"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:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tL-YYhdl2uvFg_rhDHPXclru5hhy5R54/view?usp=sharing

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:

 

Sound Morphology Learning Lab - Inside the Score: Agostino Bonalumi and the Mito-Notational Field

Sound Morphology Learning Lab

Inside the Score: Surface, Pressure, and the Mito-Notational Field

In this score, I am not using the page as a neutral support. I am using it as a pressure field. I want the work to begin acting before it is performed, before the eye organizes the symbols into anything legible, before the performer decides what counts as event and what counts as atmosphere. The score has to function first as a condition.

That is where Agostino Bonalumi matters to me. What I take from him is not simply a visual reference. It is a structural lesson. His relief works turned the surface into an active spatial body. The plane was no longer passive. It was stretched, stressed, pushed outward, made to hold tension. That logic is central to what I am doing here. I want the score to behave the same way. I want it to feel as though it has been forced into visibility from behind.

The matte-black receding relief in the background establishes that immediately. It is not there as backdrop or mood. It is the first layer of behavior. The protrusions make the page feel swollen, pressured, bodily. They interrupt the fantasy of flat readability. Even before notation appears, the score is already telling the performer that this field has depth, resistance, and stored force.

I think of the black relief as compressed energy. It recedes, but it also insists. That contradiction is useful. It makes the eye work. It slows down the act of reading and turns perception into part of the composition.

The Scuduri font in the upper right reinforces that shift. For me, it is not a decorative flourish or a title marker. It acts as a local code block, a signal that the score operates under its own internal law. It announces a notational jurisdiction. Once that font appears, the page makes clear that it may borrow from conventional systems, but it is not governed by them entirely.

That is the role of what I call the mito-notational system. It borrows from Western notation, but it does not remain obedient to it. Staff fragments, noteheads, beams, rhythmic densities, and gestural clusters all appear, but they no longer behave as parts of a continuous linear syntax. I break them apart, suspend them, compress them, and redistribute them so that they begin acting less like instructions and more like charged objects.

This is the essential move. I am not rejecting notation. I am turning notation into material.

Across the score, the fragments do not form a single sentence. They form a dispersed topography. Some are dense and blackened, almost architectural. Some are thin and unstable, more like tremor bands or residues. Some hover as isolated capsules. The performer does not simply read through them. The performer has to move among them. The score becomes archipelagic. Meaning is produced not only by the symbols themselves, but by the tension between them, the distance between them, and the pressure of the relief field underneath.

That is how the score functions. Each element bends the space around it. A compressed cluster thickens the silence beside it. A stretched line changes the temporal character of an empty zone. A suspended fragment may carry less literal instruction than atmospheric or tactile pressure. In this system, notation is not just symbolic. It is topological.

The purple variant makes that even more explicit. The field becomes more synthetic and less recessive. The metallic circular forms read like resonators, valves, apertures, or pressure discs. The staff lines extending outward from the clef create a sense of projection or transmission, as if notation is being routed into a device. At that point the score stops behaving only like a page and starts behaving like an interface.

That shift matters to me because it shows how the work moves between identities without settling. It can be relief painting, score, symbolic artifact, and apparatus at once. I do not see that instability as a problem. It is the engine of the piece.

For the performer, this changes everything. The score does not ask for passive decoding. It asks for navigation. It asks the performer to decide what is foreground and what is field, what is sounded directly and what remains atmospheric, what behaves as rhythm and what behaves as texture. The page distributes pressure, but it does not close off interpretation. That balance is important. I want the work to remain unmistakably itself while still requiring thought, judgment, and risk from the performer.

So when I say this score functions and acts, I mean that quite literally. It functions as a relief system, a hybrid notational script, and a symbolic object. It acts by delaying legibility, by turning surface into force, by making notation tactile, and by forcing performance to begin as interpretation rather than execution.

That is the larger aim for me. I do not want a score that simply tells a performer what to do. I want a score that changes the conditions under which doing becomes possible. I want a page that thinks spatially, a notation that behaves like matter, and a surface that carries its own internal tension into the room.

That is where this work begins. Not as document, but as pressure.

Status Field No. 7 - "A Study in Pressures." For Violin. 2006

Status Field No. 7

"A Study in Pressures"

For Violin

2006

 

W.I.P. - Archigram Exercise in Density

 

Page from "Fountainhead"

"A Calendar of Weight" for Solo Violin

 

"The Paranormal Detective Agency's Guide To Modern Physics" for Viola

 

"The Paranormal Detective Agency's Guide To Modern Physics" embodies a plethora of complex musical concepts and intricate notational structures. My goal for this work, composed for the viola, is to exude a sense of otherworldly energy and a heightened sense of mystery that is both awe-inspiring and eerie.

The composition employs a highly developed notational palette that incorporates fissures, fragmentation, and semicollapsed geometric transformations, which pivot and rotate. The visual landscape of the score is both complex and multifaceted, with each element interacting in a unique and intricate manner, creating a complex and layered soundscape that is both immersive and mesmerizing.

The score is in the midst of a metamorphosis, caught in the process of becoming something else. The composer's vision is to create a piece that defies conventional music theory and notation, incorporating a multitude of unique concepts and techniques that push the boundaries notation.

As a composer, I define myself as someone in total opposition. I believe that resistance is autonomy, and that it is the raison d'etre for my existence as a composer. It is fundamental to my work and is the driving force behind my compositional endeavors.

The use of fissures and fragmentation in the score creates a sense of fragmentation and disorientation, with the performer jumping from one section of the score to another, creating a sense of chaos and disorder. The semicollapsed geometric transformations add another layer of complexity, with the notes and symbols appearing to pivot and rotate around each other in a dizzying display.

Despite its complexity, the piece is incredibly engaging and captivating, albeit it is also an extreme extension of systemization and depersonalization incorporating a range of techniques and elements that create a sense of dematerialization, a seductive effacing of architectural boundaries, and of the surfaces rendered so emphatically present that defines the viola in an abstract, extreme persona.

The discreet allusiveness gives way to the linear evocations of perspectival recession, generating the feeling of an empty space mirroring itself to infinity.