W.I.P. - NOVEMBER, 2026

 

Typography as Sound: Notes from My Desk

Typography as Sound: Notes from My Desk

I’ve never trusted a score that only wants to be heard. Somewhere along the way, I started caring as much about how the words on my pages look as what the notes say. These days the type is often the music itself, and the performer has to find their way into it.

A handful of artists got me here, most of them not musicians at all.

David Carson

David Carson

I remember the first time I saw David Carson’s magazine layouts: text crashing into text, columns sliding off the page, headlines you had to tilt your head to read. It felt like someone had finally given typography permission to misbehave.

That’s how I use words in my scores now. An invented word like Vistrallic or Obfuscene might be broken into pieces and scattered across the page, and the performer has to put it back together in their own order. Layers of type sit on top of each other, some easy to read, some barely there, so reading becomes a kind of search. A heavy, bold word sounds different in my head from a thin, faded one, and I want the player to feel that difference too. The page stops being a road map. It becomes a maze you have to talk your way through.

Agostino Bonalumi

Bonalumi stretched his canvases over hidden shapes, so the surface swells and pushes out toward you. His paintings look like they’re breathing.

I want my scores to have that kind of body. I’ve thought about raised lettering a player has to feel with their fingers. Sheets of clear Mylar, thin wires, or rubber stretched across the page, so reading takes a little effort, the way a hard passage takes effort to play. Smooth against rough. Soft against stiff. Each texture suggests a sound. Reading the score turns into a physical act, almost a small performance in itself.

Piero Manzoni

Piero Manzoni

Manzoni canned his own excrement and called it art. He signed people and declared them living sculptures. I love him for it. He never let art take itself too seriously.

He gave me permission to be absurd. Some of my words, like Somaticor or Anaesthovalence, sound like medicines because I spend my working life naming medicines. But I never say what they mean. The performer has to decide. I’ll print words upside down, or backward, or half hidden, and see what the player does with that. I leave blank spaces on the page and let them be silences, without telling anyone how long they last. The result is part music, part joke, part dare.

Thomas Demand

Thomas Demand

Thomas Demand builds rooms out of paper, photographs them, then destroys the models. The photographs look completely real until you notice everything’s a little too perfect.

That idea, of something built to look real, runs through a lot of my work. I break words into small parts the performer has to assemble. I layer clear sheets of type so certain words only appear when you tilt the page toward the light. Folds and layers make the score feel constructed, like one of his rooms, and the player starts to wonder how much of what they’re reading is real and how much they’re making up. Meaning ends up somewhere between my intentions and theirs.

Jennifer West

Jennifer West

Jennifer West’s experimental films, where text, sound, and image pile up and shift, showed me that words don’t have to sit still. In her hands, text moves through time.

So why not in a score? Words could be projected into the room, or printed on surfaces that turn, so the meaning keeps changing while the music plays. Film techniques like cuts, dissolves, and overlays can become ways of laying out type, each one suggesting a rhythm or a color of sound. The score starts to behave like a film, and the performer has to keep up with it.

Where this leaves me

Put all of that together, and the words on the page stop being labels for the music. They become the structure the music lives in.

Invented words become sparks. Players hear them, say them, feel what they suggest, and make sound from that. The page itself becomes something to touch, so reading becomes physical. And text that moves, shifts, or appears in the room brings time into the score, until it’s hard to tell where the page ends and the performance begins.

I don’t know exactly where this leads. I just know that every time I let the words on the page get a little stranger, the music gets more interesting.

What Lee Bontecou Taught Me About Scores

 

 

What Lee Bontecou Taught Me About Scores

The first time I stood in front of one of Lee Bontecou’s wall reliefs, I didn’t want to look at it so much as climb into it. All that welded steel and stretched canvas, pulled tight around a black hole in the middle. I leaned in, half expecting to hear something come out of the dark.

I’ve had that same feeling opening certain scores. You look at a page of marks and realize it’s not really telling you what to do. It’s inviting you somewhere. Bontecou’s work does that to me every time, and over the years it’s quietly changed how I think about making a score. I don’t want to copy how her work looks. I want to borrow how she thought.

Here are five things she taught me.

1. The hole is where the music is

Bontecou’s black openings are the first thing everyone notices. They feel empty and full at the same time, like something might be waiting in there. Silence in music works the same way. It’s never just nothing. It’s held breath.

So I started wondering what would happen if a score had actual holes in it. Literal cutouts in the paper, or blacked-out areas on a screen, where the performer has to decide what happens. Maybe it’s silence. Maybe it’s improvisation. Maybe it’s a cue to move, or to turn the page around.

Picture a string quartet called Hollow Frequencies. The players read the shapes around each hole: a round opening might swell outward into a crescendo, while a jagged tear might mean something sudden and sharp. The music stops running in a straight line from left to right. It starts orbiting the empty spaces instead.

2. A score can be built, not written

Bontecou didn’t paint her early pieces. She assembled them from steel frames and canvas, often salvaged materials like old conveyor belts, all stitched and wired together. Every part stays visible, but somehow it all becomes one thing.

That made me think about scores as kits. Separate pieces, each holding its own music, that performers arrange themselves.

Imagine Industrial Resonances, written on sheets of translucent vellum. Some panels hold jagged, metallic shapes for hard attacks. Others hold woven patterns for layered textures. The players arrange them on a magnetic board before each performance, so no two concerts are ever built the same way. The composer makes the parts. The performers make the piece.

3. What it’s made of matters

Bontecou’s materials weren’t neutral. Steel and canvas carried the weight of the postwar industrial world, and later, when she turned to molded plastics, the work felt fragile and strange in a completely new way. You can’t separate what her pieces mean from what they’re made of.

Scores don’t have to live on white paper either. What would it mean to read music off a steel plate, a sheet of acrylic, or a piece of rough cloth?

Think of Tactile Horizons, its notation etched into metal, so the performer has to run a finger along the grooves to read it. The act of touching the score becomes part of the performance. The page stops being paper and becomes an object, something closer to sculpture.

4. A line can tell a story

Her drawings, many of them made with soot, are full of sweeping arcs and sharp edges that feel like thoughts in motion. They aren’t pictures of things. They’re records of movement and feeling.

Musicians already live by the line: melody, phrasing, the arc of a whole piece. But Bontecou made me see line as a gesture in its own right.

In a piece called Line of Ascent, performers might follow long curves drawn across a large canvas. How thick the line is, how rough, which way it travels: all of it translates into bow pressure, vocal intensity, or the force of an attack. The drawing is the music.

5. Show the work in progress

The critic Suzanne Hudson, writing in Artforum, described Bontecou’s work as a record of her own process, forms caught in the middle of taking shape. That idea has stayed with me. So much new music is about process too, about leaving things open.

What if a score showed how it was made? Sketches, crossed-out passages, notes in the margins, all left on the page.

Imagine Echoes of Assembly, where the final music sits on top of layers of my working notes. Erased lines, rewritten bars, a notation system I abandoned halfway through. Performers decide which layers to bring forward and which to leave buried. Every performance becomes another round of building the piece.

Why she matters to me

Bontecou eventually stepped away from the art world and kept working mostly out of public view. I think about that a lot. She never seemed interested in making things easier to understand. She just kept following the work wherever it led.

That’s what I want from my scores. Not a set of instructions, but a place you can step into, with dark corners worth exploring. Her black holes were never empty. They were openings. I’ve come to believe a good score works the same way: it doesn’t end where the marks stop. That’s where it starts.

 

"Molecular Semantics: Naming the Drug, Notating the Score"

By Bil Smith

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For most of my working life I’ve had two desks. At one, I name medicines. At the other, I take music notation apart and put it back together wrong, on purpose. People assume these are separate lives. They aren’t. I’ve just never found a good way to explain that at dinner parties.

When we named Remicade, we weren’t decorating a molecule. We were building something that had to survive a pharmacist’s handwriting, a lawyer’s search, and a frightened patient saying it out loud for the first time. Every sound was argued over. Did it feel trustworthy? Did it hint at what the drug does without promising too much? Could a doctor say it twenty times a day without tripping? Evenity, Vyondys, Veozah: each one went through that same slow, obsessive tuning. The weight of a vowel. Where the hard consonant lands. How it ends in the mouth. I’ve spent decades listening to names that way, and somewhere along the line I stopped being able to listen to anything else that way too.

So it’s no accident that my scores have names like Ablutorax for Septal Loops or Extylphex Miasma for Atonal Conduction. They sound like medicines because I think like someone who makes medicines sound right. They don’t mean anything in the dictionary sense. They’re meant to land somewhere in your chest before your brain catches up. A good drug name does the same thing. It suggests. It doesn’t explain.

Every name I’ve ever proposed has been picked apart by regulators. The FDA and EMA look for confusion, sound-alikes, anything that could lead someone to take the wrong pill. There’s even a computer score for it. I find that oddly moving: an entire system built around the fear that a word might be misunderstood. My scores go through their own review. Musicians read them, argue with them, misread them, and make something I never imagined. In medicine, misunderstanding is the danger. In my music, it’s the point.

That’s why my pages often look like they came out of a pharmacy. Blister packs. Boxed warnings. Dosage tables. Patient information inserts. I’m not being clever. I genuinely believe music is something you take. It goes into the body and changes it for a while, and then it wears off, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Over the years, Brand Acumen has created more than a thousand drug names, from Abilify to Atripla. I used to think of that list as a client record. Now I think of it as the longest piece I’ve ever written. Each name is a tiny composition, performed every time a doctor writes it on a pad or a patient repeats it in a waiting room, quietly, to make sure they’ve got it right.

So when someone performs one of my scores, I don’t really think of it as playing music. It’s closer to administering something. You’re giving the room a dose. You’re taking the risk that someone will hear it wrong. You’re putting a name on something that has no body.

No agency regulates my scores. Only attention does, and attention is a much harder reviewer to satisfy.

If both of my desks have taught me one thing, it’s this: the words are the active ingredient. Everything else is how they reach you.