Paper, Model, Score: Thomas Demand’s Afterimage in My Compositional Surfaces

Thomas Demand’s pictures have followed me into the studio for years, not as images to imitate, but as a procedure to inhabit. He reconstructs a scene as a full-scale paper model, photographs the model, then removes the evidence. What remains is an image twice mediated: a photograph of a construction that stands in for an earlier photograph.

That lesson is foundational to my scores. I also insert a built intermediary between source and outcome. Where Demand builds rooms, I build pages: hyper-notational surfaces that must be navigated rather than merely executed. The performance you hear is not a translation of instructions; it is an excavation of a constructed field.

Thomas Demand's "Control Room"

From Photograph of a Model to Model for a Score

Demand’s practice taught me to distrust directness. In my work, I stage a sequence: concept → model (visual, typographic, photographic) → notational object → performance. Portrait sessions with models, tilt-shift photography, and photo-real fragments feed the page; the page is then collaged with blocks, legends, and vectors. Like Demand’s sets, these pages are not neutral carriers; they are architectures that record the choices of their making and demand new choices from readers.

The effect in both cases is similar: a viewer or performer must confront the intermediary. The work refuses to disappear into fluency.

Objecthood as Method (Not Decoration)

Demand’s dye-rich prints condense time and manual procedure into surface. I aim for an analogous condensation: metallic powders, conductive inks, thermochromic and photochromic layers, dense graphite, aluminum supports. These are not embellishments. They are operational materials that change the kinetics of reading such as how light grazes a line, how a block occludes, or how a legend becomes legible only at a particular angle or distance. The page controls tempo before a single sound is made.

In rehearsal this has consequences. Performers negotiate wayfinding (landmarks, corridors, cul-de-sacs) rather than counting alone. The score becomes site: not a tape to be unspooled but a place where decisions are staged and restaged.

Spatial Resistance

When notation turns spatial, it becomes political. The linear staff over-optimizes for excerptability, logistics, and product. A spatial score resists all three. It cannot be skimmed, clipped into “best bars,” or sight-read on short call. It costs rehearsal, and that cost is the point: time redirected from efficiency to attention, from throughput to co-presence.

This is where Demand’s ethic touches mine most directly. His pictures slow spectatorship by making the image slightly “wrong."  Convincing yet off, familiar yet modeled. My scores slow performance by making the page thick.  They become fields of potential that frustrate frictionless delivery. In both cases, the work’s difficulty is not punitive; it is repairing. It restores our capacity to read with care.

Instruction, Trace, Object

I’ve long been drawn to the hinge where instruction becomes object. In my practice, the score is simultaneously:

• Instruction (it can be played),

• Trace (it records a process of construction, including failures),

• Object (it holds on the wall, on a table, as a sculpture of information).

Demand’s model/photograph dynamic clarified this for me. We both use an interposed artifact to change the terms of reception. For him, the paper room reforms the photograph. For me, the constructed page reforms the performance. In both, the intermediary is generative, not ancillary.

Reading as Archaeology

Performing these works is an archaeological practice. Players read for seams: where instructions thicken, where textures contradict, where legends fork. Annotations accumulate; each realization leaves residue for the next. The work grows by stratigraphy, not by a single definitive text. Demand’s destroyed sets are gone, but their logic remains legible in the image; my earlier drafts are gone, but their logic is fossilized in the final page. We meet our audiences (and performers) at the surface where that history has been compacted.

Curatorial Notes (from the Studio Outward)

If these pages enter the gallery, I prefer they be treated as sites, not illustrations for a performance that “really matters.” Show the scores at scale, with vantage points that enable mapping.  Present rehearsals, marginalia, and multiple realizations as parallel artifacts, not documentation. The point is to stage the same demand these works make in the rehearsal room: engage the intermediary.

Influence, Precisely Named

Demand didn’t give me a look to borrow; he gave me a logic to adapt:

1. Build the intermediary (model/page) that stands between source and outcome.

2. Harden process into surface (photograph/score) so that labor becomes legible.

3. Compel a new literacy in the viewer/performer.  Reading for joins, routes, and residues rather than for instant legibility.

That sequence continues to shape my compositions. It is why some pages appear obstinate; why blocks sit where common sense says “clear the path”; why certain legends seem too local or contingent. They are local and contingent by design. The page is a model of a situation, not a shortcut through it.

Coda: Afterimage

I often think of Demand’s pictures as afterimages of making. My scores aspire to the same: to be notational afterimages that hold, in their complication, the memory of the processes that produced them and the performances they will provoke. If the work asks more of the reader, it is because I want the page to look back and say: the intermediary is where meaning starts.

"Exoprene" for Flute. 28" X 16" Score Link To Hi-Res PDF Score

"Exoprene"

For Flute

Bil Smith Composer

2020-2023

28" X 16" Score

Link To Hi-Res PDF Score

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hXeRPk-r0yVqV34i6-RcTc9sE5xbG4IZ/view?usp=sharing

  

Tactilism and Tactilist Scoring in Contemporary Music

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The Emergence of Tactilist Scoring

The evolution of contemporary music has always been driven by the interplay of ideas across disciplines. In recent years, the concept of tactilism, a multidisciplinary approach that integrates tactile, sculptural, and architectural elements, has emerged as a groundbreaking paradigm for musical notation and interpretation. Tactilist scoring challenges traditional, two-dimensional notation by transforming the score into a three-dimensional, tactile object, bridging the gap between visual art, architecture, and music.

This whitepaper explores how the influences of artists such as Claus Oldenburg, Enrico Castellani, Alberto Burri, Agostino Bonalumi, Jeff Koons, Paolo Scheggi, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Irma Boom inform a new aesthetic that reshapes the relationships between composer, performer, and audience. By incorporating tactile, material, and spatial strategies, tactilist scoring establishes a new compositional archetype that transcends conventional boundaries.

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Theoretical Foundations of Tactilist Scoring

Tactilist scoring reimagines the musical score as a sculptural, tactile, and multisensory artifact. Rather than simply encoding musical information, the score becomes an active participant in the performance process, requiring physical interaction and sensory engagement.

Key principles of tactilist scoring include:

1. Materiality: The use of unconventional materials. Wood, fabric, metal, plastic transforms scores into physical, tangible objects.
2. Spatiality: Scores occupy three-dimensional space, requiring performers to navigate them physically.
3. Interactivity: Performers manipulate tactile and spatial elements, making interpretation a dynamic and participatory process.
4. Multisensory Engagement: Tactilist scores engage touch, sight, and sometimes even sound, creating a holistic interpretive experience.

Box 12 of 16 from Windless Hall of Unknown Apparatus" for Two Percussionists.  Wood, Ink, Oils, Nails, Cotton Balls, Ball Bearings and Wire Mesh.

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Artistic Influences on Tactilist Scoring

Claus Oldenburg: Playful Monumentality

Oldenburg’s soft sculptures and monumental depictions of ordinary objects introduce playfulness and material transformation. His works encourage rethinking the familiar through unexpected forms, textures, and scales.

• Impact on Tactilist Scoring: Scores could incorporate oversized, soft, or pliable materials that performers manipulate to “read” musical information.
• Example: A fabric-based score that performers stretch or compress to modify its notational cues in real time.

Enrico Castellani: Dimensional Surfaces

Castellani’s practice of manipulating canvases to create dynamic textures and reliefs offers a model for embedding three-dimensionality into scores. His works transform static surfaces into active spaces.

• Impact on Tactilist Scoring: Embossed or punctured surfaces in scores can encode rhythmic or dynamic information through tactile exploration.
• Example: A metallic score with raised notations that performers trace with their fingers or tools.

Alberto Burri: Material Transformation

Burri’s use of unconventional materials (burnt wood, burlap, plastic) emphasizes decay, transformation, and process. His work demonstrates the potential of materiality to evoke narrative and emotion.

• Impact on Tactilist Scoring: Scores made from degradable materials (e.g., heat-sensitive paper or reactive fabrics) reflect the temporal nature of music.
• Example: A score that alters over the course of a performance, revealing or obscuring notations as it reacts to the environment.

Agostino Bonalumi: Extroverted Canvases

Bonalumi’s "estroflessioni" push the canvas into the third dimension, emphasizing spatial projection and tactile tension.

• Impact on Tactilist Scoring: Scores could protrude into the performance space, requiring performers to navigate their physical form.
• Example: A score with layered, sculptural elements that demand both visual and tactile interpretation.

Jeff Koons: Reflective Surfaces

Koons’ polished, reflective works challenge perceptions of material and reality. His use of industrial materials introduces hyper-materiality as an aesthetic principle.

• Impact on Tactilist Scoring: Reflective or mirrored scores could distort notational elements, adding layers of visual complexity and performative interaction.
• Example: A mirrored score that forces performers to interpret distorted reflections of notations.

Paolo Scheggi: Apertures and Depth

Scheggi’s layered canvases and cut-outs explore visible and hidden spaces, creating an interplay of depth and surface.

• Impact on Tactilist Scoring: Scores with perforated or layered structures invite performers to interact with multiple notational layers simultaneously.
• Example: A score composed of translucent sheets with overlapping symbols, creating polyphonic visual and tactile relationships.

Donald Judd: Minimalism and Material Precision

Judd’s minimalist sculptures emphasize materiality, repetition, and spatial relationships. His works demonstrate the power of simplicity and precision in creating profound spatial effects.

• Impact on Tactilist Scoring: Scores could adopt modular, minimalist designs that emphasize repetition and structural clarity.
• Example: A modular score where performers rearrange geometric components to create varying musical outcomes.

Dan Flavin: Light as Medium

Flavin’s use of fluorescent light as a sculptural material redefines spatial and perceptual experiences, emphasizing the role of light in shaping form.

• Impact on Tactilist Scoring: Scores might incorporate light-based elements, such as illuminated notations or dynamic lighting that guides interpretation.
• Example: A score where light projections interact with physical notations, creating an interplay of shadow, texture, and sound.
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Irma Boom: Experimental Book Design

Boom’s avant-garde book designs push the boundaries of materiality, layout, and tactile interaction, transforming books into sculptural objects.

• Impact on Tactilist Scoring: Scores could borrow from Boom’s design principles, integrating unconventional bindings, textured pages, and interactive elements.
• Example: A score with foldable pages and embedded textures that performers manipulate as part of the interpretive process.

Conceptual Implications: A New Compositional Archetype

Tactilist scoring challenges traditional hierarchies of composer, performer, and score. It redefines the act of interpretation as a multisensory, participatory process, offering new avenues for creativity and expression.

• Embodiment: Performers engage with the score physically, blurring the line between musical and choreographic performance.
• Materiality: Scores become enduring artifacts, integrating music with visual and tactile art forms.
• Spatiality: The score transforms the performance space, creating immersive environments for both performers and audiences.
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Conclusion: The Future of Tactilist Scoring

Tactilism and tactilist scoring represent a transformative aesthetic in contemporary music. By drawing on the practices of Claus Oldenburg, Enrico Castellani, Alberto Burri, Agostino Bonalumi, Jeff Koons, Paolo Scheggi, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Irma Boom, composers can create scores that are not only seen and heard but also felt and inhabited.

This new compositional archetype challenges performers and audiences to engage with music as a multisensory experience, redefining the boundaries of sound, space, and touch. As composers continue to explore the possibilities of tactilism, they pave the way for a future where music is no longer confined to the auditory but resonates across the full spectrum of human perception.

"Weitsyde and Johnson's Addition" for Compound Ensemble. Bil Smith Composer.

"Weitsyde and Johnson's Addition" for Compound Ensemble.  

 Spatial material logic of pseudosonic collage…a step in the direction of discontinuity;  of organizing blocks of discourse simultaneously in space rather than connectively in time.

Bil Smith Composer.

This work is about grafting futures being envisageable without contradiction.  

The abandonment of real necessity permits one last elucidation.

Drawing Inspiration from Paolo Scheggi’s Intersuperfici

Drawing Inspiration from Paolo Scheggi’s Intersuperfici

The act of translation from the spatial to the temporal, the visual to the sonic, offers a unique set of challenges and possibilities for composers. My new composition currently in progress explores this very relationship, taking direct inspiration from the work of Paolo Scheggi, specifically his iconic Intersuperfici series. These monochrome works, characterized by three overlapping canvases with elliptical or circular openings, serve not just as a visual reference but as a conceptual and structural foundation for this musical piece.

The Visual as Sonic Architecture

Scheggi's Intersuperfici (translated as "Inter-surfaces") are best known for their multi-layered canvases, which create a three-dimensional depth, despite the works being largely monochromatic. Each layer, though hidden to some extent by the one in front of it, contributes to an intricate play of light, shadow, and perception. In my current composition, this principle of depth and occlusion becomes a central feature.

I am treating the score not merely as a linear progression of notes and rhythms but as a spatial construct where overlapping musical ideas and layers interact, much like Scheggi's canvases. Each layer of the composition, whether a melodic line, harmonic structure, or rhythmic pattern, can be seen as analogous to Scheggi's canvases, with specific elliptical or circular "openings" through which the performer (and listener) peers into other musical layers.

Layering and Hidden Structures

Scheggi’s work disrupts the notion of a singular plane of representation, making the viewer constantly aware of what is seen and what is concealed. Similarly, this composition in progress plays with the idea of hidden musical structures. Certain elements, though seemingly dominant on the surface, will obscure or interact with underlying lines in a way that allows only glimpses of the hidden motifs or harmonic progressions. These "musical apertures" create a sense of mystery, inviting the performer to explore the spaces between the sounds as much as the sounds themselves.

In this way, musical material is revealed and obscured simultaneously, with layers of notational motifs emerging from beneath others only briefly before receding back into the fabric of the piece. 

Monochromatic Soundscapes

While Scheggi’s canvases are visually monochromatic, the subtle interplay of light and shadow between the layers gives the works a kind of hidden dynamism. In the composition, the idea of monochrome is translated into a restricted notational palette. 

Elliptical Openings as Musical Voids

One of the most striking aspects of Scheggi’s Intersuperfici is the elliptical or circular openings in the canvases, which suggest that something lies beyond but does not reveal it fully. In this score, these openings are translated into gaps, pauses, and silences. Rather than being traditional rests, these pauses are designed to be active spaces, creating anticipation and suggesting continuity beyond what is immediately performed. The performer must engage with these gaps not as empty voids, but as portals into an unseen (or unheard) musical space.

The idea of silence as structure is crucial here. Much like how Scheggi’s viewers are aware of what they cannot see, the performer is made aware of what they cannot hear directly, but which the structure implies is there. The elliptical gaps become invitations for the  imagination, asking the performer to mentally fill in what lies beneath the surface layer of sound. This creates an ongoing dialogue between presence and absence, sound and silence.

Tension Between the Static and the Fluid

A central tension in Scheggi’s works is between the static nature of the monochrome surface and the implied movement created by the openings. The composition mimics this tension by alternating between static harmonic or rhythmic sections and sudden shifts in texture or tempo. These moments of stasis, where a single chord or rhythmic figure is repeated, almost mechanically, are punctuated by rapid, almost violent, shifts that pull the performer into a new, deeper layer of the musical surface.

I aim to explore how these shifts can be both disruptive and fluid, much like how the circular voids in Scheggi’s works destabilize the viewer’s perception while also suggesting the continuous movement of light through the layers. In musical terms, the shift might occur through tempo modulation, sudden dynamic changes, or the introduction of a previously unheard performance technique into the texture, creating an effect akin to suddenly encountering a new visual plane beneath the first.

Performance as an Excavation

For the performer, this piece is less about following a straightforward narrative and more about excavating layers of sound. The score offers multiple interpretive possibilities, with certain sections allowing for improvisational freedom based on the performer’s ability to navigate the overlapping textures and silences. The challenge is not just in playing the notes but in bringing forth the hidden layers of the composition in a way that honors the tension between surface simplicity and underlying complexity.

Like Scheggi’s works, which encourage the viewer to engage actively with the space between the canvases, the score invites the performer to engage with the spaces between the sounds...the silences, the gaps, the moments where one layer of music folds over another. The performance thus becomes an act of discovery.

Conclusion

In this new composition, the influence of Paolo Scheggi’s Intersuperfici is not merely aesthetic; it is conceptual, structural, and performative. The score, much like Scheggi’s multi-layered canvases, plays with depth, occlusion, and revelation. It challenges the performer and the listener to consider what lies beneath the surface, to navigate the precarious relationship between sound and silence, and to explore the tension between the static and the dynamic. Ultimately, this piece is not just an homage to Scheggi, but a sonic reimagining of his artistic vision, translating his visual inter-surfaces into a rich and multilayered musical experience.

 

Cuts, Cans, and Calendars: Why I Study Painters to Write Music

 

Cuts, Cans, and Calendars: Why I Study Painters to Write Music

Bil Smith, Sound Morphology

I hold two degrees in music, a B.M. and an M.M., and I took the full sequence. I analyzed Du Fay's isorhythmic motets and the mensuration canons of Ockeghem's Missa prolationum. I traced Stravinsky's blocks and Scriabin's mystic chord, and I spent a long, productive year inside Ferneyhough's rhythmic architecture before moving on to the materiality of Rebecca Saunders and the bodily, ritual instrumental writing of Pierluigi Billone. I don't regret any of it. But when I sit down to compose now, the books open on my desk are more likely to be catalogues of Hanne Darboven, Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Holzer, and Jeff Koons than scores.

This isn't a pose, and it isn't a rejection of my training. It's a response to a problem my training revealed.

Music theory, as it's taught, is a discipline of retrospection. It takes finished works and extracts their grammar: the voice-leading rules, the pitch-class sets, the formal schemes. That's valuable, and it builds real craft. But a grammar extracted from the past is, by definition, a description of what has already been done. Students who internalize it learn to produce sentences that the grammar recognizes as correct. Correct is the enemy here. Convention is self-replicating: you study the conventions, you absorb them, you reproduce them with small variations, and your students analyze your variations. The loop tightens.

The composers I admire most broke that loop, and they rarely did it by studying other composers more closely. Ockeghem wrote a Missa cuiusvis toni, a mass that can be sung in any mode. That's a conceptual work in the strictest sense, a piece whose identity lies in a rule rather than a fixed sound, written more than five centuries before anyone used the word "conceptual." Morton Feldman famously spent more of his formative time among the New York painters than among composers, and his music sounds like it: the scale, the flatness, the refusal of development. John Cage got more from Duchamp than from Schoenberg. Our tradition, at its best, has always been fed from outside itself.

So what do I actually take from painters and sculptors? Not their imagery. I'm not interested in program music about canvases. What I take are their operations: the verbs that define their work.

Fontana cuts. His Concetti spaziali, the slashed and punctured monochromes, aren't pictures of anything. They're acts performed on a surface, and the surface's response to the act is the work. When I treat a sustained sonority as a membrane and then rupture it, with a single attack, a sudden cutoff, or an extended technique that tears the tone, I'm not quoting Fontana. I'm borrowing his question: what is on the other side of the surface, and what does the cut reveal?

Burri burns and stitches. He worked with burlap sacks, charred plastic, and cracked earth, and in Gibellina he poured white concrete over the ruins of a town destroyed by an earthquake, preserving the street plan as a landscape of fissures. Burri taught me that degraded material has a dignity polished material lacks. A sound that is distressed, overblown, or made from a damaged or detuned instrument can carry history in its grain. Saunders and Billone know this too; Burri simply showed it to me first, and more bluntly.

Manzoni seals. His Merda d'artista cans, the Linee rolled and sealed in cylinders, the Achromes drained of color: these are works about containment, value, and the impossibility of verifying what's inside. A notated score is also a sealed container. It promises a sound it doesn't contain. Manzoni pushes me to make that gap part of the composition, to write scores whose visual life is not fully redeemable in performance.

Darboven counts. She filled thousands of sheets with calendar arithmetic, handwritten numbers, and quasi-script, and she translated those number systems into actual music. Her work is the clearest proof that a visual artist can arrive at musical structure from an entirely different direction: not through harmony but through time-keeping itself. She treats duration as something to be written out by hand, day by day, which is what composers do, except that she does it without pretending the result must please.

Ruscha and Holzer state. Ruscha paints words in deadpan typography and photographs Twentysix Gasoline Stations with no commentary. Holzer's Truisms and LED texts put flat declaratives into public space, where their authority becomes suspect. Both have shaped how I use text in scores: not as poetry to be set, but as signage. Language as an object, as typography, as instruction, sometimes legible and sometimes degraded into noise.

Koons polishes. He is the hardest case and the most instructive. His surfaces are so finished that they become a kind of aggression; the banal object, made perfect, stops being banal. I'm drawn to the uncomfortable question he raises about craft. When does technical perfection become the content? A flawlessly executed passage can be the most hollow moment in a piece, and I'd rather compose that hollowness on purpose than produce it by accident.

What are the ramifications of working this way?

The first is that the score becomes an object in its own right. My score Proproxasant; Indicated for Brugada Syndrome layers notation with typography, rendered imagery, and invented pharmaceutical language. A theory class would ask what the pitches are doing. That's a fair question, but it's not the only one, and it may not be the first.

The second is that the vocabulary of evaluation changes. If the operations come from visual art, then the relevant criteria include material, surface, scale, seriality, and context, alongside harmony and form. That makes some musicians uncomfortable, and it should. Discomfort usually means the frame is being tested.

The third ramification is a risk, and I want to be honest about it. Borrowing from other disciplines can produce dilettantism: works that gesture toward a painter's name without understanding the painter. The defense against that is the same rigor my music training gave me. I study these artists the way I studied Ockeghem: closely, chronologically, and with attention to how each decision was made. The discipline transfers. The conventions don't have to.

This brings me to the point I most want to make. My conservatory training isn't the opposite of this approach; it's what makes it possible. I can hear what Fontana's cut might mean in sound because I know what a sustained sonority has meant from Du Fay to Billone. The tradition gives me the fluency. The painters give me permission, and a set of tools, to say something the tradition hasn't already said.

Studying only within the discipline produces more of the discipline. That's how convention works. Without disruption, there is no innovation, and disruption rarely comes from inside the room. It comes from a slashed canvas, a sealed can, a sheet of handwritten numbers, a sign that says PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT. I've found that the best way to honor Ockeghem's restless intelligence is not to imitate his counterpoint, but to look where he would have looked if he were alive now: everywhere except the place he was told to look.