Saturday, February 7, 2026
"Immoral Geography" for Soprano Saxophone
"Immoral Geography"
for Soprano Saxophone
Bil Smith Composer
Link to PDF
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sRWIVRMHbeTOVzXm7C25HJ4TlCmyHhcj/view?usp=sharing
"Black Spring in the High Rise" for Vibraphone and Soprano
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| Soprano Score |
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| Detail from Soprano Score |
"Proctor of The Misconstruction Emporium." A Fanfare for Two Trumpets and Megaphone
"Proctor of The Misconstruction Emporium"
A Fanfare for Two Trumpets and Megaphone
Bil Smith Composer
Large Format Score 22" X 20"
2024
Link to PDF:
The score of "Proctor of The Misconstruction Emporium" recontextualizes the traditional trumpet fanfare within a modernist framework that challenges the historical and ceremonial connotations of the trumpet's sound. Instead of serving as a straightforward call to attention or a marker of significant societal events, this fanfare delves into the realm of the abstract and the introspective, reflecting the complexities of modern narratives and identities.
The incorporation of a megaphone alongside traditional trumpets in this score is particularly noteworthy. This combination not only amplifies the physical sound of the instruments but also metaphorically amplifies the urgency and the contemporary relevance of the fanfare. The megaphone, a tool commonly associated with public announcements and grassroots activism, transforms the fanfare from a symbol of hierarchical or institutional authority into a vehicle for personal expression and public intervention.
Historically, the use of the trumpet fanfare can be traced back to ancient civilizations, where instruments similar to the trumpet were used in religious and military contexts. In the Middle Ages, the trumpet was a staple in courts and battlefields. Its use in fanfares was tightly controlled by guilds, and playing the trumpet was often a right reserved for those belonging to specific societal classes. By the time of the Baroque period, the trumpet had evolved into a key musical instrument in courts across Europe, used both in orchestras and to herald the arrival of monarchs and other dignitaries.
In classical music, fanfares composed by figures like Claudio Monteverdi and Jean-Baptiste Lully incorporated trumpets to emphasize regality and grandeur. The trumpet's role continued to evolve through the Romantic era and into the 20th century, where composers like Aaron Copland used fanfares to evoke feelings of American resilience and unity during challenging times.
This piece, in its refusal to conform to normative musical structures, does not merely exist within the realm of sound but extends its reach into the realm of spatial theory, particularly the "geographical" as an essential component of its composition. This geographical dimension does not refer to physical space alone but to the conceptual and cultural spaces that the music inhabits and invokes.
This score's relationship with location and context underscores a fundamental critique of traditional musicology's reliance on the monocular perspective—the idea that a score must serve as a transparent medium through which the composer's intentions are unproblematically realized by the performer. Instead, "Proctor of The Misconstruction Emporium" subverts this by presenting a score that acts as a site of struggle between the composer's intentions and the performer's interpretation, between the notation's prescriptive authority and the performative act's creative potential.
SCORE DETAIL:
“Dolavance” . Temporal Syntax and Acoustic Cartography
In Dolavance, the traditional constraints of musical notation have not merely been abandoned, but they have been re-coded into a radical lexicon of symbology, architecture, and material metaphor. What unfolds is a poly-temporal map, a cartography of sonic potential that positions the performer less as an interpreter of written time and more as a semiotic navigator of a hyper-visualized soundscape.
Sonic Conduits and Temporal Gateways
At first glance, Dolavance evokes the formalism of a mechanical diagram. Chrome-plated clockwork forms punctuate the compositionreminiscent of compression valves, diaphragms, and speaker cones. These aren’t mere aesthetic interruptions but chronometric agents, reinforcing the central thesis that time here is not linear but rotational, diffused, and recursive.
A literal clock at the top-left orients the piece in temporality, but refuses to give instruction. Instead, it mocks the rigidity of Western time signatures. The vertical directional flow, punctuated by a downward-pointing arrow and clef symbol skewered into Cartesian graphing, suggests a plummeting descent into deeper rhythmic strata, one not governed by bar lines but by gravitational pulls of meaning.
Linguistic Residue and Glyphic Assemblage
The composition is deeply glyphic. There are hints of Braille, Morse, asemic writing, and phonetic abstraction, all of which resist singular legibility. The score leans into “illegibility as invitation”, prompting the performer to traverse across multiple semiotic registers, not unlike the works of Ferneyhough or Xenakis, but further fragmented by what appears to be architectural topography.
Central to the image is a tattered, layered sheet structure. It appears of satellite scans of paper relics or scorched manuscripts suggesting erosion, multiplicity, and perhaps even archaeological depth within the score. One plays not what is visible, but what is implied, forgotten, or subsumed.
The Orbit of the "DOLAVANCE" Device
The eponymous Dolavance, appearing as a label in the lower right, is a neologism that feels part pharmaceutical, part engine, part performative device. It invites associations with "dolor" (pain) and "advance" (forward motion)...a dialectic of tension and propulsion. Perhaps this is a fictional instrument, or a psychological state the performer must adopt.
Notably, a radiant blue field, far right, creates a corona around a smaller glyph. It is an interruption of the otherwise muted color scheme. This rupture signals either an acoustic climax or a semantic rupture, where the structure of the score momentarily destabilizes.
Acoustic Ecology and Mechanical Ornamentation
Embedded within this digital glyph-set are speaker forms and audio transducers. These are not symbols for sound but symbols of sound's infrastructure—the technology that mediates, shapes, and distorts acoustic information. The score becomes not just a prompt for performance, but a meta-score. It is a commentary on how we hear, transmit, and reproduce sound.
If traditional scores are blueprints for sonic architecture, Dolavance is a deconstructed machine, equal parts schematic and sculpture. It instructs nothing directly, but demands interpretive agency, requiring the performer to assemble a sonic act from visual ideograms, architectural cues, and residual memory.
Conclusion: A Score for the Post-Semantic Performer
Dolavance resists closure. It resists even calling itself a “score” in the classical sense. What it offers instead is a speculative object, one that activates performance not through prescription, but through confrontation with the failure of conventional notation. It is notation-as-interface, as narrative shard, and as temporal sculpture.
In its refusal to conform, it joins a lineage of radical notation—from Cage’s visual works to Brown’s “December 1952,” from Treatise to Smith’s own "WET Scores". It exists not to be solved, but to be inhabited.
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Language as Object: The Sculptural Letterform in Composition
Language as Object: The Sculptural Letterform in Composition
"The moment a word appears on the page, its sound detaches and its body begins to act. Not as symbol—but as structure."
In the corpus of my compositional oeuvre, language no longer serves meaning in a linguistic sense. It is not instructive, explanatory, or even illustrative. Instead, I render language as object extracting words from their semantic utility and repositioning them as topological forms, spatial interventions, and performative materialities. This shift marks a decisive ontological turn in contemporary notation: away from meaning, toward presence.
My scores do not use text merely as annotation or auxiliary gesture. Rather, they leverage typography as a site of sculptural density where letterforms bear weight equal to pitches, dynamics, or timbral vectors. To read a score is not to be guided; it is to confront a typographic architecture that resists semantic legibility while asserting material fact.
Consider my "Circular Notational Systems" or pharmacologically annotated diagrams found throughout Sound Morphology. In these works, isolated textual elements such as "VIBRATE," "VOID," "ENDOCYTIC," and "RETRACT" occupy space not as symbols but as performative masses, floating amid vortexes of color and rotational grids. Each word exists not as instruction, but as spatial objecthood, inviting activation, resistance, or passive proximity. The performer must orbit these textual bodies, never sure whether to sound them, avoid them, or use them as temporal anchors.
This ideology bears deep kinship with the typographic aesthetics of Ed Ruscha, wherein the word becomes a visual object flattened, shadowed, silkscreened, but emotionally suspended. For me, however, the page becomes not a site of contemplation, but a performative terrain. Words don’t rest, they protrude. The stenciled glyph, the italicized pharmaceutical, the fractured imperative all function as notation by occupation.
The concept of “letterform as sculpture” emerges most clearly in my use of materialized language: burnished metallic type, Xerox-transfer glyphs, three-dimensional printed text forms, and layered text that visually interrupts staves, curves, and other sonic gestures. Typography here is not a channel for meaning; it is a force field. One might recall Agostino Bonalumi’s extroflected surfaces: pressure made visible. So too are my words: text under tension.
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| Bonalumi inspired notational element |
In works like WET/Words.Events.Text scores or the Crater Series for soprano voice, linguistic units are deployed as collision events. The words refuse to flow. They behave as tonal obstructions, sculptural barriers that ask not to be read, but to be negotiated. This notion destabilizes the performer’s relation to the score, demanding a choreography of proximity, angle, and pressure akin to a site-specific installation. The page becomes a habitat, a textual architecture whose meaning is not deciphered but inhabited.
It is not accidental that many of these scores mimic medical diagrams, regulatory documents, or psycho-pharmaceutical data sheets. These are not metaphors, bute bureaucratic typologies repurposed into musical cartographies. In them, language is no longer expressive but procedural, imposed, and ultimately aestheticized. And yet, in that neutralized body of language, something unsettling happens: it twitches with sonic potential.
This is where my projects intersect most radically with current modes of conceptual notational practice: I do not score music; I score text with all its density, ambiguity, and brutal architectural form.
Words become sonic fossils, embedded in a compositional terrain of contradictions. They are not to be read or even performed, necessarily. They are to be encountered. As forms. As volumes. As aural topographies with the mass of monuments.
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