"Unsent Compounds"
For French Horn
Bil Smith Composer
2024
Link to Full Score PDF
The score for "Unsent Compounds," composed for French Horn — its structure and the formational processes underlying its construction demand a rigorous deconstruction, akin to peeling away the layers of an intricately woven tapestry. The perfomer is confronted with a paratonal notation system that both reveals and conceals, oscillating between disclosure and obscurity.
The notation reads like a text laden with diminutive inscriptions, each element on the score not merely a directive for the musician but a signifier within a larger chain, contributing to a discourse that transcends traditional musical interpretation. The score invites the performer to confront the limitations of his perceptual apparatus: to engage with the score either up close, grappling with the minute details and risking the loss of the gestalt, or from a distance, capturing the whole yet missing the intricacies that give it substance.
This dichotomy—this oscillation between the immediate and the mediated—reflects a fundamental tension, particularly in how we approach the unconscious. Just as the unconscious reveals itself only through slips and shadows, the score of "Unsent Compounds" reveals its full meaning not through direct observation but through the play of presence and absence, of sound and silence.
Architectural Analogies
The reference to architectural diagrams within the score is telling. The composer equates the structural elements of music—its rhythms, its harmonies, its textures—to the foundational elements of a building. This analogy is not merely illustrative but deeply structural. Just as an architect might align a ground plan with an elevation, the score aligns the sonic with the symbolic, each note and rest mapped onto a conceptual framework that challenges the performer to navigate space musically and interpretatively.
The vertical runoffs and the gravitational pull they exert do not merely dictate the dynamics and phrasing but suggest a deeper, almost gravitational force at play, pulling the performer into the depths of the typophony of the notation. These elements do not freeze the gestures but, paradoxically, animate them with a dynamic tilt that propels the narrative forward.
Significantly, the score forecloses any sense of wild abandon. This is a crucial aspect as the foreclosure is a rejection of the fundamental signifiers leading to a return of the repressed in other forms—here, in the constrained yet expressive modalities of sound production. The musician, bound by the paratonal system, finds freedom not through ecstatic release but through a disciplined exploration of the boundaries set forth by the score.
The thick pools of architectural signs within the score, then, do not merely guide but demand a reconceptualization of musical performance as an act of constructing and deconstructing meaning, of finding order in apparent chaos, and of creating coherence in the face of structural fragmentation.
