Sound Formulary: The Score as Pharmaceutical Compendium By Bil Smith

 

Sound Formulary: The Score as Pharmaceutical Compendium

By Bil Smith

I’ve never believed in the sanctity of the score. I believe in its volatility. Its ability to behave like an unstable molecule defined by interaction, shaped by temperature, duration, resistance. In Sound Formulary, I have built not compositions but compendia...scores that behave more like pharmacological guides than musical texts. Each symbol, each material inclusion, is not a note or cue, but an active agent with conditional efficacy.

Much like a formulary, the curated list of therapeutics permitted within a health system, my scores prescribe sounds through layers of permissions, black-box warnings, delivery vectors, contraindications, and dosage thresholds. I’m not interested in telling performers what to do, but under what conditions they may act. A score isn’t a set of instructions; it’s a permission structure laced with embedded contradictions.

I’ve always admired the absurd specificity of the pharmacopoeia: a drug’s classification, its delivery mode, its systemic effects, its inactive binders. This architecture became a model for me. In these works, an “active ingredient” might be a harmonic artifact. A “delivery mechanism” might be a performer’s breath timed against a page’s margin. An “excipient” (what pharma would call a non-active filler) is, in my scores, the whitespace, the metallic ink, the absence of gesture that supports the act without being it.

There is a score in this series titled RECOMBINANT TEXT / for Aural Bioequivalence Studies. It includes boxed labels, sample vial silhouettes, schedules of administration, and sequence variability dependent on circadian staging. Not as parody. Not as gimmick. But as structural syntax. These are protocols the way extended technique was for 20th-century composition: an invasive, sometimes alien, vocabulary forced into the system until it naturalizes.

This is the kind of music that doesn’t get played; it gets metabolized.

I’ve included materials like powdered gallium, scored cellulose, metallic inks, and blister pack embossings, not as texture, but as data. These elements are not ornamental; they hold notational function, they mediate performance possibilities, and they invite compliance or resistance. Every performance becomes a clinical trial.

In the world of drug development, a compound is tested, dosed, evaluated for efficacy and tolerability. I view my scores the same way. A first performance is a Phase I trial (does the concept survive contact with the body)? Phase II is refinement. Phase III is confrontation. The FDA has no role here, but I have always imagined my notation under regulatory scrutiny: Is it legible? Is it dangerous? Does it induce affective disruption?

The musician becomes a pharmacologist. The sound becomes an off-label event.

The score: a diagnostic artifact.

The mistake: a necessary adverse reaction.

Music, in this formulary, is never safe.

It is investigational. And never intended for general use.

"Propaganda Fly" for B Flat Trumpet; The Jubal Project and Multimodality in Composition

"Propaganda Fly" for B Flat Trumpet

A Jubal Project Composition

Bil Smith Composer

Score: 32" X 12"

As I have written in the past, "The Jubal Project" is an ambitious endeavor that aims to revolutionize music notation by using the circle as a central symbol. By utilizing the circle as a universal symbol, I hope to create a notation system that can oscillate between indexical registrations, symbols of forces in flux, and sensory stimuli, providing a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities that avoids any orientation towards a culmination point or external end. 

One of the key features of this notational archetype is its ability to yield aftereffects that empower the composer and performer, allowing for multiple transformations and variants of sound creation. 

The philosophy behind the Jubal project is the theme of multimodality.  Multimodality is the coexistence of multiple semiotic modes within a given context. Semiotic modes refer to the different ways in which meaning is created and conveyed, such as language, images, sounds, gestures, and movement.

Multimodality is an everyday reality as we experience the world through multiple senses and modes of communication. The rise of digital technologies has led to an increase in multimodal products, such as hyperfiction, digital books, and music compositions that incorporate various modes of expression. The twenty-first century can be seen as a quintessentially multimodal era, making the implementation of multimodality in composition even more urgent and relevant. Although the practice of multimodality has been long-standing, the field of multimodality composition archetypes is still at an early stage of development.

"Perisetta, Barefoot and Dusted with Refinery Ash": A Score for String Quartet

"Perisetta, Barefoot and Dusted with Refinery Ash": A Score for String Quartet

Introduction: Temporal Structures in Sound

The score for Perisetta, Barefoot and Dusted with Refinery Ash for string quartet is a study in systematic repetition, mathematical structuring, and stark formalism, drawing inspiration from the process-driven mark-making of Hanne Darboven and the clinical yet confrontational aesthetic of Thomas Ruff’s portrait photography. In both Darboven’s obsessive recording of time through numerical systems and Ruff’s forensic depiction of the human face, we find a commitment to accumulation, iteration, and a near-bureaucratic confrontation with form.

By translating these visual and conceptual methodologies into sound, the score functions as an auditory transcription of duration, repetition, and erasure, challenging conventional ideas of development in musical structure.

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I. Score as Repetitive Notation: The Darboven Influence

At the heart of this composition lies a notation system built on cumulative repetition, mirroring Darboven’s relentless handwritten numerals and calendar-based sequencing. The score does not unfold in a traditionally teleological manner; instead, it builds in grid-like accumulations of repeated gestures, which function as a sonic equivalent to Darboven’s vast wall installations of copied texts and figures.

Mathematical Structures & Temporal Expansion

• Like Darboven’s installations, the music’s structure maps time itself, with the performers tracing through a field of prescribed gestures rather than progressing towards resolution.

Handwriting as Sound: The Ritual of Mark-Making

• Each instrument enacts a daily inscription of notes, accumulating in layers of slight variation, akin to the way Darboven’s handwriting accumulated into walls of near-identical pages.

• Repeated bowing techniques.  Sul ponticello scrapes, harmonic glissandi, and shifting microtonal trills function as the equivalent of pen strokes, obsessively documenting the passage of sonic time.

• The material is fixed but mutable, allowing the players to slightly alter their articulations in a manner akin to handwriting inconsistencies within structured repetition.

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II. The Ruff Influence: Static Portraits in Sound

Where Darboven’s influence is in the rigid structuring of time, Thomas Ruff’s photography provides a model for the score’s cold, enlarged sonic surfaces. Ruff’s portraits are emotionally neutral yet invasive, forcing an intensified scrutiny of texture, imperfection, and presence.

Musical Surface as Photographic Exposure

• The quartet is treated as a single, composite entity, akin to a neutral photographic background upon which subtle variations emerge.

• The score utilizes high-resolution timbral focus, exaggerating overtones, bow pressure, and micro-adjustments in vibrato, much like Ruff’s hyper-detailed depictions of skin texture and tonal gradation.

• By magnifying these subtle shifts, the composition achieves an uncanny stillness, where the sound is both neutral and overwhelming emerging as a confrontation between objectivity and presence.

Lack of Expressive Depth: The Anti-Narrative Approach

• Traditional phrasing, tension-and-release structures, and harmonic motion are largely absent.

• The performers’ role is not to convey emotion but to enact presence and to inhabit the material without interpretation.

• This lack of psychological depth, in contrast to the density of surface-level detail, is a direct challenge to the listener’s expectations of portraiture in sound.

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III. Large-Scale Accumulation & The Aesthetic of Overwhelm

Both Darboven and Ruff use scale as a tool of excess; one through endless pages of numerical inscriptions, the other through gigantic photographic enlargements. Perisetta mirrors this approach in the way it expands static elements into a monumental experience.

Overlapping Layers & The Perception of Stasis

• The score eliminates foreground/background distinctions, allowing for a flat auditory plane, similar to Ruff’s uniform lighting that erases narrative depth.

• The result is both immersive and alienating.  A document of time’s passage without traditional markers of progression.

Perisetta, Barefoot and Dusted with Refinery Ash is an attempt to reconcile the materiality of time, surface, and repetition in a string quartet context. By drawing on Darboven’s obsessive numerical structures and Ruff’s detached yet invasive photographic realism, the score resists narrative and emotional depth, offering instead a neutral yet imposing document of sonic presence. It is a work where the act of playing becomes an act of recording, where music does not progress but inscribes itself onto a durational landscape, moment by moment, until nothing remains but the imprint of repetition.

 

The Last Glamour of the Ordinary. For Piccolo Trumpet in A. A Brief Fanfare

 

"UnLaced" for Bass Trombone

 

"UnLaced" 

for Bass Trombone

Bil Smith Composer

Link to Hi-Res PDF Score

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wjxw4qm5NW6MI4A1a-IAeN9DZpPrZACw/view?usp=sharing

Symbolic Overidentification, Sublime Dissonance and the New Music Lexicon: Non-Traditional Notation

Symbolic Overidentification - a notation system that exaggerates and intensifies traditional musical symbols and structures, revealing the ideological underpinnings of our musical conventions.

Negative Dialectics of Notation - the critical reflection on the limitations and shortcomings of traditional music notation systems, with the aim of uncovering the implicit assumptions and ideological biases embedded in them.

Transcendental Signification - the process by which musical symbols acquire meaning through their relation to the subjectivity of the composer and the interpreter, as well as to the historical and cultural context of their production.

Disruptive Archetype - a fundamental musical structure that challenges the conventions and expectations of a given style or genre, by introducing new harmonic, melodic, or rhythmic elements.

Transcendental Synthesis - the unification of different musical elements, such as tonality, rhythm, and timbre, into a coherent and meaningful whole, through the creative intervention of the composer.

Sublime Dissonance - a type of musical dissonance that evokes a sense of awe and reverence, by transcending the limits of conventional tonality and revealing the hidden potentials of sound.

Aporetic Notation - a notation system that embraces the paradoxes and contradictions of musical expression, by allowing for multiple and conflicting interpretations of the same score.

Radical Temporality - the manipulation of time and duration in a musical piece, by introducing irregular or unpredictable rhythms, or by stretching or compressing the time intervals between notes.

Retroactive Causality - a musical composition that challenges our traditional understanding of causality and chronology in music, revealing the ways in which past musical forms can be reinterpreted and repurposed in the present.

Logical Composition Has Been Truncated.

Logical composition has been truncated.

It has tried to begin and end in the middle, with the result that it has ended in the air.

Composition presents the curious anachronism of a science which attempts to deal with its subject-matter apart from what it comes from and what comes from it.  The objection that such a chapter on the conditions and genesis of the operations of knowing belongs to composition, only shows how firmly fixed is the discontinuity we are trying to escape.

As we have seen, the original motive for leaving this account of genesis to composition was that the act of knowing was supposed to originate in a purely psychical mind. Such an origin was of course embarrassing to compositional logic, which aimed to be musical. 

The old opposition between origin and validity was due to the kind of origin assumed and the kind of validity necessitated by the origin. One may well be excused for evading the question of how ideas, originated in a purely psychical mind, can, in Kant's phrase, "have objective validity," by throwing out the question of origin altogether.  Whatever difficulties remain for validity after this expulsion could not be greater than those of the task of combining the objective validity of ideas with their subjective origin.

Intellectual advance occurs in two ways. At times increase of knowledge is organized about old conceptions, while these are expanded, elaborated and refined, but not seriously revised, much less abandoned.

At other times, the increase of knowledge demands qualitative rather than quantitative change; alteration, not addition. Men's minds grow cold to their former intellectual concerns; ideas that were burning fade; interests that were urgent seem remote.

Composers and performers face in another direction; their older perplexities are unreal; considerations passed over as negligible loom up. Former problems may not have been solved, but they no longer press for solutions. 

Composition is no exception to the rule. But it is unusually conservative--not, necessarily, in proffering solutions, but in clinging to problems. It has been so allied with theology and theological morals as representatives of composer’s chief interests, that radical alteration has been shocking.

Composers activities took a decidedly new turn, for example, in the seventeenth century, and it seems as if composition was to execute an about-face.  The association of composition with academic teaching has reinforced this intrinsic conservatism. Scholastic composition persisted in universities after composer’s thoughts outside of the walls of colleges had moved in other directions. In the last hundred years, like composition,  intellectual advances of science and politics have in like fashion been crystallized into material of instruction and now resist further change. I would not say that the spirit of teaching is hostile to that of liberal inquiry, but a composition which exists largely as something to be taught rather than wholly as something to be reflected upon is conducive to discussion of views held by others rather than to immediate response.

Composition when taught, inevitably magnifies the history of past thought, and leads composers to approach their subject-matter through its formulation in received systems. It tends, also, to emphasize points upon which composers have divided into schools, for these lend themselves to retrospective definition and elaboration.

Consequently, compositional discussion is likely to be a dressing out of antithetical traditions, where criticism of one view is thought to afford proof of the truth of its opposite (as if formulation of views guaranteed logical exclusives). Direct preoccupation with contemporary difficulties is left to literature and politics. 

If changing conduct and expanding knowledge ever required a willingness to surrender not merely old solutions but old problems it is now. I do not mean that we can turn abruptly away from all traditional issues. This is impossible; it would be the undoing of the one who attempted it. Irrespective of the professionalizing of composition, the ideas composers discuss are still those in which Western civilization has been bred. They are in the backs of the heads of educated people.

But what serious-minded composers not engaged in the professional business of composition most want to know is what modifications and abandonments of intellectual inheritance are required by the newer ‘Big Data’ analytics movement.

They want to know what this new movement means when translated into general ideas. Unless professional composition can mobilize itself sufficiently to assist in this clarification and redirection of composer's thoughts, it is likely to get more and more sidetracked from the main currents of contemporary life.