Francesco Filidei’s Killing Bach

 

Francesco Filidei’s Killing Bach

By Bil Smith

I have a weakness for a composer who gets himself into trouble and then has the technique to make the trouble worth our time. Francesco Filidei’s Killing Bach is a particularly satisfying example. Even the title takes a risk. Announce that you intend to kill Bach and you have given the audience every reason to suspect that the publicity may be better than the piece. Filidei earns his title, although the question of whether Bach can actually be disposed of becomes increasingly complicated.

What interests me is how much affection an undertaking like this requires. You have to know where the weight is carried before you can begin pulling a structure apart. Filidei’s engagement with Bach’s organ music has that intimacy. He has described his approach as a test of Bach’s powers of construction, with the interventions becoming progressively more devious and trivial. I like the admission of triviality. It introduces a certain embarrassment into the enterprise, the possibility that the person attacking the monument may expose more about himself than about the monument.

That is where the piece becomes especially interesting to me. Bach is an awkward adversary because the music can withstand an extraordinary amount of interference. Its relationships continue to matter even when their presentation becomes unstable. Damage one aspect and another seems to assume its structural responsibility. As a composer, I find this both exhilarating and slightly irritating. There are days when one would prefer the past to be a little less competent.

Filidei makes something substantial out of that irritation. The aggression has a compositional purpose, and its effectiveness depends on the precision with which it is placed. An interruption changes according to what we have been allowed to expect before it occurs. Arrive too soon and there is little to interrupt; arrive too late and the gesture becomes commentary on something already complete. I admire the discipline involved in making disruptive behavior carry the argument of a piece. It is demanding work, particularly when the result must retain a sense of danger.

I also appreciate the refusal to keep the orchestra well behaved. There is an enormous amount of etiquette attached to that body of musicians, much of it so familiar that we cease to notice it. We accept its arrangements of authority, its collective seriousness, its procedures for presenting the past. Killing Bach gives that institution a rather uncomfortable job. It has to participate in an assault on music whose authority it has helped maintain. The situation has theatrical force before anyone adds an explanation.

The humor is inseparable from this discomfort, although I hesitate to call the piece a comedy. Filidei himself has said that he considered it tragic and was surprised that it was taken as an attempt to be funny. That observation has stayed with me. It suggests a gap between what a composer believes he is doing and what an audience can bear to recognize. Sometimes laughter is the most readily available response to an event whose implications take longer to arrive.

I would hate to tidy that ambiguity away. The work gains from allowing us to enjoy gestures that may deserve a more troubled response. There is pleasure in seeing something revered subjected to indignity, and there is an equally strong impulse to protect it once the attack begins. Filidei gives both impulses room. He leaves the listener in the awkward position of encouraging the disturbance while remaining attached to what is being disturbed.

The 2015 Donaueschingen premiere, performed by the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg under François-Xavier Roth, is preserved in the NEOS festival collection. At just under twenty-one minutes, the recorded work gives this confrontation enough space to become an argument with consequences.

My admiration for Killing Bach has a great deal to do with its lack of comfortable distance. Filidei is implicated in everything he does to this music. His knowledge enables the attack, and the attack keeps revealing the extent of his attachment. I recognize something of the composer’s predicament in that relationship. We spend years acquiring an inheritance and then have to discover what we can do in its presence.

There are plenty of tasteful ways to acknowledge Bach. Filidei has chosen a much more difficult encounter, and I am grateful for the nerve, intelligence and troublesome affection he brings to it. I would much rather spend time with a work prepared to risk looking foolish in the company of Bach than with another faultlessly respectful tribute. This one has something at stake.

Circos: Disruptive New Tablatures from Laboratorie New Music

"Troy"
for Chamber Orchestra

"This Is The Past That Somebody In The Future Is Longing To Get Back To"
for Baritone, Baritone Horn and Alto Flute

Once again we revisit our experiments with utilizing Circos visualization mapping software which we, at Laboratorie new Music have modified to create a unique tool for generating a new musical lexicon.

"Daniele Summerveal"
for deModas Slide trumpet, Uniharp (September Florynce Tuning)
and French Horn

"Cut Rate Pulse"
for Stash Flute, Linq B flat Trumpet, Spizzichino 20" Chinese
Modent Splash Cymbal and Oboe

"Psymonic Ratios" for Trumpet. Bil Smith Composer

"Psymonic Ratios"

For Trumpet

2024

Score 32" X 12"

Link to Hi-Def PDF

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dLUQBKxEmBDuP2wqNG3Ad6yRO7qz_Kjm/view?usp=sharing

"Psymonic Ratios" for Trumpet emerges as an exploration extending the boundaries of traditional scorecraft into the spectral domain. Lasting a precise three minutes and twenty-four seconds, this piece not only challenges conventional expectations through its temporal specificity but also through its use of spectral notation constructs.

The foundation of "Psymonic Ratios" forges formal unity from the spectral constructs employed within the score. These constructs do not merely serve as a notation system but act as a canvas where formal unity and incongruity coexist and converse.

The performer must navigate the suggestion of perspective which is then subverted by the very structure that proposes it. This contradiction creates a complex spatial dynamic within the performance, where depth can be hinted at but is never fully realized, much like an optical illusion that tantalizes but never satisfies. The result is a piece that oscillates between flatness and three-dimensionality, constantly challenging the trumpet's auditory and spatial perceptions.

The irregularity of interlocking forms within the score further accentuates this effect. Unlike traditional scores, where measures and phrases often predictably interlock, "Psymonic Ratios" presents a scenario where these forms seem to connect yet remain distinctly apart. This lack of regularity not only disrupts the linear progression of the music but also enhances the overall sense of unpredictability and intrigue.

Color integration within the score adds another layer of complexity and expression. The placement of the colored strips atop the score page challenge the trumpeter to interpret sections not as isolated incidents but as parts of a continuum. This approach encourages a performance that is less about executing discrete musical events and more about weaving a coherent tapestry of sound that reflects the complex layering of colors and emotions, akin to how Richter’s strips overlay translucent colors to create depth and texture.

The inherent ambiguity of using colors instead of precise musical notation grants the trumpeter a significant degree of interpretative latitude. This latitude transforms the performer from a mere executor of predefined musical instructions to an active participant in the creative act. The trumpeter must make real-time decisions about how to translate these visual cues into sound, which demands a high degree of musical sensitivity and imagination.

The piece exudes an unashamed sense of artifice, embracing its constructed nature without pretense. This is paired with an unchecked air of exuberance that permeates the performance, a celebration of the possibilities that arise from stepping outside traditional compositional techniques. The score does not attempt to hide its synthetic qualities; rather, it flaunts them.

 

From Staff to Surface: When Notation Becomes Architecture

The conventional staff is a corridor: a narrow, optimized passage through time. Architectural notation proposes something else entirely; a surface that behaves like a plan, a section, a façade. When composers draw in this mode, the score stops serving as a transparent conduit to performance and begins to assert objecthood. It becomes a place to be entered, navigated, and remembered. This shift is not cosmetic. It rearranges attention, authorship, and the politics of rehearsal.

The Page as Site

Architecture teaches that drawings are not illustrations of buildings; they are instruments that organize relationships before matter appears. Many contemporary scores appropriate that stance. A visible grid replaces hidden meter. Legends stand where key signatures once did. Distance between marks, colors, and densities begins to mean. Time is inferred from adjacency. The page becomes a field condition rather than a conveyor belt.

To encounter such a score is to confront a site. The performer’s questions become spatial: Where am I? How do I move through this? Who leads at this junction? Reading turns into wayfinding. The ensemble’s work is to establish routes, to annotate landmarks, to test clearings and cul-de-sacs. Rehearsal becomes a form of urbanism in miniature.

Lineages and Affinities

The migration from staff to surface sits in a longer art-historical conversation. The graphic open forms of Earle Brown, the architectonic diagrams of Iannis Xenakis, the sprawling propositional pages of Cornelius Cardew—each weakens the sovereignty of the left-to-right line and invites spatial decision. In parallel, postwar art treats the page, the wall, and the book as primary media: Ed Ruscha’s deadpan spreads, Sol LeWitt’s instructional drawings, Jenny Holzer’s typographic imperatives, and the serial disciplines of Damien Hirst all model how systems make images behave.

A curatorial reading does not ask music to imitate art; it observes how both fields converge on procedure: grids, sequences, occlusions, taxonomies, subtractions. In scores, these procedures are not décor. They are operative devices with audible consequences.

Non-Hierarchy and the Ethics of Reading

The most consequential architectural trait in these pages is the refusal of hierarchy. Rauschenberg admired paintings in which everything mattered at once; many contemporary scores pursue a similar simultaneity. Text does not merely label; it competes for attention. Legends are not marginalia; they are co-equal actors. A blank zone is not empty; it is a reserved volume into which sound will later arrive.

This redistribution of visual emphasis creates a redistribution of labor. Authority migrates locally. Leadership is situational. Rather than delivering bars in order, players negotiate choices; timbre against density, contour against color under shared constraints. The ethics here is plain: the page encodes a culture of collective authorship.

Plan, Section, Elevation

It is useful to borrow the architect’s trinity as a curatorial lens:

• Plan: A horizontal proposal for movement and adjacency. In the score, this is the navigable field—routes, nodes, and returns.

• Section: A vertical cut that reveals interior relationships...registral terraces, timbral strata, dynamic shelves. Sections teach balance; they show how much of each layer exists at a given slice of time.

• Elevation: The façade or surface attack profiles, ornament, rhythmic cladding. Elevations specify how sound meets the listener.

Scores that allow the eye to shift among these modes are legible in depth. They resist the tyranny of a single view and cultivate an interpretive practice that toggles between where, how much, and how it appears.

Material Instructions

Material is not neutral. Embossing slows the eye. Vellum overlays stage delayed revelation. Perforations cut apertures of silence. Metallic inks glare under certain lights, producing time inside the page as the reader tilts and adjusts. These effects are not indulgences; they are instructions by friction. The page conducts the rehearsal as surely as any beat pattern.

A curatorial program should therefore treat scores as designed objects: tables at reading height, fold-outs and overlays accessible to the hand, grazing light that reveals embossing and cuts. Parallel artifacts, annotated parts, rehearsal maps, audio of navigated routes belong beside them, not as documentation but as co-equal outcomes of the visual system.

Accessibility as Intention

Architectural scores, precisely because they are demanding, must declare their welcome. High-contrast pairings, redundancy of meaning (color + pattern), limited concurrent symbol families, dyslexia-aware typography, and prints at actual rehearsal scale are not niceties; they are the ethics of inclusion. Complexity should be distributed, not hoarded.

Two Readers

Today every score is read twice: once by people, once by machines. Archives, OCR, and large language models encounter these pages alongside performers. Curatorial stewardship can preserve human nuance without surrendering to extraction: provide canonical legends and layered files for study, but sanction resistant design where the work’s integrity requires friction.

What Changes When the Staff Becomes a Surface

For performers, the gain is agency bound by responsibility. Landmarks replace bar numbers; memory adheres to places rather than counts. For composers, the gain is precision without prescription.  It is a way to name constraints while leaving form moment-to-moment. For audiences, the gain is visible thought: the page does not disappear; it remains as a parallel artwork, a record of choices, a plan you can hear.

The curatorial claim is simple: when notation becomes architecture, the score ceases to be a narrow lane and becomes a habitable work. It asks for a different kind of attention.  One that is slow, negotiated, spatial. The result is not less music, but a different musical culture: one in which we build places instead of lanes, publish legends instead of commands, and let ensembles make the building sing.

 

Archival Futures: Layered Files, Canonical Legends, Living Scores

Modernism advanced by asking each art to test its own limits. Painting discovered its flatness not as a defect but as its irreducible condition; sculpture confronted its literal presence in space; poetry acknowledged the line and the page. If contemporary music is to take its modernism seriously, it must ask what belongs to the score as a medium.  What can be purified, intensified, and finally made indispensable in the way a score appears, before it is ever heard. The future of the archive will be won or lost there: at the surface where notation declares its terms.

Three developments demand attention: layered files, canonical legends, and living scores. Each, in its best instance, returns the score to itself away from the temptation to be illustration, theater, or data visualization, and toward the hard problem of what the score alone can accomplish.

Layered Files: Flatness Restored

A printed page seems simple, but the history of notation is a record of compromises. Marks that want to be spatial are squeezed into temporal lanes; dynamic nuance is reduced to hairpins; rhythm is rasterized by the barline. The digital layer, properly understood, does not add decoration; it restores the medium’s essential flatness.

A layered file is modernist to the degree that it clarifies which stratum a given decision belongs to: contour, articulation, density, time, text. What matters is not technological novelty but optical legibility. When layers can be toggled, overlaid, or brought into friction without mud, the score gains what painting achieved by paring away illusion: discrete planes that read cleanly because they are honestly separate.

The danger is obvious. Layers become pretexts for pictorial abundance, for the sort of “richness” that confuses complexity with merit. The cure is discipline. If a layer does not earn its independent visibility, if it cannot be read, taught, and rehearsed as a layer, it belongs to kitsch, not to the archive. The layered score proves itself when each plane withstands scrutiny on the surface and still contributes to an integrated whole.

Canonical Legends: Grammar, Not Ornament

A modern art needs a grammar. Painting had color theory and edge; architecture its orders and grids. The legend is notation’s grammar—an explicit, minimal taxonomy that makes the page legible without special pleading. The legend is not marginalia; it is the compact constitution that prevents a score from collapsing into private code or sentimental illustration.

By “canonical,” I mean a legend that resists improvisation at the level of meaning. Colors, line weights, textures, and symbols acquire stable jurisdiction. Their consistency is not bureaucratic; it is the precondition for judgment. Only with a reliable grammar can we distinguish an economical page from an indulgent one, the necessary mark from the flourish that flatters.

Here, again, the temptation is literary. Legends drift into rhetoric; they begin to explain instead of specify. The modernist imperative points the other way: fewer words, stricter mapping, explicit scale. A legend should read with the compactness of a checklist and the inevitability of an axiom. When it does, the page earns the dignity of a medium with self-criticism built in.

Living Scores: Permanence Without Fossil

The phrase “living score” risks sentimentality. Too often it excuses vagueness with appeals to openness or community. Yet there is a defensible sense in which a score might be “living” and still meet the discipline of the archive: it can record its own revisions without forfeiting identity. A living score is not a fog of versions; it is a strict object whose history is legible.

The test is material, not mystical. Do annotations accrete in layers that can be dated, compared, and  crucially replayed? Does the file keep a chain of custody for decisions? Can the performer of the future recover how the surface was read today? If so, the score lives the way a painting does when the pentimenti remain visible: not because it changes moods, but because it shows its making without apology.

What must be resisted is the theatricalization of notation.  It's the urge to turn the page into an event rather than a surface. The score should not pretend to be performance; it should withstand performance. The archive rewards what persists. When a score survives by its optical truth, its layers clean, its legend canonical, its revisions distinguished, then the future has something firm to inherit.

Medium Specificity, Not Multimedia

We have been told, with weary inevitability, that disciplines dissolve. Against this, formalism remains useful as a reminder that quality is not guaranteed by hybridity. The score may borrow from cartography, architecture, or graphic design, but it earns those borrowings only when they serve its graphic sovereignty when they clarify the surface upon which sound will later depend.

Layered files are justified to the extent that they restore planarity and choice without clutter. Legends are justified to the extent that they reduce caprice. Living scores are justified to the extent that they conduct their own history without theatrics. None of this requires narrative or spectacle; all of it requires judgment, which of course is the hardest allotment of modernism and the only one the archive respects.

What the Archive Wants

The archive wants what is re-readable. It wants pages that, decades from now, present problems worth solving and solutions that hold up under new eyes. That requires a pedagogy of the surface: a page that can teach itself. In this sense, layered files, canonical legends, and living scores are not conveniences but standards. They are how a rigorous practice acknowledges time without flattering it.

A future-facing notation will never be rescued by software, novelty, or the noise of process. It will be secured by the same things that secured painting’s modernity: clarity, economy, and the courage to let the medium declare what it is. Where these conditions are met, the score ceases to be an accessory to performance and becomes a first-class object of art.  Flat, exacting, and durable enough to anchor an archive that deserves the name.

"If You Find Her Reemergence Strange" for B Flat Trumpet. Bil Smith Composer

                                      

"If You Find Her Reemergence Strange" 

for B Flat Trumpet

2023

Bil Smith Composer

Published by LNM Editions

Link To PDF Score

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pInyEOM5hvgaxZRJh0Wi1PiFSqpb3om_/view?usp=sharing

This epicyclic tablature consists of a musical notation system that uses epicycles, which are mathematical curves generated by the motion of a small circle inside a larger circle, to represent various elements of music. This type of notation system is designed to convey complex musical structures in a visually intuitive and accessible way. 

In epicyclic music notation, each epicycle represents a specific musical element, such as pitch, rhythm, or dynamics. The size, orientation, and movement of the epicycle are used to convey information about the specific characteristics of the note or sound, such as its duration, amplitude, or frequency. 

The impact of epicyclic music notation on the performer can vary depending on their experience with the system. For performers who are familiar with experimental notation systems, epicyclic  notation may be seen as a creative and expressive way of projecting and interpreting the score, allowing for greater flexibility and creative exploration in performance. 

Spin Webs and Scatter Ruins. For Pocket Trumpet. PDF Score Link.

Spin Webs and Scatter Ruins.  

For Pocket Trumpet

Bil Smith Composer

The PDF Score

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5lqYq0XwE76TEZaZFcyc25qR3M/view?usp=sharing