Sunday, November 8, 2026

"Cake" For Dunnett snare drum. A note to whoever is brave enough to pick up the sticks.

"Cake"

For Dunnett snare drum. A note to whoever is brave enough to pick up the sticks.

Hi-res score (PDF):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jjIEub7m_SR8kdf6YIsVwnXWecjvnX5k/view?usp=sharing

This one is for you, the snare drummer.

You've spent years being exact. Rudiments until your wrists ached. Rolls so even you could set a clock by them. Flams, drags, ratamacues, the whole catechism. You've been the most reliable person in every ensemble you've ever sat in: the one who keeps the time when everyone else forgets it.

I wrote Cake to take all of that away from you, and then hand it back in pieces.

It's a single page for a single drum. The drum is a Dunnett, a beautifully made instrument with a voice that rings and lingers. The page is the opposite: crowded, unstable, and quietly falling apart. Between the two of them, there's you.

What you'll find on the page

Not instructions so much as inscriptions.

There are staves, yes, but they don't stay where staves belong. They slide left and right across the page, overlapping, interrupting each other, some cut off at the margins as if they've wandered in from another piece. Between them run jagged lines that look like seismograph readings: sharp peaks, sudden drops, long ramps climbing toward nothing. In places the vertical strokes bunch so tightly they turn into solid black walls. That might be a roll. It might be an earthquake. On a snare drum, frankly, there isn't always a difference.

There are circled numbers, arrows, hairpins, brackets, little coloured dots and the odd flash of red. There are tempo markings, and I'll be honest with you: some of them are confessions and some of them are lies. Part of your job is working out which is which.

The four women

And then there are the four of them, flat silhouettes in solid colour, pin-up shapes dropped into the middle of all that technical noise. They're not decoration, and they're not instructions either. Think of them as witnesses.

Blue, top left, standing, before the music even starts. She's the first thing your eye lands on, and she's watching you. She's the prelude, the one who knows how this ends.

Hot pink, stretched out across the second system, lying right in the path of the notation as if she's been there all along. You'll have to play around her, or through her. I haven't decided which, and neither will you until you're there.

Gold, standing at the right-hand edge, halfway down, looking back across the densest part of the page. Muse or critic, she's impossible to read. She looks like she belongs in an advertisement, which is exactly why she makes me uncomfortable.

Moss green, low on the right, horizontal again, drifting at the bottom edge where the notation is starting to give out. She's the descent. By the time you reach her, so are you.

Why are they there? Because every performance is watched, and every performer is being looked at as much as listened to. I wanted that gaze on the page where you can't ignore it.

The page is falling

Look at the score as a whole, from a distance, and you'll see it: the systems don't stack neatly. They shift and sag. Lines drift off the edges. The whole thing slouches downward like something that's been carrying too much for too long, dragging itself toward the bottom margin.

It isn't you that falls in this piece, and it isn't the drum. It's the page. The notation started out confident and then lost its nerve, and you're watching it happen in real time.

Meanwhile the drum just sits there, head tight, perfectly tuned, completely indifferent. That contrast is the whole point. The most controlled instrument in percussion, under the least controlled score I could write.

What I'm asking of you

Here's the honest version: you can't play every mark on this page. Nobody can. It's built like a house nobody could live in. That's what makes it irresistible.

So don't try to execute it. Try to survive it. Read the seismograph lines as pressure and energy, not pitch. Let the black walls become rolls that go on longer than is comfortable. Use the whole drum: the centre, the edge, the rim, the shell, the snares on and off. Treat the sticks less as tools and more as a pen writing back to the page. And when the notation finally starts to collapse near the bottom, let your playing thin out with it. Don't rescue it.

You'll make choices nobody else would make. Good. That's the performance. Two drummers will never play this the same way, and I'd be disappointed if they did.

So where's the cake?

There isn't one. Not literally.

Maybe the cake is the page itself, something sweet-looking that you work your way through layer by layer and never quite finish. Maybe it's the performance, devoured by an audience in a single sitting after you spent months making it. Maybe it's you.

What I do know is this. Studying Cake makes you complicit in it, and playing it means letting it get the better of you a little. If that sounds like a warning, it is. It's also an invitation.

The score is linked above. Pick up the sticks.

"Fitch Ratings". The Score (PDF). For English Horn, Alto Flute Dramatique & Piccolo Trumpet . 2007-2016 A Commission From Leggett & Platt and Lion Nathan Ltd. PDF Score (52 pages) Link

"Fitch Ratings"

For English Horn, Alto Flute Dramatique & Piccolo Trumpet

Bil Smith Composer

2007-2016

A Commission From Leggett & Platt and Lion Nathan Ltd.

PDF Score (52 pages) Link

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByXT8veODB_TTlhaMWZ6RllxU0E/view?usp=sharing

Fitch Ratings

My own rating report on a trio for English horn, alto flute dramatique and piccolo trumpet

RATING ACTION

Today I'm placing my new trio for English horn, alto flute dramatique and piccolo trumpet under review. The outlook, honestly, is volatile. I've called it Fitch Ratings. It has nothing to do with any agency of that name, and no, it isn't investment advice.

It is barely music advice.

What it is, is a piece about judgement: who gets to grade whom, what a score is really worth, and what happens when three instruments that were never meant to share a room are asked to underwrite each other's risk.

I wrote it. I stand behind it. I'm not going to apologise for any of it.

WHY RATE ANYTHING?

Start with the word. Credit comes from the Latin credere: to believe. Every rating ever issued, every triple-A and every junk bond, is a statement of faith dressed up as arithmetic. Somebody decided to believe, or not, and printed a letter grade to make it look objective.

The Germans go further. In German, Schuld means debt. It also means guilt. One word for what you owe and for what you've done wrong. I've never stopped thinking about that.

We live inside ratings now. Your credit score follows you around. Your driver gives you stars, and you give them stars back. Restaurants, doctors, books, strangers: everything gets graded, and the grade arrives before the experience does. We've become a civilisation of examiners who no longer believe anything until it's been scored.

And music has always been in on it. The score is literally what we call the thing on the stand. A composer hands it over and says: this is what I'm worth, play it back to me. Critics rate it. Juries rank it. Audiences vote with their hands or their feet.

So I thought: fine. Let's put the rating inside the music, and see who flinches.

KEY RATING DRIVERS

I have three issuers here, with three very different balance sheets.

The English horn. In French it's the cor anglais, and it is famously neither English nor a horn. I love it for that. It's an instrument that has spent its entire life being mislabelled and has carried on regardless, singing the saddest lines in the repertoire as if nobody had insulted it at all. Dark, reedy, patient. In this piece it's the senior debt: the voice everything else is measured against. But look at its page. Its staff is surrounded by satellite lines of shattered noteheads, broken shapes that look like a melody someone dropped on a stone floor. Even the safest asset in the room is cracking.

The alto flute dramatique. It's written on its own split two-line staff, shivering with tremolos, held notes stretched under long, low arcs. The alto flute is all breath and shadow. I added dramatique because I wanted it to stop apologising for being quiet. Low volume isn't low value. This instrument is the one that holds its nerve while the others panic, and I rate it accordingly.

The piccolo trumpet. The highest trumpet in regular use, built for brilliance: the instrument that lets trumpeters reach Baroque heights without bursting a blood vessel. Bright, fast, glamorous, and one cracked note away from public disaster. Classic high yield. Huge returns when it lands, total exposure when it doesn't. On the page it's crowned with little rows of paired diamonds, like jewellery on a borrowed suit.

Put them together and you get a portfolio no sensible manager would hold: one sad, one quiet, one showing off. That's exactly why they're in the same room.

THE DOCUMENTS

Every rating needs paperwork. Here's mine.

My score alternates. A page of music, then a page of image, then music again, like a report interrupted by exhibits.

The image pages all show the same photograph: a long panorama of a stage full of costumed performers, with fans, chairs and a tall white banner, caught in a moment of rehearsal or ritual. But the photograph has been pulled apart. Above and below it, its colours have been stretched into hundreds of horizontal stripes, like a scanner that kept running after the paper ran out. And straight through the middle of the crowd runs a solid bar of colour, blotting out every face at exactly the same height. Yellow on one page. Cyan, hot pink and pale lime on the others. The whole thing is re-coloured each time: teal and maroon, then magenta, then acid green, then electric blue and orange.

Same people, same moment, same redaction, rated four different ways. That's what a rating is. The facts don't change. The colour you paint over them does.

Then the music. Three instruments, each with satellite staves of shattered glyphs hovering above and below their own lines. Time signatures shift constantly, from eight-eight to six-eight to five-eight and back, so the bar itself is always being renegotiated. Brackets marked 5:8 and 6 stretch over whole passages, squeezing one kind of time into another.

And over all of it, in red, the auditor. Clusters of red circles, large and small, swarm across the systems like stamps, like inspection marks, like a grading pen gone feral. On one page there's a red box with nothing inside it at all, a single empty rectangle sitting in the middle of the most crowded music in the piece.

Data unavailable. Every report has one.

RATING SENSITIVITIES

In a real ratings report, this is the section that tells you what could move the grade up or down. In my piece, the performers are the market, and I'm the one watching them.

What earns an upgrade from me: an English horn that lets its lines break without trying to glue them back together. An alto flute that plays its quietest material as if it were the loudest thing in the room. A piccolo trumpet that risks the high note anyway, knowing it might crack, because safety is the one thing this piece will never reward.

What gets a downgrade from me: caution. Polish for its own sake. Any attempt to make the three instruments blend into one tasteful sound. They aren't meant to agree. They're meant to hold each other to account.

The red layer is the auditor's voice. Whatever the players decide those marks mean in a given performance, and they will have to decide, it should feel like being watched. A little exposure is healthy. Ask anyone who has played a solo in front of a jury.

OUTLOOK

Here's what I actually believe.

We've handed the job of judgement to systems that cannot listen. Algorithms decide what music reaches you, based on what you've already rated. Playlists flatten everything into mood and tempo. A piece like this one would score terribly on every metric that matters to them: too dense, too long, too strange, impossible to skip to the good bit, because there is no single good bit.

Good.

I'd rather be downgraded by a system that can't hear than upgraded by one that doesn't care. The only rating I trust is the one that happens in a room, in real time, when three players on three wildly mismatched instruments either convince you or they don't.

That's credit in the old sense. Credere. You either believe it or you don't. No letter grade required.