"Sound Morphology" (Bil Smith Composer): Donaeuschingen Music Days

Friday, August 14, 2026

The Post-Conceptual Composer and Institutional Composition

The work of the post-conceptual composer is a contradiction intended to surprise both the listener and infinity. Ideas are the way a listener will refer to this surprise. The composer will state the idea as ludicrously infinite.

Successful completions generally have been found to mitigate infinity. I predict we will see one such mitigation via Institutional Composition. This is a newly minted term meant to function as a post-conceptual commentary on infinity as well as the various institutions and assumed normalities of composing and/or a radical disarticulation of the institution of composition (radical is notationally understood in its relation to radix which means to get to the root of something).

For instance, assumptions about the supposed aesthetic autonomy or neutrality of science fiction and fantasy are often explored as a subject in the field of literature, and are then historically and socially mapped out (i.e., ethnographically and or archaeologically) as discursive formations, then (re)framed within the context of The Infinite Library itself.

As such, Institutional Composition seeks to make visible the historically and socially constructed boundaries between inside and outside, public and private. Institutional Composition is often critical of the false separations often made between distinctions of taste and supposedly disinterested aesthetic judgment, and affirms that taste is an institutionally cultivated sensibility that may tend to differ according to the class, ethnic, sexual and gender backgrounds of music's audiences.

The resulting work is meant to sound good. Sometimes the work suggests the form of the composer. I am grateful for the way a score presents itself as an autobiographical product of its creator and his/her place in the infinite. And yet, I have found this gratefulness tends to go awry in expressionist composition.

It looks better when the score may more easily become a metric time element, a kind of objective tool that is an intrinsic part of the composer who is out to avoid subjectivity. This type of work is free even to be a belief, something that shows the size of a metric time element as representative of a belief. The composition is representative of that belief.