EIGHTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith calls the system underlying his art-language scores “Ankhrasmation”—a portmanteau combining “ankh” (the Egyptian hieroglyph for “life”), “ras” (the Amharic/Ethiopian term for “head creator” or “leader”), and “ma” (a sound associated with mothering around the world). Both visually and musically innovative, these scores are included in his current exhibition “Kosmic Music,” curated by Kristin Poor and Jenny Jaskey at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, where it will remain on view through July 3.
Wadada (his preferred moniker) began making visual scores in 1967, when he was in Chicago writing “The Bell,” which premiered on saxophonist Anthony Braxton’s influential 1968 album 3 Compositions of New Jazz. An expressive painter since his youth, Wadada had already been considering how symbols or glyphs could represent musical possibility on staff paper. He added some X’s and lines and put them all in “a dotted box,” he says, “as a way of marking this box as special.” This unusual notation was made not retroactively but as part of the initial process of composition. During a roundtable for the 2015 exhibition “Ankhrasmation: The Language Scores, 1967–2015” at Chicago’s Renaissance Society, Wadada described hearing the playback of the song’s recording, which he and Braxton made with pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and violinist Leroy Jenkins (all key members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, or AACM), as “experiencing a kind of transformation, about what was there and what I could actually do with it.”
In the nearly sixty years since then, Wadada has become a deeply respected figure in the “creative music” field many still call “jazz”: a master of his instrument; a longtime educator at Bard College and then CalArts; a prolific recording artist and composer whose historic 2012 suite, Ten Freedom Summers, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Music. His continuing “discovery” of Ankhrasmation took him beyond those few initial marks toward a full-throated language based on symbology (heavily weighted toward ancient Egypt and the teachings of Dogon sage Ogotemmeli), science (from Einstein’s ideas of what Wadada calls “time flexing in space” to the electromagnetic radiation spectrum), and, yes, divine creativity. “I consider it a pure inspiration,” Wadada says of Ankhrasmation. “Not based off a reaction to something, but off an acknowledgment that I received something new and different.” Unlike the midcentury tradition of “graphic scores” developed by the likes of John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, and György Ligeti, or the purely subjective idea of “playing art” that’s found favor in many galleries and museums, Wadada’s art language is wholly freestanding and self-contained (an Ankhrasmation Symbolic Language Key, undated, hangs near the beginning of the Academy exhibition), requiring direct study, while also balanced by each individual practitioner’s interpretive knowledge and in-the-moment creativity.
Wadada’s visual vocabulary encompasses primary polychromatic shapes interspersed with long, flowing, sometimes idiosyncratic forms and additional ideograms, all of which convey particular performance actions and time intervals. The dots of “The Bell” have been elevated to solid boxes, and other scores take form as stems, loops, and towers, painted primarily with acrylics and ink, appearing on larger and larger sheets, especially in a quartet of symphonic works, which hangs like a set of oversize planets on a single gallery wall. Yet the specifics of these art-scores are also balanced by the individualism Wadada expects from all those who engage them, including nonmusicians who approach these pieces purely as works of visual art. “When a person sees [the pieces] exhibited in a secluded place, my expectation . . . is that they stand there, without any prior knowledge, and imagine the score being performed, with them as the primary leader or the primary motivator. . . . Music of the mind. And I would ask them also to allow that to be a secret amongst themselves.”
This notion of a personal, imagined sound is key to Wadada’s conception of the philosophical and social dimensions of the music that emanates from the Ankhrasmation scores. If individual contributors bring their own personal points of view and inspirations to the shared space of the work, the result is something new. “It is a community, a family of people from different cultures, different backgrounds, with different pieces of knowledge,” he says. “And they collectively, not knowing what knowledge the other person has, put their knowledge into the . . . performance space. And each person does that. The equation is how to balance that and make an art piece out of it.”
Piotr Orlov is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, and musicker who publishes the newsletter Dada Strain.
