“Repeject Bound” for Bass Clarinet . A Curatorial Essay by Christopher Priest

 

“Repeject Bound” 

for Bass Clarinet 

A Curatorial Essay by Christopher Priest

Bil Smith’s Repeject Bound emerges as both palimpsest and provocation.  It becomes an ontological wedge driven into the conventions of instrumental music notation. This score for Bass Clarinet is not merely a guide for performance; it is an ecology of graphical residue, architectural schematics, pharmaceutical epistemology, and cinematic movement, a distillation of Smith’s late-stage compositional aesthetic where the line between notator and semiotic insurgent collapses.

Architectural Topographies of Duration

The score’s uppermost strata unfold like a deconstructed metronomic terrain. Thick black sheafs, graphically collapsed onto a linear timescape with coordinates marked in descending durational notations(12.97, 8.06, 1.69, 0.06) suggest a system in flux or decay. These are not mere time stamps but craters of expressive density. At center: a bisected medallion, red and fuchsia in saturation, housing an anatomical secti (a valve or ventricle perhaps) signaling a physiological rhythm overlaying the sonic one.

To the right, a three-tiered architectural extrusion appears suspended in percussive silence. It evokes a scaffolding for interpretation, but offers no footing—its steps lead nowhere, or to tonal exhaustion.

Pharmaco-Phonetic Assemblages

Mid-register is where Smith invokes a pharmacological pantheon: Dorzotinoin, Etradine, Tretilovir, Lovadane, Vibranil; all drug names perhaps imagined or repurposed, stitched into the notational framework as both linguistic detritus and visual anchors. These are not marginalia; they are notations.

The performer does not merely play notes but ingests signs, confronted by names that feel at once molecular and musical. These substances interrupt the stave like interventional agents, subverting any linear phraseological delivery.

Of note is the warped text sequence that dissolves into PROPRAMUNEX, a name whose pronunciation may mimic a breath-induced trill. Its layout feels like the phonetic shadow of an inhalation, aspirated through a reed.

Glyphic Subdermal Cartographies

Below, the score descends into the realm of typographic overabundance and anatomical suggestion. A looping, recursive structure of dot-and-stem configurations mimics bass clarinet fingering diagrams, but distorted as if misremembered. There’s a saturation of data that resists interpretation, forcing the performer to dwell in indeterminacy.

Further right, a vertical instrument-like glyph encodes itself in repetition: a clarinet, a column, a pipe organ. Its reflection elongates into nothingness. This is the void the bass clarinet must project into.

The Image Strip: Cinematic Score-Time as Gesture

At the score’s base, a four-frame photogram unfolds like a sequential thought or exhaled scene. Filtered in cyan, ochre, and vermilion, the images appear as inverted negatives of domestic or performance environments, each connected by arrows suggesting logical or temporal flow.

This series speaks to the movement of the piece as a psycho-narrative. Time is refracted, fragmented, and assembled as visual metonymy for performance temporality.

 The Score as Stratified Lexicon

In Repeject Bound, Smith abandons the idea of score-as-instruction and embraces score-as-environment. It is both performable and unperformable, readable and encrypted. For the interpreter, this is less a set of directives and more a pharmaco-sonic archaeology. Smith’s score functions as a hallucinatory map through linguistic terrain, a fugue state between naming and playing, between breathing and decoding.

It is a composition that demands, to borrow from Foucault, “an archaeology of silence.” And in that silence, Smith’s glyphs whisper their own broken grammar.