Theoretical and Aesthetic Considerations of “The Kindly Machines” for Bass Clarinet by Bil Smith
by Markus Birnbaum
Bil Smith’s “The Kindly Machines” operates within a discursive zone that destabilizes conventional music notation, merging material culture, semiotic density, and performative ambiguity into a single score-object. The page evokes an epistemology of fractured legibility, situated at the crossroads of conceptual art, post-structuralist theory, and contemporary composition. It does not direct the performer toward a singular sonic outcome, but instead insists upon interpretive agency and embodied exploration.
At the score’s center lies a sculptural tableau: what appears to be a photographic or rendered grid of compressed, industrially wrapped packages, each with varying sheen, opacity, and chromatic temperature. This imagery displaces the primacy of notes or staves, suggesting instead a syntax of objects. The performer is positioned as an archaeologist of material semiotics, interpreting density, contour, weight, and implied texture as sonic provocations.
Notational Philosophy
Smith’s approach reflects an explicit turn away from teleological composition toward what might be termed non-linear performative cartography. The visual system resists hierarchy. His numbers, grids, symbols, and objects operate without a centralized logic. In this way, the score invokes the aleatoric structures of John Cage, while visually recalling the architectonic syntax of Sol LeWitt and the visual fragmentation of Mark Lombardi's diagrammatic drawings. The performance of this piece is not only musical but investigative serving as an excavation of surfaces.
Aesthetics of Refusal
This page resists the rationalism of classical modernist notation. In the tradition of Dieter Roth or Hanne Darboven, text, number, and structure are conflated and abstracted. The grid, often a symbol of order, becomes here a space of potential collapse or infinite recursion. Numbers are scattered and color-coded, detached from any clear metric function, behaving more like Deleuzean rhizomes than linear indicators.
Further, the embedded symbols (e.g., the pink silhouette, the blue 8.03, the mirrored 7.118) function less as instructions and more as residuesto imagined processes. These may allude to biochemical weights, timestamps, or even emotive instructions. Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance is apt here. The meaning of these signs is perpetually deferred, never fixed, and always negotiated anew by the performer.
Performativity and Objecthood
The presence of wrapped forms suggests an engagement with materialism and post-object art. The performer must decode not just symbols, but objecthood itself. This is reminiscent of Thomas Hirschhorn’s bricolage installations, in which debris, commodity, and text are layered into critical density. Similarly, Smith’s score merges the banal and the cryptic, making no distinction between high concept and packaging material.
A Musical Artefact of Ambiguity
The bass clarinet becomes an instrument of friction. It is literally grinding against the granularity of the visual field. This may call for techniques that are gestural, timbral, or even choreographic. The inclusion of expanded notation elements and pictographic suggestions de-instrumentalizes the act of performance. It echoes Fluxus sensibilities, where the distinction between performer and observer collapses, and where notation becomes performance in itself.
Conclusion
“The Kindly Machines” is not a score in the traditional sense, but an aesthetic object that demands a rethinking of sound production as a form of spatial and conceptual inquiry. In its visual logic, theoretical density, and performative provocation, it aligns with a lineage of artists, composers, and thinkers who seek to dissolve the boundary between instruction and interpretation, between language and matter, between image and sound. It is not meant to be deciphered but engaged. To be contested, misread, sounded out.
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