"The Kindly Machines"
for Bass Clarinet
Bil Smith Composer
(2025)
Sunday, April 27, 2025
Saturday, April 26, 2025
Three Pages from the Score of "The Benevolent Engine Accord" for Solo Viola
Three pages from the score of "The Benevolent Engine Accord" for Solo Viola
Bil Smith Composer
2025
Redefining Composition and the ART Score: Dynamic Integration of Art Aesthetics from Locher to Ploeger
Redefining the Score: Dynamic Integration of Art Aesthetics from Locher to Ploeger
One of the most striking developments in the interpretation of the contemporary music score is the integration of visual art aesthetics into compositional frameworks. My approach goes beyond traditional music notation to incorporate the conceptual and aesthetic methodologies of influential visual artists, such as Thomas Locher, Barbara Kruger, Ed Ruscha, and Wolfgang Ploeger.
By drawing from the fragmented language of Locher, the provocative visual statements of Kruger, the conceptual wordplay of Ruscha, and the geometric abstraction of Ploeger, I redefine the score as an interactive, multifaceted system. The fusion of these diverse art forms creates a paradigm shift, one that transcends auditory expression to become a conceptual experience.
The Evolution of the Score in Contemporary Music
Traditional vs. Experimental Music Scores
In traditional Western music, the score serves as a precise guide for performers to follow, encoding specific instructions regarding pitch, rhythm, and expression. The clarity and specificity of standard notation allow for consistent execution across different performers and ensembles. However, the rigidity of this system becomes an obstacle to expressing the complexity of modern ideas.
My work represents a shift away from conventional notation, embracing instead graphic scores, symbolic representations, and abstracted notational systems. This new approach is heavily influenced by visual arts that use open-ended structures, ambiguity, and multiplicity of meaning, offering a fresh perspective on how music can be represented and experienced.
Art and Music as Interactive Disciplines
The boundaries between art forms are increasingly fluid, especially in the digital age. The integration of visual arts with sound is not new, but artists like Locher, Kruger, Ruscha, and Ploeger have brought new dimensions to this relationship. These artists use abstract imagery, textual manipulation, and conceptual forms to challenge perception and convey meaning. My scores, in turn, mirror this tendency, offering performers multiple layers of meaning, much as a visual artist might present a piece that requires the viewer to actively engage with the work to fully understand its depth.
My Approach
My compositional approach blends visual art aesthetics with the principles of sound morphology, creating scores that are conceptually rich and open to interpretation. My work incorporates elements such as:
- Non-linear Structure: Much like modern visual art, this notation do not follow a linear, traditional progression. Instead, they offer fragmented or overlapping notations that reflect the complexity of human experience and perception.
- Graphic and Abstract Notation: Inspired by artists like Locher and Ploeger, I use visual symbols, geometric forms, and graphic cues to represent musical elements, allowing performers to experience the score as both a visual and aural representation of sound.
- Dynamic Interaction: Just as visual art often involves a dynamic interaction between the viewer and the piece, the scores demand that performers actively engage with the material, interpreting both the visual and musical aspects of the composition.
Art Aesthetic Integration in Bil Smith’s Compositional Framework
Thomas Locher: Fragmentation and Symbolic Language
Thomas Locher is known for his exploration of semiotics and the fragmentation of language in his artwork. Locher’s abstract symbols and disruptive text systems challenge the viewer to reconsider how meaning is constructed and interpreted. This conceptual approach directly influences my compositional structures, where abstract symbols serve as a point of departure for sonic exploration.
In Locher’s art, disjointed elements and non-linear text force the viewer to engage with the piece in a non-traditional way. Similarly, my graphic scores often present overlapping, fragmented sections that require performers to decipher the structure and meaning of the piece, blurring the lines between visual aesthetics and musical execution.
Barbara Kruger: Provocative Text and Visual Directives
Barbara Kruger’s conceptual art relies heavily on text-based visuals that challenge authority, identity, and social norms. Kruger’s iconic works like “Your Body Is a Battleground” use bold typography and stark imagery to make provocative statements, inviting viewers to reconsider their perspectives on power and control.
I embrace the use of bold graphical elements and strong visual contrasts mirrors Kruger’s approach. For example, a score might include large, dominant symbols or contradictory visual cues that force performers to interpret the meaning behind the image, akin to how Kruger’s art forces the viewer to decode the underlying message. This method encourages an engagement with both the visual and the conceptual, giving musical instruction through a visually evocative framework.
Ed Ruscha: Wordplay and Conceptual Narratives
Ed Ruscha’s work often focuses on textual exploration and wordplay, where the graphic treatment of words creates a new visual language. Ruscha’s use of language is often ironic or conceptual, pushing the boundaries of literal meaning and cultural signifiers. This playfulness and non-literal approach to language is something that deeply resonates with my compositions, where words and symbols are used not just to represent sound, but also to express broader concepts.
We see similar wordplay and conceptual language that invites reinterpretation. For instance, I might use symbols that represent non-musical elements such as time, space, or emotion, allowing performers to explore these ideas through musical and physical gestures.
Wolfgang Ploeger: Geometric Abstraction and Digital Art
Wolfgang Ploeger’s work is renowned for its geometric abstraction and integration of digital elements. His visual works often rely on precise, abstract forms that evoke movement, space, and light. Similarly, My scores utilize geometric shapes and digital forms to represent musical textures and spatial dynamics.
Ploeger’s use of digital media and interactivity in art inspires one to think about how graphic scores can integrate modern technology. Just as Ploeger’s art can be experienced digitally, my scores may involve dynamic, interactive components that can evolve based on performer interpretation or audience interaction, challenging the performer to engage in a multisensory experience.
The Future of Graphic Scores and the Influence of Art Aesthetics
Expanding the Concept of the Score
As technology evolves, the relationship between visual art and music will continue to blur. I believe that, by 2030, we will see immersive environments where graphic scores are integrated into digital landscapes, allowing for more interactive and adaptive compositions.
Performers will no longer simply read scores; they will interact with visual cues that are constantly shifting and changing, much like an evolving piece of art.
The Role of Performance in Art-Music Integration
Future performances may involve live visual art creation, where artists like Locher, Kruger, Ruscha, and Ploeger influence the performance itself. By using visual stimuli to guide musical decisions, performers will have the opportunity to bring both visual art and music into a unified experience, making the boundary between disciplines even more fluid.
By drawing from the works of Locher, Kruger, Ruscha, and Ploeger, I challenge the traditional structure of the score, turning it into a conceptual, multisensory experience.
"The Hermeneutics of Suspicion in the Time-Traveling Cowboy's Adventures" For Cello
In this new composition "The Hermeneutics of Suspicion in the Time-Traveling Cowboy's Adventures" for Cello delivers a complex notational vocabulary incorporating extreme extended techniques in which the cellist encounters rhythmic indentations and protrusions; a delicate topography of peaks and valleys in the score.
The composition is focused on the concept of a new space… on the grounds that it was too closely bound up with subjective gesture, but much more flexible about the notational intervals at which they appeared of which arranged diagonal vectors form corridors of open space which alternately narrow and widen across the score.
In a way, the composition attacks the supports and surfaces, the very structure of what this score is, and in that way we feel these sounds as if were feeling these textures in our own body.’ The cellists' compositional expression and the idea of how to frame that expression become inseparable; or, to borrow an idea from the theater, the proscenium is designed together with the action onstage. This work represents a very physical form of creative destruction: to go through it and transform it.
One of the themes I explored in this work focused on my interest in the ways in which power operates in society. I envision the cellist arguing that power is not just something that is possessed by individuals or groups, but is rather something that is diffuse and pervasive, operating through a complex web of social relations. The intricacies of the tablature express my belief that knowledge is always produced within a specific historical and cultural context, and that it is therefore always contingent and subject to change.
I am also interested in the ways in which this notation functions as a system of signs that produces meaning. This notation is not just a stylistic choice, but is rather a way of engaging with their ideas about power and knowledge. It is a composition that embodies the radical potential of creative destruction. It is a work that attacks the very foundations of traditional musical notation and reconfigures them into a new kind of space that is both unsettling and exhilarating.
It is a work that demands not just technical virtuosity of the performer, but also a willingness to engage with the political and philosophical implications of its form and the idea of the "destructive character" - a figure who seeks to go beyond the limitations of existing forms and create something new. The use of the cello as the solo instrument creates a sense of intimacy and immediacy that is difficult to reproduce; it creates a sense of disorientation and uncertainty which embodies a sense of skepticism and distrust of established power structures.
Secret Revolutions: The Living Brevity of "Locked Transit" for Flute and Bassoon.
"Locked Transit" for Flute and Bassoon.
Published by LNM Editions
(Laboratorie New Music)
In experimental chamber music, moments of brevity often conceal intricate worlds of inner complexity. Such is the case with Locked Transit for Flute and Bassoon — a work that compresses an extraordinary density of action, transformation, and narrative into just 67 seconds of performance time.
From the first bar, Locked Transit thrusts its performers and its listeners into a whirling, pulsing space — a sonic environment that is not merely activated by gesture but is itself the byproduct of a living, breathing musical metabolism. The flute and bassoon do not present melodies or even traditional textures; rather, they coax sonic phenomena into existence, layering micro-gestures, fluttered articulations, tremulant dynamics, and frantic registral leaps that seem less like performance and more like the exposing of some hidden biological process.
What makes the piece even more remarkable is that it does not wait for a climax or a completed "event" to unveil its intricacies. Instead, the score is designed to allow every notational gesture — even in its early, unstable forms — to reveal its secret transformations. Every slur, every trill, every dynamic fidget shows its own evolution before it even stabilizes into anything like a recognizable figure. The music lives in a constant state of pre-fulfillment, a paradoxical space where ideas are both forming and dissolving at once.
This act of allowing musical material to "betray" its own nature — to show itself mid-metamorphosis — draws a conceptual through-line back to philosophies of non-inert matter, of the animate hidden within the inanimate. Locked Transit is less a "work" in the conventional sense and more a temporary biosphere of sound: teeming, unstable, yet intensely organized.
The score’s extreme complexity is never gratuitous. Instead, every hyper-specific marking — the tight layering of alternate fingerings, the insistence on minute inflections of dynamic shape — serves to focus the listener’s perception inward, toward a sense of material caught in the act of becoming. The performers, too, are asked not to "build toward" a musical climax but to inhabit the tiny internal whorls of each gesture, trusting that the larger structure will emerge not from grand arcs, but from the coalescence of micro-movements.
In the end, Locked Transit is not about "arrival." It is about the impossibility of stasis, the refusal of sonic material to be frozen or defined. Even within 67 seconds, it makes clear that sound itself is never at rest — always moving, shedding, reforming — a secret morphology made momentarily audible.
Friday, April 25, 2025
"ATLAS OF THE FLOODLINE IN THE JUNGLE:" A Speculative Compositional Lexicon
"ATLAS OF THE FLOODLINE IN THE JUNGLE"
A Speculative Compositional Lexicon
The ATLAS OF THE FLOODLINE IN THE JUNGLE is less a notational system than a pre-architectural mythology. A subtextual cartography rendered in diagrams, it reimagines the musical score not as a neutral transmitter of intention, but as an ideological precinct—part reliquary, part hypothesis. It is both machine and mood, a floodplain of expressive debris awaiting performers who are not merely interpreters but settlers, archeologists, and insurgents.
Developed specifically to interface with the Conn (12A) Wonder Parlor Pocket Cornet—an instrument of ornamental brevity and compact bravura—the lexicon forges a language that acknowledges the instrument's historic sentimentality while deploying it as a node of tactical subversion. The score becomes a form of compressed infrastructure: not just notating what is to be played, but why, where, and in what speculative environmental condition it should occur.
The Lexicon as Construct: Vertical Grammar, Diluvial Syntax
At the heart of the ATLAS is a set of archetypes—call them glyphs, indices, or pressure points—that do not merely point to pitch or time, but represent topographic tensions: surge, saturation, stagnation, and exposure. Each symbol is a miniature edifice, a spatialized ideogram that presumes a certain climatology. Notation is treated here not as an artifact of sound, but of weather. In this regard, we have not merely a system of signs, but a hydraulic epistemology—notation as the map of forces, as an inventory of subsurface sediment.
Lines bleed. Margins flood. Boundaries are traced not with clefs and meters, but with sedimentations of musical precedent and imaginary collapse. One archetype—a series of concentric circles punctuated by jagged verticals—signals “post-sonic liquefaction,” a moment in the score when the performer must enact not a note but the idea of structural failure under acoustic strain. This is not a rupture; it is a cultivated deterioration.
The Jungle as Pretext, The Cornet as Mythology
To speak of the “jungle” in the title is not to evoke a geography but a semiotic thicket—a deliberately overgrown referential field in which signals tangle and drown. The ATLAS does not aim to clarify the jungle but to honor its resistance to monocultural order. The Cornet, small and deceptively playful, is weaponized as a proxy for the explorer's voice: sometimes declaring, other times camouflaging, or simply mirroring the lush, wet disorientation of the surrounding system.
Rather than using traditional dynamics or articulations, performers are instructed through geotemporal directives: play as if beneath a canopy in monsoon; intonate with the weight of sunken architecture; emit tone as if interrupting fungal growth. These are not metaphors, but procedural truths of the new lexicon.
Towards the Future -Isms: Adaptive Musics for Discontinuous Times
The ATLAS does not end with the Cornet. It anticipates future -isms—musical, architectural, and ecological—that it will seed rather than merely predict.
Fossilist Expressionism might arise, where compositions simulate the slow pressure of mineral time upon musical form. Here, the ATLAS’s layered strata of notation could guide performers in mimicking deep compression: phrases fold inward, intervals erode into drone sediment.
Post-Urban Echoism could leverage the ATLAS as a blueprint for soundwalks in decommissioned spaces. With its glyphs serving as ritualized sonifications of forgotten civic plans, the work extends into the spatial politics of acoustic memory—abandoned metros, flooded libraries, brutalist relics used as natural reverb chambers.
Hydrographic Serialism, too, might develop: a compositional mode based entirely on tidal and weather-based cycles, scored with symbols derived from the ATLAS’s floodline index. This -ism would require performers to use NOAA data or speculative climate models to generate musical action.
The Performance as Cartographic Incursion
A performance of a work under the ATLAS rubric is a ritual incursion, a temporary claim staked in the interpretive wilderness. The cornetist must approach the score as an urbanist might a half-sunken city—charting submerged transit lines, listening for reverberations in collapsed concrete halls. Practice becomes excavation, and the page a palimpsest of submerged strategies. There is no singular reading. The ATLAS demands residency in the material. It’s a dwelling score.
Each score is site-specific by default: not to place, but to climate, contour, tension. The player’s breath is not merely air—it is pressurized atmosphere, pushing against the ecology of notation, altering weather patterns on the page.
Concluding Ruins: The Score as Memorial and Prototype
To engage with the ATLAS OF THE FLOODLINE IN THE JUNGLE is to situate oneself in a speculative history that is already decomposing. It is not a map of what music has been, nor what it might be. It is a score of losses, forecasts, and interstitial domains.
The Conn Wonder Parlor Pocket Cornet becomes the instrument of choice not because of its tradition, but because of its ability to sound like memory—compressed, evaporating, almost nostalgic for futures it never had.
In the end, this is not a system. It is a weather model.
Not a lexicon, but a field guide.
Not notation, but territory.
Thursday, April 24, 2025
Wednesday, April 23, 2025
Retroframed Discourse as a Compositional Ontology: Toward a Radical Temporal Materialism in Musical Thought
Retroframed Discourse as a Compositional Ontology
Toward a Radical Temporal Materialism in Musical Thought
Introduction: Time, Echo, Frame
In a culture increasingly obsessed with real-time immediacy and prospective innovation, the practice of “retroframing” invites a paradoxical rupture—one that resists the forward-pull of teleology and instead insists upon reconstitution from within a matrix of temporal residues. Retroframed discourse, as introduced in this context, is not merely the backward glance of nostalgia nor the simple recontextualization of the past in the present. Rather, it is a rigorous ontological maneuver that positions the past not as memory, but as active infrastructure. When applied to composition, this framework births a compositional ontology rooted in recursive time, archival instability, and deliberate semantic erosion.
This paper aims to chart the theoretical landscape of retroframed discourse as a compositional ontology: how it may operate in music, notation, and artistic production as both method and metaphysics. It examines the stratification of musical meaning not as progress, but as a process of layered reconsideration—each layer reframing the previous under a different ontological regime.
Retroframing Defined: Discourse in Reverse Drag
Retroframing is the act of constructing meaning backward—where intent is retroactively installed through its aftereffects. In linguistic terms, it aligns with paratextual augmentation, wherein surrounding materials (marginalia, editorial interventions, performative annotations) dictate the perception of a central body of work.
But in musical composition, retroframing assumes a more architectural form: a piece may emerge as though discovered in fragments, conjured through editorial forensics, or composed as if restoring a lost edition. The implication is not that the work was forgotten, but that it never quite existed until now.
Retroframed discourse functions, therefore, as an act of compositional retroconjuring—a dramaturgy of absence and afterimage. Notation, here, is less a prescriptive system and more a palimpsest of sonic hauntings.
Ontology and the Time Object: Score as Artifact
To discuss a compositional ontology means asking not what music is, but how it exists. Retroframed composition embraces the score as archaeological site—a locus not of prescriptive instruction, but of temporal contradictions and interpretive sediment.
Where traditional ontologies of composition imply linear authorship (composer → score → performance), retroframed discourse collapses this pipeline. A retroframed work might simulate restoration or mimic transcription from an obscure archive, placing the composer in the role of editor, archivist, or even translator of a non-existent source.
Such works often mimic:
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Facsimile aesthetics (faux-aged paper, ghosted staves, invented scribal errors),
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Erratic revisionist layers (scratched-out measures, abrupt stylistic shifts),
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Metamusical commentary embedded into the score itself (e.g. non-performative footnotes, pseudo-historical context).
By doing so, the work becomes ontologically unstable—neither past nor present, neither fiction nor artifact—but a folded object caught in a loop of retroactive becoming.
Applications: Retroframed Techniques in Practice
Let us consider how this theoretical framing translates into practice:
1. Phantom Editions
A piece may be presented as "Edition No. 4" of a work whose first three editions never existed. Each "version" can be a retroactive mutation of a piece that was never composed in its original form—creating a false genealogy whose performance reveals dissonance in historical continuity.
2. Interlineal Ghosting
A compositional method where instructions, alternate noteheads, and marginalia are rendered visible but intentionally non-executable—ghost notes, parentheticals, or canceled dynamics—all preserved in the score to simulate the history of decisions that never happened. It borrows from textual criticism in biblical or medieval manuscripts, where layers of meaning are fossilized in the very process of revision.
3. Faux-Forensic Assemblage
The composer curates imagined musical fragments—simulated as though excavated from different centuries—and sutures them together. This invokes a speculative materiality, similar to Derrida’s archaeology of knowledge, where the frame becomes the primary generator of form.
Future -isms: Toward Retrotemporality in Sound
Retroframed discourse has broad implications for emergent compositional -isms:
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Neo-Archaeophony: Compositions that simulate forgotten acoustic environments, imagined instruments, or sonic rituals of non-existent cultures.
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Reconstructivism: A methodology where pieces are written backward—from fragment to whole, from imagined ruin to speculative original.
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Para-Chronism: The simultaneous presentation of multiple conflicting time signatures, tunings, or rhythmic epochs as a way of "folding" historical realities into a composite now.
This also feeds into AI-assisted music creation, where retroframing could be algorithmically simulated—training models not to generate music, but to reconstruct imaginary pasts.
Temporal Resistance, Ontological Excess
In retroframed discourse, the past is not a source—it is a material. The work becomes a site of excavation, interpretation, re-temporalization. The composer is no longer a maker of sound but a constructor of frames—a curator of absence, a generator of ontological tension. Here, notation is not merely a means to reproduce sonic content, but a treatise on the impossibility of fixed meaning.
This compositional ontology resists both futurist abstraction and classical fixity. It offers instead a temporal bracketing of musical thought, a haunted form of writing that defers its own authorship—forever becoming, forever framed after the fact.
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.
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