❐ "The Antiseptic Pantheon"
I did not invent the Antiseptic Pantheon. I found it, the way a pathologist finds what was already growing in the sample.
People who have studied the Smith Jubal system describe its architecture as a hybrid of medical cartography and war memorial engraving. That description is accurate, and incomplete. It is also a pharmacy. Every score I make carries an indication, a dosage, and a list of contraindications, because sound administered without supervision is a controlled substance, and I prefer to write the label myself.
The Pantheon is not a notational style. It is a liturgy for a religion that has been fully sterilized: a taxonomy of deities scrubbed of belief and preserved only through their refusal to be performed. Each deity (read: pitch class, harmonic cell, psychoacoustic event, symbolic fracture, or, in at least one documented case, a pharmaceutical name that does not exist yet) is housed in a chemically sterile zone. A white void. Thin black concentric halos. A meter that obeys geometry from somewhere other than Euclid.
The staff lines are containment fields. They do not support the notes; they detain them. When I draw a staff, I am not giving the music a place to stand. I am building the cell.
[Archive note: The composer has elsewhere stated that the staff lines are "decorative" and "mean nothing at all." Both statements appear in his hand, on the same page, in different inks. Carbon dating of the inks was inconclusive. One of them may be newer than the page.]
Performers who have attempted these scores have reported the following:
- Temporal distortion during sustained phrases, catalogued as "Velocity Lag." The note arrives late, or the performer does.
- Synesthetic nausea triggered by violet glyph clusters, also called "Minor God Ribbons," also called (by one cellist, who has since stopped answering correspondence) "the purple ones."
- Recursion fatigue: the experience of having played a gesture before it was read, and then reading it, and finding it already slightly worn.
- Dosage drift: following the tempo instruction, "Take two measures every eight hours, with or without food," the performer loses track of whether the piece has begun.
- Attribution vertigo: the conviction, during performance, that the score was written by the performer and merely signed by me.
Marginalia found on certain scores include:
Don't unseal this one yet... still volatile.
Pentatonic sigil might leak if tapped.
Indicated for: listeners who have stopped believing in resolution.
Not for use in children, churches, or the key of D.
This paragraph was not here yesterday.
These are not jokes. They are infection protocols for music that wants to escape, written by a composer who is not entirely sure he wants to stop it.
❒ "The Evidentiary Color Archive"
Where the Pantheon organizes itself through absence, the Archive is built on overflow: a forensic chromatic excess in which every hue is placed on trial and none is ever acquitted.
In the Smith Jubal manuscripts, color is not ornament and it is not pitch. It is evidence. Each swatch is entered into the record as proof, not of a performance, but of intention, of trace, of contamination. The red may be breath. The teal, an inhale that was never completed. A yellow smear may be the exact duration of doubt, measured to the millisecond and then deliberately smudged so that no one, including me, can measure it again.
"We do not write music," I once wrote. "We deposit evidence."
[Archive note: This quotation also appears, verbatim, in a 1960s gallery catalogue for an artist who is not Bil Smith. The composer denies having read it. The catalogue denies having printed it. Both copies are held in the Archive, in the same folder, and the folder is labeled in pencil: "Same hand?"]
Ink becomes deposition. Graphite becomes affidavit. Spray becomes perjury. Gold leaf becomes a bribe. Every page is an exhibit with a chain of custody, and the chain has been broken at least once, probably by me.
The performer standing before a page from the Archive is no longer a reader. The performer is a witness, called to the stand, sworn in, and asked to testify about events they did not see, in a language they were not taught, before a court that has already reached its verdict.
The verdict is sealed. I have it. I have never opened it.
▣ FORMAL TRAITS OF SMITH JUBAL NOTATION (SELECTED, RECONSTRUCTED, DISPUTED)
| ELEMENT | FUNCTION | STATUS |
|---|---|---|
| Laminated Glyph Mass | Notational clusters sealed in acetate; "Do Not Touch" gestures, preserved like an artist's sealed tin, contents unverified | Unopened. Possibly empty. Possibly not. |
| Isobaric Trough | A deep cut or indentation in the page signifying unspeakable silence; the paper is wounded so the silence has somewhere to go | Active. Do not press. |
| Perimeter Chantline | A continuous phrase-loop scrawled around the page edge, sometimes in blood analog, sometimes in a crawling declarative text the performer must read aloud and not believe | Looping. Origin point unknown. |
| Evidentiary Splotch | Color blot catalogued by pH and intent, not tone | Admitted as evidence. Contested. |
| Detained Clefs | Conventional clefs boxed in annotation grids, unplayable unless formally "released" | Held without charge. |
| Dosage Bar | A measure carrying a prescription instead of a tempo; administered, not counted | Off-label use reported. |
| Calendar Staff | Duration written out by date, one line for each day the piece was not performed | Ongoing. Currently in its fourth year. |
| Polished Void | A passage executed so flawlessly it becomes indistinguishable from nothing at all | Under review. Possibly the most dangerous element. |
| The Unnamed Compound | A note-cluster labeled with an invented drug name, "indicated for" a rare condition, with no supplier | Orphan status pending. |
⎇ The two systems, the Antiseptic Pantheon and the Evidentiary Color Archive, exist in contrapuntal friction. One silences; the other testifies. One bleaches the divine down to its residue; the other proves the crime by refusing to clean it up. I have spent years trying to decide which of them I believe in. Lately I suspect they are the same system, viewed from opposite sides of a glass partition, and that I am the glass.
It is said that some of the Pantheon scores burn themselves when performed too literally, leaving a charred surface more beautiful than the music it consumed. Others dissolve in water and reveal layers of archived pigment underneath: testimony beneath testimony, a stratigraphy of unplayable truths. One score, when soaked, revealed a second score. The second score, when soaked, revealed the first one again, slightly altered, as if it had been revised while underwater.
[Archive note: The composer was asked which score came first. He replied, "The one you haven't performed yet."]
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