Prescriptive Noise: Composing with the Pharmacopoeia by Bil Smith

 

Prescriptive Noise: Composing with the Pharmacopoeia

By Bil Smith

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My intent has never been to render music in the traditional sense. Rather, it is to transmute the language of authority, whether be it clinical, legislative, or linguisticinto notation. In Prescriptive Noise, I found in the pharmacopoeia not just metaphor but medium. It offered a dense, bureaucratic lexicon that mirrored the regulatory pressures of composition itself. Dosage became a form of articulation. Adverse events, my dynamics. Contraindications, the structural parameters of ensemble behavior. It was never about drugs.  It was about systems of control masked as systems of care.

The materials of the pharmaceutical world are precise, impersonal, codified and designed to regulate and minimize ambiguity. But I was interested in what happens when that clarity is turned inside out. When 500 mg q8h becomes a percussive instruction. When sublingual or extended-release becomes a cue for how a timbre might decay or remain latent across pages of silence. I found these terms beautiful in their violence, elegant in their administrative coldness.

Damien Hirst's "Pharmacy London" Project

I have often admired Damien Hirst, not for the repetition, but for the audacity of his taxonomy. In his work, pharmaceuticals are flattened into color and shape, depersonalized until they become aesthetic. But I wanted to push further: to resubjectivize that aesthetic, to make the performer complicit in its effects. My scores aren't visual inventories.  They’re volatile compounds. The page might look clinical, minimal even, but it’s saturated with potential side effects.

There’s a reason I include boxed warnings in my scores. They are not performative gimmicks. They are functional constraints. When I write “Do not execute concurrently with color fields,” it’s not just instruction—it’s a reflexive device. It’s a challenge to the notion of compliance. Pharmaceutical language is inherently conditional, always hedging: may cause dizziness, may interact with other agents, not for use in patients with a history of interpretive consistency. I adopt that tone not to parody it, but to implicate it within musical practice.

Page from the score: "Bolribine" for Solo Oboe

My use of microdosing terminology such as ramp-up titration, saturation threshold, and half-life is not mere stylistic borrowing. These are structures that replace form. Why write in movements when you can compose with pharmacokinetics? Why phrase in bars when time can be governed by absorption curves?

Page from the score: "Bolribine" for Solo Oboe

And perhaps most importantly: these scores are written to resist completion. Like a trial drug under accelerated review, they exist in a phase of perpetual testing. The performer is not a vessel of interpretation, but a clinician. They observe, they respond, they encounter the music not as narrative, but as protocol. Failure, misreading, improvisation under constraint?  None of these are bugs.

They are baked into the compound.

In Prescriptive Noise, the music is not what is heard, but what is risked.

The score is a prescription.

The performance, an off-label use.

And the silence between events?

That’s the half-life.