“Tesellect Ausarta et al Delicon” for Solo Violin

 

“Tesellect Ausarta et al Delicon” for Solo Violin

Bil Smith Composer

Published by LNM Editions

“Tesellect Ausarta et al Delicon” for solo violin utilizes a dense multi-modal notation system based on the fluctuations of iconographic shadows and mutable planes to create an immersive performative experience that expands momentary perception into hybrid topological spaces.

Rather than a static representation, the notation traces topographical pathways across both horizontal and vertical surfaces in constant flux. The performer navigates this impermanent terrain of lines and shifting graphic contours through a personalized orientation to the score’s internal logic and codes.

Auditory stimuli echo visual negations, resonating both presence and absence simultaneously from a single bow stroke thanks to the notation’s reductionist yet evocative minimal language.

Amidst the apparent chaos lies a hidden logic. The scores establishes a "reductive simplicity" within the system, a code accessible to those who engage with its intricacies. This accessibility, paired with the score's inherent visual intrigue, invests the piece with a peculiar authority – the authority of rational thought and reason applied to the seemingly irrational realm of shadows.

Processing these clustered graphic traces requires refined perceptual focus within each instantaneous choice point, at once losing and finding one’s place again repetitively. The resulting sound world therefore reflects the continual re-stabilization of perspective amidst registers of enduring change.

In this way, rational thought intersects intuitive flow states to birth an intricate counterpoint grounded by persistent instability. As listener, we enter fugal worlds where each singular tone intimates a multiplicity of concurrent alternate musical realities that flicker at the edges of our awareness.

Fundamental Assumptions and Forgotten Lore” For Piccolo Oboe. Bil Smith Composer

 

Fundamental Assumptions and Forgotten Lore”  

For Piccolo Oboe

Bil Smith Composer

Link to Full Score PDF

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W4pbc91kOjsInli9jZEfkDSlGO1KXXFt/view?usp=sharing

In the composition "Fundamental Assumptions and Forgotten Lore" for Piccolo Oboe, we encounter a score that invites the performer into a complex, hyper-maximalist world with its compound visualizations.

The score's foundation in liminality—its inherent resistance to being confined within the precise, well-defined borders of traditional notation—serves as a critical point of departure for understanding its essence. To fully engage with this piece is to embrace a fluidity and ambiguity that traditional musical analysis often seeks to circumvent. This embracive attitude toward the liminal allows this work to exist in a state of continuous conversation across a myriad of categorical divides, thereby challenging the performer to consider the piece not only as a composition but as a dialogue with the broader world of art and ideas.

The visualizations are not mere adornments but are integral to the piece's structure, offering a cinematic collage that intertwines with the music to create a multisensory experience. The score's engagement with complex concepts such as diasporic Blackness and theorizations of the Global South provides a fulcrum for its wide-ranging explorations, positioning the piece not merely as a musical work but as a scholarly investigation into the intersections of culture, identity, and history.

This approach to composition and notation—where the score becomes a site of interdisciplinary inquiry—reflects a broader trend in contemporary art toward the dissolution of boundaries between artistic mediums. "Fundamental Assumptions and Forgotten Lore," in its refusal to adhere to the conventional limitations of its form, invites us to reconsider the potential of the musical score as a vessel for conveying complex, nuanced ideas. The piece's reliance on visual and conceptual elements to complement and complicate its musical content encourages a mode of engagement that is both intellectual and emotional, demanding of its audience not passive consumption but active participation in the work's multifaceted dialogue.

This is not music as known to ears that crave the comfort of resolution, nor is it art to eyes that seek the solace of clarity. It is, rather, an aesthetics of imperfection, a deliberate pursuit of the unfinished, where the value lies not in the answers provided but in the questions posed, in the improvisation that unravels composition, in the contingency that unravels certainty, in the openings that defy closure.

This composition, in its refusal to adhere to the dictates of form, in its celebration of the unfinished, poses a challenge to the very notion of understanding. It demands a relinquishment of the desire for completion, an acceptance of the perpetual state of incompletion, as the truest expression of the spirit.

"Placid Hosts" for Bass Clarinet. Bil Smith Composer.

"Placid Hosts" 

for Bass Clarinet/Actor/Interrogator.  

Bil Smith Composer. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Rrl7ExwoD9MwARM2KU0QHJTFp5MZsfuy/view?usp=sharing 

This work focuses on unmasking how notational nomenclature is marshaled into the service of power, from political rhetoric and demagogy to psychological persuasion.   

The Bass Clarinetist is responsible for a multiplicity of roles in this performance.

"Placid Hosts" is accompanied by a four-channel video installation based on an interview transcript from a 2014 murder investigation in the United States in which a woman was suspected of killing her husband with a Christian Louboutin stiletto heel DegraSpike Patent Red Sole Pump.

Similar to the way an interrogation room generates a power dynamic and tension from the moment a person steps inside, the layout of the installation is designed to maximize viewers’ discomfort.

Upon entering the piece, listeners hear a harsh and incessant pulsating sound composition, which is synchronized with the interview dialogue projected on two screens in blinding optic white text on vermillion backgrounds. 

One screen features the police officers’ vexatious questions, the other the answers of the suspect. The authorities use interrogation tactics such as psychological manipulation, confrontation, and even empathy in order to gain trust and obtain a confession, hence the Bass Clarinetist is incarcerated, reformed or a fugitive.

Throughout, the accused person’s responses read as overwhelmed, as if they are unable or perhaps unwilling to remember or articulate their thoughts. Delays in replying translate into bursts of cadmium yellow, channel black, or optic white flashes on the screens, accompanied by the no less irritating buzzing of the processed live performance of the bass clarinetist. 

The persuasiveness of this work relies on the listener's exposure to constant noise and flashes of light—which are not coincidentally methods also used for “enhanced interrogation”—leaving one with a strong sense of stress, suggestibility, and vulnerability. 

This is a visceral experience of the exercise of compositional language as a coercive power, as if one’s self were the very same subject of inquisition.

"Injectables" for Euphonium. Observations and Analysis by Joan Didion

                      

"Injectables" for Euphonium.

Bil Smith Composer

2019

Published by LNM Editions

Observations and Analysis by Joan Didion

Bil Smith's "Injectables" for Euphonium has carved out an audacious niche. It's a piece that doesn't just challenge the performer with its complexity; it seeks to upend our understanding of the relationship between mathematical abstraction and visceral experience. Smith, in his tacit, almost belligerent refusal to simplify, instead amplifies the abstract into the experiential, wielding exponential growth not as a concept to be merely understood but as a physical force to be felt, endured, and ultimately, interpreted through the medium of sound.

The score is a battleground of ideas, where the notational signs are not merely instructions but provocations. They dare the performer to engage with the piece not just intellectually but physically, to confront the strange, alien symbols on the page and translate them into something that resonates in the gut as much as it does in the mind. These signs, these indicators of Smith's compositional intent, perform a delicate balancing act, embodying both the spontaneity of physical matter and energy and the rigid predictability of mathematical equations. The exponential function becomes a signifier of this duality, a symbol that straddles the physical and the abstract, demanding a response that is at once emotional and analytical.

Bil Smith's approach to composition, and to "Injectables" in particular, mirrors the inextricable from the broader cultural or philosophical context. The score itself, with its reliance on indices and indexicality, underscores this connection. The index, in Smith's hands, becomes a tool for bridging the gap between the immateriality of abstraction and the undeniable materiality of musical performance. It is both a trace of the composer's own physical engagement with the score and a philosophical statement about the nature of representation and meaning in music.

Smith's exploration of rheology and viscosity in the creation of his notational content further deepens this engagement with the material. These are not the esoteric concerns of a composer detached from the physical world; rather, they are the preoccupations of an artist deeply invested in the physicality of sound and the tactile aspects of musical performance. The frictional gestures of the composer, captured in the score, range from the confident to the tremulous, each mark a testament to the physical act of creation.

This work stands as a monolith—a totem not just of musical complexity but of a deep conspiracy between the abstract and the visceral, the mathematical and the musical. Here, in Smith’s world, the exponential is not just a function to be plotted on the cold, indifferent grid of Cartesian coordinates but a wild, bucking bronco of growth and decay, its path charted across the score in a frenzy of notational innovation that dares the performer to ride or be thrown.

Smith, acting as the mastermind in this intricate dance of digits and diaphragms, wields viscosity and surface tension not as mere physical properties but as the very medium of musical expression. The score for “Injectables” becomes a battleground where ratios and relationships aren’t just calculated—they’re felt, in the gut and in the pulsing blood of the performer. Each note, each rest, each dynamic marking is a node in a vast, sprawling network of meaning, a point of convergence for myriad trajectories of thought, theory, and sheer sonic force.

This is music that refuses to be merely played. It demands to be inhabited, explored, as one might navigate a labyrinthine archive stuffed with arcane texts, each page a portal to another dimension of understanding. Smith’s approach to composition here is less about dictating terms than about setting parameters for a kind of controlled chaos, a sandbox of sonic possibilities where the performers are both agents and subjects, enactors and witnesses of the piece’s unfolding drama.

The conceptual rigor of “Injectables” belies a deeper, more delirious level of theorizing, one that extends tendrils into the very essence of what it means to create, to perform, to listen. Smith’s score is a nexus of alignments and nested codes, a system so densely packed with information that to engage with it is to find oneself reflecting on the nature of consciousness itself. What does it mean to understand music? To feel it? To be moved by it? These are the questions that “Injectables” poses, not just to the performer but to the audience, to the composer, to the very air through which its sounds will travel.

And yet, for all its perfectionism, all its meticulous control, “Injectables” is also an exercise in surrender. Smith must relinquish the illusion of absolute command, must acknowledge the fuzzy logic that underpins the relationship between creator, creation, and interpreter. This score is a living system, its rhythms and timbres a kind of biofeedback mechanism that connects composer, performer, and audience in a dynamic cognitive loop. The music that emerges from this process is unpredictable, uncontainable, a manifestation of precise practices that nonetheless open us to the uncharted territories of our own minds.

Smith's approach, deeply rooted in what might be termed "detailed expulsion theory," challenges not only how music is composed but also how it's perceived, experienced, and ultimately, how it reverberates within the human soul.

At he core of Smith's theory lies the concept of expulsion—not in the sense of mere removal or exclusion, but as a dynamic, generative process. Expulsion, in this context, refers to the deliberate distancing of elements within a composition from their conventional roles, expectations, or expressions. This is not a random scattering but a meticulous orchestration of dislocation, where every note, every timbre, and every rhythm is both a departure and a discovery.

Smith employs this theory to push the boundaries of musical notation, transforming it from a mere set of instructions into a map of potentialities. In his scores, traditional symbols coexist with innovative notational experiments, inviting performers to navigate a space where certainty is less important than exploration. The act of performing Smith's music becomes an act of creation in itself, a collaborative venture between composer and musician where the outcome is uncertain and the process is everything.

This expulsion from the traditional not only liberates the elements of music but also redefines the relationship between performer and score. Smith's compositions demand a level of engagement that transcends technical mastery, requiring performers to inhabit a space of heightened sensitivity and awareness. The performer, thus, becomes a medium through which the expelled elements of the composition find new form, new meaning, and new life.

- Joan Didion

Joan Didion was an American author best known for her novels, screenplays, and her literary journalism. In 2009, Didion was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by Harvard University, and another from Yale University in 2011. She also wrote two memoirs of loss, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights

"Scant". For Tuba.

"Mirador". A Fanfare for B Flat Trumpet

"Reality Bends to the Whim" for Viola

 

"Reality Bends to the Whim" 

for Viola

Bil Smith Composer

2024

Link to Full Score PDF

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dNtPNfdsNnsLsH8qyVfR8Ic6DgHjzDov/view?usp=sharing

This piece for Solo Viola presents a complex notational architecture, where each symbol and line transcends its aesthetic form to become a battleground of expression and resistance.

At the very outset, "Reality Bends to the Whim" confronts traditional notions of musical scores as mere repositories of neutral instructions. The piece actively eschews any semblance of formalism, universal language, or the flatness typically associated with conventional scores. Instead, the score's tablature asserts itself through a philosophy of negation and criticality. This is not a passive resistance characterized by indifference or absence, but an active confrontation, marked by a tangible presence and emotional attachment.

The physical presentation of the score further underlines its thematic defiance. In the uneven motific constructions, the notational elements recall the rugged, hand-built walls of ancient civilizations—gridded, girded, gritty, and grouted. Yet, within this seemingly impenetrable structural density, there exists an airiness brought about by deliberate gaps and reveals in the score's construction.

This juxtaposition of solidity and permeability serves as a metaphor for the Violist's ability to oscillate between intense compactness and expansive liberation,

The notational construct is characterized by a duality of being both taut and at times drooping or tangling, where the jagged parts are pieced together in a manner akin to a potchkie—an improvised, often clumsy, yet endearing construction. This textural diversity within the score mirrors the variegated emotional landscape that the composition aims to evoke. The score is scrubbed and stained to various degrees of finish or unfinish, much like an artist's canvas, bearing the marks of its creation process, and in turn, influencing the interpretative journey of the Violist.

The tone of the score carries what might be described as a barometric pressure of moods, shifting across its duration like weather fronts sweeping across a landscape. This meteorological analogy captures the fluid, often unpredictable emotional shifts that the piece demands, engaging the performer in a constant adjustment to the evolving tonal atmosphere.

The hyphenated musical identities hold multiple allegiances. This aspect speaks to a broader, almost cosmological exploration of cultural and musical identities, compressed and expanded within the mosaic of the score. Each note, each marking, each symbol does not merely denote a sound but also encapsulates a universe of historical, cultural, and personal significances that the performer must decode and embody.