Suspending Atmospheres. Toward an Aesthetics of the Poem-Score
For more than a decade, I have extended my experimental sound scoring practive towards poem-scores—textual architectures that suspend language between poetry, notation, and performative proposition. Inspired by Dadaistic and Lettrist experimentation, but also by Fluxus and the intuitive scores of the 1960s, I explore word scoring as a comprovisational practice, in which language oscillates between poetic meaning-making and score instruction, between associative and concrete sense. Each poem-score tests how poetic syntax, metaphor, and rhythm can act as triggers for collective listening, structured improvisation, or silent reflection. The text is not a description of music but a field of potential gestures—its linguistic surface already vibrating with phrasing, pulse, and breath. Grammatical pauses suggest temporal form; typographic spacing implies spatial distribution; sonic imagery evokes timbral and emotional direction. Pieces such as Let This Sound Slowly Dissipate (2014) and Rasa Poem Scores (2015) explore text as an embodied sensorium: instruction dissolves into metaphor and re-coagulates as collective action. How to Inhabit These Different Temporalities (2020) takes this principle into collective interaction between public and players. Nagori Rengakai (2021) reimagines the Japanese renga tradition as a transferable relay of aural atmospheres, while in Life & Times – A Poetic Fugue (2025) counterpointed poetic voices weave a polyphony of human experiences. I River (2025) imagines a riverine personhood as a multi-voiced textual flow that informs musician’s reactions. Across these works, language becomes a medium in suspension—at once solid and fluid, graspable and evaporating. Each score constructs an ecology of attention in which reading, voicing, performing and listening intermingle; each is an atmospheric text that can travel, infuse and inspire new sonic situations.