... And with a tip of the hat to "Lucy", Luciano Berio.

Foundation Score Page: Sequenza 1 for Mellophone in F

One of Six (6) Transparencies for the Score of  Sequenza 1 for Mellophone in F

Sixty One (61) Solo Pieces of which all will be premiered over the next five years in Johannesburg which began in June, 2015.

... And with a tip of the hat to "Lucy", Luciano Berio.  It was Susan Oyama, Berio's second wife's pet name for him.

I embark on a series of solo compositions in the spirit of Berio's Sequenzas.

I am very fortunate to be underwritten by DeBeers Consolidated and Eskom.  Tshediso Matona, CEO of Eskom, and a devoted Berio aficionado was kind enough to see this project through to 2027.

Excerpts from New Work for Ensemble: Concentric Notation System

"The Few Slender Feet of U.S. Sovereignty"

"The Few Slender Feet of U.S. Sovereignty"

For Cornet, Xylophone & Baritone Guitar

Bil Smith Composer

Commissioned by Alitalia

Link To PDF Score

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PT1rEZH4qeVTA_cy3Ah7JVQJVhQq67bD/view?usp=sharing

"The Irrigator's Car" For Bass Flute, Voice and Electronics (La Voiture de l'Irrigateur)

The Irrigator's Car

For Bass Flute, Voice and Electronics

Bil Smith Composer

Published by LNM Editions (Laboratorie New Music)

Link to PDF Score

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LoczWaMLG_JGJ0h5G30BSmp232w3dW5I/view?usp=sharing

Assembling The Elements of My Scores

 

Assembling The Elements of My Scores

By Bil Smith

My scores are not merely instructions for music; they are synthetic objects.  They are assemblages of sound, symbol, architecture, and language. They function as performative systems: visual environments saturated with musical, poetic, and semiotic potential. Their construction is not procedural, but material and linguistic, developed through acts of layering, collision, translation, and provocation.

To describe how these scores are put together is to describe an evolving practice of sonic image-making where visual syntax, textual interference, and invented language operate together as compositional matter. In these works, notation is not a code to be deciphered but a living diagram.  They become a  space of negotiation, indeterminacy, and active authorship.

From Pre-Notation to Visual Grammar

The process begins in a pre-notational state.  This occurs before staves, measures, or rhythm where gesture, form, and conceptual impulse guide the creation of visual fields. I often begin with what I call vectorial provocations: drawings, splines, structural schematics, or 3D renderings that behave like sonic catalysts.

These gestures generate a visual grammar, what I call a a proto-score. It is not yet musical in the conventional sense, but it contains the kinetic and affective energy of music. These early constructions consist of curved architectures, broken staves, mechanical arms.  They become the armature upon which notational and textual systems are later anchored.

The Syntactic Scaffold: Building a Score in Layers

Once these vectorial elements are in place, I begin to construct what I call the syntactic scaffold. This is where musical notation, spatial logic, and typographic systems intersect. I embed traditional notational marks such as clefs, accidentals, and rhythmic fragments into distorted staves that collapse linear time and expand spatialized logic.

At this stage, the score functions more like a site than a system. Performers do not read left to right but traverse.  They drift, navigate, dig, orbit. Temporal relationships are encoded through density, contrast, layering, and spatial juxtaposition, not metronomic measure.

This scaffold is also where I integrate non-musical systems.  This may include medical imagery, circuitry, and architectural blueprints which behave like parasitic notations, challenging the performer to read outside of familiarity.

Language and Neologism: Text as Sonic Intervention

Integral to my process is the integration of language and invented text. I treat language not as annotation, but as a compositional material that transforms into a sonic-textual event that generates rhythm, texture, and conceptual dissonance. Words appear not to clarify, but to complicate, confuse, and reorient.

I often use:

• All-caps imperatives ("FREEZE!", "REFREEZE!", "SPILL!") as performative commands or false directives

• Fictional acronyms (e.g., "SZEOC") that echo corporate or technical language without yielding transparency

• Neologisms ("TICTRAP," "AURALAND," "LIMOLELLEOPELLI")—synthetic words that operate as naming mechanisms without fixed meaning, inviting the performer to speculate their purpose

These textual artifacts introduce a linguistic entropy into the score. They create zones of language noise, where the semantics collapse into phonetics, and the performer must decide whether to speak, vocalize, ignore, or sonify the text.

This use of invented language is part of a broader project: to queer the idea of legibility, to dislocate the authority of notation, and to allow language itself to become musical...a visual and sonic irritant embedded in the score’s architecture.

Symbolic Density and Iconographic Assemblage

The next phase involves iconographic integration: the placement of symbolic objects, signs, and rendered textures that introduce non-instructional meaning into the score. These may include:

• Classical sculptures juxtaposed with circuit paths

• Industrial icons adjacent to notated glissandi

• Film strips winding through note clusters

• Diagrams of unknown systems bordering musical instructions

These are not narrative symbols, but they are visual agents that destabilize the reading experience, suggesting metaphor, critique, or satire without prescribing a single interpretation.

Here, the visual density serves a performative purpose. It creates zones of friction, asking the performer to navigate complexity rather than decode clarity. Notation becomes relational and atmospheric, not absolute.

Temporal Distortion and Sonic Topography

Despite their architectural stillness, these scores are deeply concerned with time.  I am not referring to not measured time, but experienced time, disrupted time, and synthetic duration.

I achieve this through:

• Graphic compression (tight clusters of micro-notation) to suggest intensification

• Visual rupture (large gaps, overlapping layers, jarring shifts) to imply interruption or spillover

• Repeated neologisms or visual motifs (e.g., “SPILL” appearing amid expanding glyphs) to reinforce time-as-affect, time-as-collapse

These operations replace tempo with topology. The performer doesn't just “play through” time, but they encounter it, shaped by the score’s material architecture and textual disruptions.

Final Assembly and Performativity

The final stage of building the score is not print layout or PDF formatting.   It is the construction of a total encounter. The image must operate on multiple levels:

• As a standalone visual artifact

• As a performative script

• As a semiotic labyrinth

• As a linguistic playground

• As a conceptual critique of notation itself

The performer becomes the final assembler who is tasked not with executing instructions, but with translating, embodying, resisting, and resonating the score’s material.

It is in this moment between score and body, between symbol and gesture that the assemblage becomes alive.

 Toward a Post-Notational Poetics

How are these scores put together? Through graphic architecture, linguistic invention, and semiotic layering. Through the deliberate use of interference, opacity, rupture, and fiction. Through the belief that a score is not a map to be followed but a site to be performed.  One to be read as an object, not as a message.

By integrating text, language, and neologism alongside notation, I aim to produce scores that think.  These scores  refuse transparency, reward curiosity, and demand a creative reading of the world and its signs.

These works are not merely visual music. They are epistemological performances, designed to be as rich in silence as they are in sound, as much about reading and misreading as about playing.

In a world where meaning is always mediated, I want the score to be the place where that mediation is made visible, audible, and unstable.

"Artifice and Pretense" for Solo Piano

 

"Artifice and Pretense" 

for Solo Piano

Bil Smith Composer

2024

Link To Large Format PDF Score

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14huALFf8FFZrIGY8zP37zUT8He19PTm5/view?usp=sharing

"Artifice and Pretense," is a piece crafted with a paratonal notation system. Much like a message from a distant world, encoded in symbols that flirt with the edge of comprehension, the pianist, faced with the diminutive inscriptions of the score, finds themselves at the threshold of an insurmountable task. To engage with each note is to attempt to decipher a language without a key, where each symbol, each gesture, holds the promise of revelation and the threat of further obfuscation. This meticulous scrutiny, while revealing the microcosm of complexity within each notational element, simultaneously obscures the grandeur of the composition as a whole. It is a paradoxical pursuit, emblematic of the human condition: the more one seeks to understand, the more elusive understanding becomes.

Alternatively, for the Pianist to absorb the piece in its entirety from a distance is to grapple with the inverse dilemma. One might capture the essence, the overarching structure, but in doing so, the individual nuances, the intricate details that give the piece its soul, evaporate.  This detachment, a necessary sacrifice for the sake of comprehension, mirrors the alienation of the individual from the intricacies of existence, where the whole can never truly be grasped without losing sight of the parts that constitute it.

The introduction of a new progeny of musical expression, through the banishment of quasi-atmospheric modulations and the embrace of vertical runoffs, represents a rebellion against the constraints of tradition. Yet, this rebellion is not without its own contradictions. The gravitational pull of these runoffs, designed to liberate the gestures of the notation, instead imposes a new form of confinement. The score, with its thick pools of architectural diagrams, suggests an order, a system of coordinates that promises orientation within the chaotic sprawl of the music. But this system serves only to ensnare further, to heighten the sense of disorientation.

The performer, standing alone before the piano, becomes a figure of tragic heroism, engaged in a Sisyphean task where the act of performance is both an assertion of agency and an admission of its futility.

The Dense Labyrinth of Bil Smith’s Compaction Music

 

The Dense Labyrinth of Bil Smith’s Compaction Music

By Rick Geller

In the domain of speculative compositional practice, Bil Smith's Compaction Music emerges as an intricate labyrinth, a site where reductionism is transfigured into a game of multiplicities, obfuscations, and dense interrelations. It is a form of compositional philosophy that recasts sonic material as the locus of theoretical economy, ontological condensation, and methodological rigor. By invoking reductionist thought, not as a limiting force, but as a field for generative complexity, Smith invites us to consider how compaction itself becomes a performative and intellectual strategy for the destabilization of musical assumptions.

Reduction in the philosophical sense often involves the mapping of one domain onto another, simpler framework, physical properties onto atomic structure, chemical interactions onto quantum mechanics, or cognitive processes onto neural patterns. Smith adapts this epistemological maneuver, translating it into musical practice, where the dismantling of structure does not merely clarify but mystifies, folding the act of understanding into the impossibility of total comprehension.

Compactionism as Epistemic Framework

Smith’s methodology can be categorized into three core axes... methodological, theoretical, and ontological compactionism.  Each of which operates with overlapping purposes but distinct phenomenological implications. The reductionist orientation of Compaction Music is not a simplifying act but a contracting one, collapsing the spacious into the dense, the audible into the tacit, and the perceivable into the obscure.

Methodological Compaction:

At the methodological level, Compaction Music operates like a musical collider, breaking down expansive compositional gestures into their smallest perceptual units. A singular tremor of the tuba, for example, might be dissected into its overtonal constituents, its micro-temporal instability, and its implied silences. These smallest sonic "particles" become nodes of hyperactivity, where the sonic material behaves paradoxically: as both minimalistic and overabundant, sparse yet overwhelmingly dense in interpretative potential. The process mirrors the reductionist impulse in science, where boiling points are traced to atomic dynamics, and atomic dynamics to quark interactions except that here, the breakdown does not aim at a clearer truth but a proliferating ambiguity.

In works like Ewart Bandina, Smith maps microstructural fragments into recursive layers of interpretation. The score itself serves as a performative text, wherein symbolic representations are not guides but provocations, forcing the performer to reconstitute broken fragments into their own internal logic. The act of "reading" the score becomes inseparable from the act of "creating" the music.

Theoretical Compaction:

The theoretical dimension of Smith’s practice aligns closely with the reductive aspirations of unification found in scientific paradigms. The idea of a theory of everything in physics (a singular explanatory framework encompassing disparate phenomena) finds a curious analogue in Compaction Music. Here, disparate sonic events, notational systems, and even interpretative biases are folded into overlapping compositional matrices.

In Scant, a work utilizing a cylindrical coordinate system, radial symmetry is repurposed to collapse multiple timelines into a single representational form. Time becomes a circular economy of interaction rather than a linear narrative. This circularity, while seemingly restrictive, allows for an infinite set of radial relationships, each vector radiating outward to imply gestures unbound by hierarchical structure. In doing so, Smith challenges traditional linearity in musical form, offering instead a theoretical compactness that generates endless interpretative multiplicities.

Ontological Compaction:

Ontologically, Compaction Music does not propose an escape from complexity but situates complexity within a monistic reduction of essence. To reduce, in this sense, is to reveal an essence so densely compacted that it no longer presents itself as singular or reducible. Sonic particles in Smith’s framework are not isolated entities but networks of entangled relationalities, where one event necessarily implicates another. A gesture played in the tuba’s lower register, for example, may resonate with spectral instability, its overtone series bleeding into silence, implying textures that remain physically absent yet conceptually essential.

This ontological condensation aligns with Smith’s fascination with materiality and ephemerality. The act of reduction is not only compositional but existential, asking whether all musical events can, in fact, be reduced to their barest form, but whether reduction itself creates a new layer of obfuscation.

Compaction Music as Game and Praxis

Smith’s approach to composition does not merely represent compaction; it performs it through gamification. Much like the Oulipian experiments of constrained writing, Compaction Music imposes arbitrary limits on its material, forcing creativity to emerge from the confines of rule-based systems. Yet Smith’s rules are not simply constraints; they are provocations. They destabilize traditional notions of form, materiality, and interpretation, leaving both the performer and audience to grapple with the unfolding of indeterminate logics.

In works influenced by Arte Povera, Smith juxtaposes the monumental and the disposable. A decaying multiphonic might coexist with a pristine harmonic sequence, both occupying the same sonic space yet conflicting in their material realities. This tension creates a gamified experience for performers, who must navigate between instruction and improvisation, between the hyper-specificity of the score and the emergent logic of the moment.

Aural Structure as Sonic Topology

One of Smith’s most provocative contributions is his reconceptualization of musical structure as aural topology. In this framework, musical properties are no longer conceived as fixed, discrete units but as elastic surfaces subject to stretching, folding, and compaction. A score in Compaction Music is a map not of notes but of tensions, deformations, and resonances. Each gesture, rather than standing alone, is a topological feature embedded in a larger sonic terrain.

In Ewart Bandina, for instance, performers navigate a landscape where every decision affects the perceived curvature of the whole. A single staccato articulation might “compress” a subsequent phrase, altering its interpretative density. This interactive process mirrors philosophical reductionism in its focus on relationality but amplifies the generative potential of reduction by refusing closure.

Conclusion: The Infinite within the Compact

Bil Smith’s Compaction Music is not merely a compositional technique; it is a philosophical stance, a reflection on the paradoxes of reductionism itself. By collapsing expansive ideas into dense nodes of interpretative potential, Smith challenges the very notion of clarity, suggesting that reduction is not the absence of complexity but its intensification.

In the world of Compaction Music, a single sonic particle can carry infinite implications, and a reductionist score can open vast interpretative landscapes. Smith invites us to consider the spaces between the compacted and the infinite, between what is written and what is implied, and between what is heard and what is imagined. Compaction Music is, ultimately, an invitation to inhabit the dense, labyrinthine folds of sonic thought.  It is an  infinite world compacted into every note, every gesture, and every silence.