The Unco-Operative Camera". For Clarinet in A

"The Unco-Operative Camera"

For Clarinet in A

Bil Smith Composer

"Crater 34" For Soprano Voice A WET (Words, Events and Text) Score

"Crater 34"

For Soprano Voice

A WET (Words, Events and Text) Score

Commissioned by BNP Paribas

For the opening of the BNP Paribas Open

Indian Wells, CA

March, 2016

The Single Page Score and The Erosion of Conventional Structures

In the labyrinth of musical notation, a striking departure from tradition emerges—the single page score. This paradigm-shattering artifact disrupts the established tablature notation hierarchy. A solo page allows us to embark on an exploration of the merits that lie within this enigmatic creation, peeling back the layers of convention to reveal its audacious allure.

The Erosion of Conventional Structures:

Within the single page score, the traditional scaffolding of musical notation crumbles, allowing for a radical reimagining of artistic expression. Here, the composer navigates uncharted territories, transgressing the boundaries of conventional form. Lines and staves converge, intersect, and entwine, evoking a sense of disorientation that fuels the artistic quest for new sonic realms.

The Absence as Aesthetic Substance:

In the voids and white spaces that permeate the single page score, we encounter an aesthetic substance like no other. The absence of notes and symbols becomes a silent protagonist, engaging in a dialogue of negation and suggestion. Through this calculated negation, the composer invites the performer and listener to actively participate in the act of musical creation, filling the silence with their own interpretive echoes.

Frragments of musical ideas collide and intertwine, creating a captivating collage of sonic possibilities. Disconnected motifs, disjointed rhythms, and fragmented melodies meld together in a tapestry of ambiguity. The listener becomes an archeologist, piecing together fragments to reconstruct the composer's intention, unveiling hidden narratives in the process.

The Cinematic Spatiotemporal Realm:

The single page score also transcends the static realm of traditional notation, transforming into a dynamic spatiotemporal canvas. Musical events unfold in a cinematographic manner, as if the score were a storyboard for an avant-garde film. Time becomes elastic, stretching and compressing at the composer's will, challenging the listener to navigate a non-linear sonic narrative.

Additionally, within the solo page lies a game of interpretive uncertainty, where the performer becomes a player in a complex musical puzzle. Ambiguous directions and cryptic notations provoke a sense of interpretive vertigo, blurring the boundaries between composer and performer. Each rendition becomes a unique artistic act, imbued with the performer's personal interpretation and interwoven with the uncertainties of the score.

As established structures erode, the absence becomes an aesthetic substance, and fragments coalesce into a collage of sonic possibilities. The spatiotemporal realm unfolds like a cinematic experience, and interpretive uncertainty becomes a captivating game. Let us embrace this daring departure from tradition, for within the single page score lies the potential for musical exploration and liberation.

"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. 

“Tesellect Ausarta et al Delicon” for Solo Violin

 

“Tesellect Ausarta et al Delicon” for Solo Violin

Bil Smith Composer

Published by LNM Editions

“Tesellect Ausarta et al Delicon” for solo violin utilizes a dense multi-modal notation system based on the fluctuations of iconographic shadows and mutable planes to create an immersive performative experience that expands momentary perception into hybrid topological spaces.

Rather than a static representation, the notation traces topographical pathways across both horizontal and vertical surfaces in constant flux. The performer navigates this impermanent terrain of lines and shifting graphic contours through a personalized orientation to the score’s internal logic and codes.

Auditory stimuli echo visual negations, resonating both presence and absence simultaneously from a single bow stroke thanks to the notation’s reductionist yet evocative minimal language.

Amidst the apparent chaos lies a hidden logic. The scores establishes a "reductive simplicity" within the system, a code accessible to those who engage with its intricacies. This accessibility, paired with the score's inherent visual intrigue, invests the piece with a peculiar authority – the authority of rational thought and reason applied to the seemingly irrational realm of shadows.

Processing these clustered graphic traces requires refined perceptual focus within each instantaneous choice point, at once losing and finding one’s place again repetitively. The resulting sound world therefore reflects the continual re-stabilization of perspective amidst registers of enduring change.

In this way, rational thought intersects intuitive flow states to birth an intricate counterpoint grounded by persistent instability. As listener, we enter fugal worlds where each singular tone intimates a multiplicity of concurrent alternate musical realities that flicker at the edges of our awareness.

Fundamental Assumptions and Forgotten Lore” For Piccolo Oboe. Bil Smith Composer

 

Fundamental Assumptions and Forgotten Lore”  

For Piccolo Oboe

Bil Smith Composer

Link to Full Score PDF

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W4pbc91kOjsInli9jZEfkDSlGO1KXXFt/view?usp=sharing

In the composition "Fundamental Assumptions and Forgotten Lore" for Piccolo Oboe, we encounter a score that invites the performer into a complex, hyper-maximalist world with its compound visualizations.

The score's foundation in liminality—its inherent resistance to being confined within the precise, well-defined borders of traditional notation—serves as a critical point of departure for understanding its essence. To fully engage with this piece is to embrace a fluidity and ambiguity that traditional musical analysis often seeks to circumvent. This embracive attitude toward the liminal allows this work to exist in a state of continuous conversation across a myriad of categorical divides, thereby challenging the performer to consider the piece not only as a composition but as a dialogue with the broader world of art and ideas.

The visualizations are not mere adornments but are integral to the piece's structure, offering a cinematic collage that intertwines with the music to create a multisensory experience. The score's engagement with complex concepts such as diasporic Blackness and theorizations of the Global South provides a fulcrum for its wide-ranging explorations, positioning the piece not merely as a musical work but as a scholarly investigation into the intersections of culture, identity, and history.

This approach to composition and notation—where the score becomes a site of interdisciplinary inquiry—reflects a broader trend in contemporary art toward the dissolution of boundaries between artistic mediums. "Fundamental Assumptions and Forgotten Lore," in its refusal to adhere to the conventional limitations of its form, invites us to reconsider the potential of the musical score as a vessel for conveying complex, nuanced ideas. The piece's reliance on visual and conceptual elements to complement and complicate its musical content encourages a mode of engagement that is both intellectual and emotional, demanding of its audience not passive consumption but active participation in the work's multifaceted dialogue.

This is not music as known to ears that crave the comfort of resolution, nor is it art to eyes that seek the solace of clarity. It is, rather, an aesthetics of imperfection, a deliberate pursuit of the unfinished, where the value lies not in the answers provided but in the questions posed, in the improvisation that unravels composition, in the contingency that unravels certainty, in the openings that defy closure.

This composition, in its refusal to adhere to the dictates of form, in its celebration of the unfinished, poses a challenge to the very notion of understanding. It demands a relinquishment of the desire for completion, an acceptance of the perpetual state of incompletion, as the truest expression of the spirit.

"Placid Hosts" for Bass Clarinet. Bil Smith Composer.

"Placid Hosts" 

for Bass Clarinet/Actor/Interrogator.  

Bil Smith Composer. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Rrl7ExwoD9MwARM2KU0QHJTFp5MZsfuy/view?usp=sharing 

This work focuses on unmasking how notational nomenclature is marshaled into the service of power, from political rhetoric and demagogy to psychological persuasion.   

The Bass Clarinetist is responsible for a multiplicity of roles in this performance.

"Placid Hosts" is accompanied by a four-channel video installation based on an interview transcript from a 2014 murder investigation in the United States in which a woman was suspected of killing her husband with a Christian Louboutin stiletto heel DegraSpike Patent Red Sole Pump.

Similar to the way an interrogation room generates a power dynamic and tension from the moment a person steps inside, the layout of the installation is designed to maximize viewers’ discomfort.

Upon entering the piece, listeners hear a harsh and incessant pulsating sound composition, which is synchronized with the interview dialogue projected on two screens in blinding optic white text on vermillion backgrounds. 

One screen features the police officers’ vexatious questions, the other the answers of the suspect. The authorities use interrogation tactics such as psychological manipulation, confrontation, and even empathy in order to gain trust and obtain a confession, hence the Bass Clarinetist is incarcerated, reformed or a fugitive.

Throughout, the accused person’s responses read as overwhelmed, as if they are unable or perhaps unwilling to remember or articulate their thoughts. Delays in replying translate into bursts of cadmium yellow, channel black, or optic white flashes on the screens, accompanied by the no less irritating buzzing of the processed live performance of the bass clarinetist. 

The persuasiveness of this work relies on the listener's exposure to constant noise and flashes of light—which are not coincidentally methods also used for “enhanced interrogation”—leaving one with a strong sense of stress, suggestibility, and vulnerability. 

This is a visceral experience of the exercise of compositional language as a coercive power, as if one’s self were the very same subject of inquisition.