity in art inspires one to think about how graphic scores can integrate modern technology. Just as Ploeger’s art can be experienced digitally, my scores may involve dynamic, interactive components that can evolve based on performer interpretation or audience interaction, challenging the performer to engage in a multisensory experience.

The Future of Graphic Scores and the Influence of Art Aesthetics

Expanding the Concept of the Score

As technology evolves, the relationship between visual art and music will continue to blur. I believe that, by 2030, we will see immersive environments where graphic scores are integrated into digital landscapes, allowing for more interactive and adaptive compositions.

Performers will no longer simply read scores; they will interact with visual cues that are constantly shifting and changing, much like an evolving piece of art.

The Role of Performance in Art-Music Integration

Future performances may involve live visual art creation, where artists like Locher, Kruger, Ruscha, and Ploeger influence the performance itself. By using visual stimuli to guide musical decisions, performers will have the opportunity to bring both visual art and music into a unified experience, making the boundary between disciplines even more fluid.

By drawing from the works of Locher, Kruger, Ruscha, and Ploeger, I challenge the traditional structure of the score, turning it into a conceptual, multisensory experience.

Prescriptive Noise: Composing with the Pharmacopoeia by Bil Smith

 

Prescriptive Noise: Composing with the Pharmacopoeia

By Bil Smith

---

My intent has never been to render music in the traditional sense. Rather, it is to transmute the language of authority, whether be it clinical, legislative, or linguisticinto notation. In Prescriptive Noise, I found in the pharmacopoeia not just metaphor but medium. It offered a dense, bureaucratic lexicon that mirrored the regulatory pressures of composition itself. Dosage became a form of articulation. Adverse events, my dynamics. Contraindications, the structural parameters of ensemble behavior. It was never about drugs.  It was about systems of control masked as systems of care.

The materials of the pharmaceutical world are precise, impersonal, codified and designed to regulate and minimize ambiguity. But I was interested in what happens when that clarity is turned inside out. When 500 mg q8h becomes a percussive instruction. When sublingual or extended-release becomes a cue for how a timbre might decay or remain latent across pages of silence. I found these terms beautiful in their violence, elegant in their administrative coldness.

Damien Hirst's "Pharmacy London" Project

I have often admired Damien Hirst, not for the repetition, but for the audacity of his taxonomy. In his work, pharmaceuticals are flattened into color and shape, depersonalized until they become aesthetic. But I wanted to push further: to resubjectivize that aesthetic, to make the performer complicit in its effects. My scores aren't visual inventories.  They’re volatile compounds. The page might look clinical, minimal even, but it’s saturated with potential side effects.

There’s a reason I include boxed warnings in my scores. They are not performative gimmicks. They are functional constraints. When I write “Do not execute concurrently with color fields,” it’s not just instruction—it’s a reflexive device. It’s a challenge to the notion of compliance. Pharmaceutical language is inherently conditional, always hedging: may cause dizziness, may interact with other agents, not for use in patients with a history of interpretive consistency. I adopt that tone not to parody it, but to implicate it within musical practice.

Page from the score: "Bolribine" for Solo Oboe

My use of microdosing terminology such as ramp-up titration, saturation threshold, and half-life is not mere stylistic borrowing. These are structures that replace form. Why write in movements when you can compose with pharmacokinetics? Why phrase in bars when time can be governed by absorption curves?

Page from the score: "Bolribine" for Solo Oboe

And perhaps most importantly: these scores are written to resist completion. Like a trial drug under accelerated review, they exist in a phase of perpetual testing. The performer is not a vessel of interpretation, but a clinician. They observe, they respond, they encounter the music not as narrative, but as protocol. Failure, misreading, improvisation under constraint?  None of these are bugs.

They are baked into the compound.

In Prescriptive Noise, the music is not what is heard, but what is risked.

The score is a prescription.

The performance, an off-label use.

And the silence between events?

That’s the half-life.

“I don’t like it, therefore AI.” AI: The New Alibi for Incomprehension

“I don’t like it, therefore AI.”

Don’t understand the image? AI.
Don’t like the music? AI.
The writing sounds too polished? AI.
Too strange? AI.
Too complicated? AI.
Too clean? AI.
Too unlike what you would have done? Definitely AI.

It is becoming the cultural equivalent of pointing at the sky and shouting “weather.”

The irony is that many of the people using “AI” as an accusation seem to have only the vaguest idea what AI can actually do, what it cannot do, and how much human direction, selection, revision, judgment, failure, and outright labor can sit behind a finished work.

AI can generate possibilities.

It cannot retroactively explain everything you dislike.

It cannot magically supply an artist with taste, intent, a point of view, a body of work, or years of accumulated decisions. It cannot turn confusion into plagiarism simply because the viewer would prefer an easier explanation.

And no, “it looks AI” is not analysis. Neither is “it sounds AI,” unless you can explain what specifically you mean beyond the fact that something made you suspicious.

There are perfectly legitimate arguments to have about authorship, originality, labor, training data, attribution, and the role of generative systems in creative work.

Those are interesting arguments.

But using AI as a synonym for “thing I don’t understand” is not one of them.

Sometimes a strange image is just a strange image.

Sometimes an unfamiliar score is simply unfamiliar.

Sometimes a complicated idea was made by a person who likes complicated ideas.

And sometimes the artificial intelligence in the room is not the problem.

It is the natural intelligence refusing to do any work.

CLARION #45 FOR C TRUMPET (W.I.P.)

 

Clarion #42 for Trumpet in C