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.