Thursday, June 30, 2016

"Skyere Treace" for Chamber Ensemble.


"Skyere Treace" for Chamber Ensemble.

Bil Smith Composer

2015

Ensemble Chase
Premiere Performance: Whitney Museum of American Art
September 3, 2015

Commission from Battelle Institute 
Stony Brook, NY

"On Sharing Favors" for Alto Flute

"On Sharing Favors" for Alto Flute

From the performance notes:


  • mutations, natural or introduced, that result in partial or complete impairment or alteration of the function of the notation.
  • overexpression or ectopic expression that results in aberrant behavior of the sound or aberrant expression where the resulting notational phenotype is used to make a judgment about the normal activity of that sound

"Mock Monoliths" for Clarinet, Oboe + CounterHarp. Bil Smith Composer




"Mock Monoliths"

for Clarinet, Oboe + CounterHarp

Bil Smith Composer

2015


Saturday, June 18, 2016

Iggy Loves Nicolas Horvath.




Iggy comes to Carnegie Hall to experience Nicolas Horvath's solo piano premiere of GlassWorks. She loves it...stays for the incredibly long concert, but scared to death about being accepted at a 'formal, classical music' concert.   Hmmmm.

She does what she does...no, of course not Darmstadtian, but as my neighbor who asked to come along, she was a beautiful open minded soul...absorbing the music and reveling at Nicolas' delivery.  

"Drunk On The MiniBar"
A distinct colloboration Bil Smith/Iggy Azalea.

Listen On SoundCloud:


This Friday, January 9, 2015.  Nicolas Horvath...Mr. Unthinkable Marathon Piano Performer Descends On Carnegie Hall and Iggy is one fan who will not miss this.


from the NY Times..

“Marathon Man-Pianist, Nicolas Horvath,  Coming off a 22 Hour Concert in Kiev Masterminds The Concert Event of 2015 at Carnegie Hall.”

"Iggy"
About her name. Iggy took her stage name from the name of her childhood dog, Iggy, and the street she grew up on, Azalea Street, where her family lives to this day in Australia.
IG's career began to flourish when her first official music video, for a song titled "Pu$$y", was uploaded on her YouTube channel.
On 27 September 2011, IG (my nickname for her) released her first full-length project, a mixtape titled Ignorant Art, saying she made it "with the intent to make people question and redefine old ideals".
And there...that last phrase caught my interest. Saying she made it “with the intent to make people question and redefine old ideals".
About her , IG stated... "It's supposed to have like, all the ridiculousness of a big-budget '90s video, but then chopped and screwed"
To define Iggy's aesthetic, non­-philosophy, by way of musical contrast, frees thought from every end. By curtailing music's specular narcis­sism, non-music(s) untethers thought from every decisional telos.

... and "Nic"

Considered to be an out-of-the-ordinary artist with an unconventional résumé, Nicolas Horvath began his music studies at the Académie de Musique Prince Rainier III de Monaco. At 16, Lawrence Foster took notice of him in a concert and, securing a three year scholarship for him from the Princess Grace Foundation, was able to invite him to the Aspen Music Festival. 

After his studies in the École Normale de Musique in Paris, he worked for three years with Bruno-Léonardo Gelber, Gérard Frémy who instilled in him a sensitivity to music of our time as well as Eric Heidsieck, Gabriel Tacchino, Nelson Delle-Vigne, Philippe Entremont and Oxana Yablonskaya. Leslie Howard got to know him and invited him to perform before the Liszt Society in the United Kingdom, dedicating to him his 23rd Etude in Black and White. Thanks to Leslie Howard, Nicolas was able to deepen and supplement his knowledge of the works of Franz Liszt..

A contemporary music enthusiast, he works for Régis Campo, Denis Levaillant, Jaan Rääts, Kazuo Missé, Thérèse Brenet, Frederick Martin... He did world premiere from more than 100 composers and he is the dedicator of more than 50 pieces (concertos, sonatas, etude, toccata, prelude...).

He performs as soloist with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte- Carlo, the Palm Beach Symphony Orchestra, The Kiev Soloists orchestra, the Nice Ensemble Instrumental and in festivals such as the Palm Beach Atlantic Piano Festival, Gabala Piano Festival, BSI Monte-Carlo Music Master, Canto XL, Palais de Tokyo 2nd Season. 

Winner of almost a dozen of international competitions, he was awarded 4th Prize and Special Franz Liszt Prize at the Yokohama International Competition which takes place in the famous Minato Mirai Hall; 2nd Prize at Fukuoka which enabled him to participate in the Nishin-Nihon Debut Recital Series; First Prize in the American Protégé which opened the doors for him to Carnegie Hall’s Weill Hall...

In 2014, Nicolas Horvath will perform during a single concert, all the 5 Liszt concertos with an original theme -a world premiere- with the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Leslie Howard. The release of his first cd «Franz Liszt's Christus» (first complete recording at the Hortus Editions) had a great press reception.

He is updating Terry Riley's legendary "All Night Concerts" with uncompromising avant-garde programs such as the "Night of Minimal Piano", the "Complete Philip Glass piano music" or the "Complete Erik Satie piano music including the Vexations". He also did a 35 hours solo non-stop version of the Satie's Vexations.

Nicolas is also an electroacoustic composer and enjoy to work with painters and video artists.

Forthcoming projects include the world premiere recording of LaMonte Young cult piece X for Henry Flynt for Sub Rosa, the recording of the complete Philip Glass piano music for Naxos - Grand Piano label, and the complete Erik Satie piano music for Sheva Collection.

The Concert is produced by Jasna Popovic and New York Artists Management

Thursday, June 16, 2016

Cage, White Paintings and Corti's Organ


Cage makes a point when he formulates one of the fundamental lessons of his infamous composition 4'33" (a work he claimed was inspired, not coincidentally, by Rauschenberg’s White Paintings): there is no such thing as silence. Take away one sound, and there are always others— fainter, or more nuanced and neutral, or simply so regular that they have merged into the background.

Eliminate those fainter sounds and you only open onto yet others in turn: the barely perceptible shimmer of electrical circuits; the ambient hums that inhabit rooms even before we do; the respiration of space.

Continue all the way to the threshold of hearing itself. The tympanic membrane and the organ of Corti resonate with amplitudes approaching the diameter of a hydrogen atom; if the human ear were more sensitive by even a degree we would hear the crash of atoms colliding in their erratic Brownian sweeps, the constant din of fluctuations in molecular density.

But even if we could listen in a vacuum, free from the imperceptible white noise of molecular space, we would still be awash in sound.


As long as we are alive we never escape the systolic waves of the hematic ocean tiding in the nautilus turns of the ear.

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

"Dominant Crave". The Score


"Lucas de Grom". For Three Trombones



"Lucas de Grom"

For Three Trombones

Bil Smith Composer

Commission from Southwest Airlines

"Pitching Substitution"


Recording: "The Black Flame Rinses The Second Sky" (2009-2013)




"The Black Flame Rinses The Second Sky" (2009-2013)
Double String Quartet, Orchestra, Pharmacist, Bally's Code Red, Spectral Ventriloquist, Micro-Gestural Half Life Timbre Polymodulation and Regulated Pulsaret-Width Modulation

On SoundCloud:


REVIEW and COMMENTARY:
"...the complex score offers a language for Smith's negotiation. From the outset, a low-slung envelope snakes through and around existing obstacles, then lifts up off the ground to allow listeners to enter before twisting and turning away, pulling the ear along rather than asking the audience to stand and stare.

A dramatic vortex of spiraling ambiguities brings daylight down even into the submerged sonorities, while allowing these sonic spaces themselves to remain unflinchingly neutral, although varied in scale and dimension.
“Temental,” as Smith calls the central passage, is as internally variegated, allowing it to perform as the binding agent rather than the hieratic center that holds all the other elements of this magnificent piece together. In other words, the surface of this music —outside and in—is not an abstract plane or a transcendent core but a site of exchange between competing concerns.
Smith confounds us with neologisms (his life's other work) to depict renderings of passages within his compositions. While others merely define their work with titles, Smith augments each piece with titles within titles...a lexical panacea; a syntacticon unrealized by any other composer in time.
...the dexterity with which the performance takes on its various roles renders it materially present but momentarily elusive: No wall can be said to guard the boundary between inside and outside. Smith’s ideal emerges as a new kind of composition, sent via special delivery to a place where negotiation is urgently needed and heroism inconceivable."
Kevin O'Hare - Music Critic for "The Republican"

"Kampfschwimmer" for Mixed Ensemble

"Kampfschwimmer" 

for Soprano Saxophone, Glockenspiel, Thundersheet, Slit Drum, Tenor, Violin and Viola(s).  

Bil Smith Composer

Zelophilia for Six Tuning Forks






"Optimized Composition" Johannes Kreidler's AudioGuide




Johannes Kreidler's "Audioguide"  

Is it?...

reactualization of a modern concern?

When we speak of radical disruption; an honest shift in constative change, we start with Audioguide. 

Audioguide...a elegiac Dionysian melodrama.  


Resistiveness and determinate negation? 

Denial, action, anger - resisting permanent composing?

Deconstruction and counter-proposal? 

A conceptual hyper-dystopian worldliness in music ?

Or one unredeemed utopia of the avant-garde?

A liquefied landscape rife with fermenting temporal locations?


Let's start here...one of the most profound acts of music (theater). 






Audioguide is a series of talk shows about music performed without breaks in a single evening over seven hours. This form of "theater installation" with various video elements is not only a stage work with music, but also a music theater work about music, about its connections to politics, psychology, technology and terrorism, with motifs from Shakespeare and ideas from Derrida in the background. 

The hypermodern state of technology is examined, subliminal messages are sent through the music, 100 instruments are destroyed, people fall into air pianos, the tragic consequences of mp3 are discussed with one of its programmers and a hyper-instrument is built in the hall.



AudioGuide - Clarinet Piece


Audioguide is the continuation of Johannes Kreidler's piece Feeds. Hören TV, created in 2010 for Musiktheater am Revier, and is produced in cooperation with Ultima Festival, Oslo.
Tom Pilath (sidekick)Andrea Seitz (psychologist)Peer Blank (coder)Stefan Fricke and Johannes Kreidler (guests)Wieland Hoban and Philipp Blume (translators)Eric Moreira and Ruben Mattia Santorsa (guitar)Ensemble neoNJohannes Kreidler: Audioguide (2013/14) (WP)Tammo Messow (moderator)


Felix Dreher (sound und video)


AudioGuide - Shortcuts



AudioGuide - Stockhausen 9/11



AudioGuide - Forest Gang



AudioGuide - Keyboard Cards and Mouth Sheet Music





"Pixar's Carrit. An Annunciation of a Trans-Litereated Pudenda"




"Pixar's Carrit. An Annunciation of a Trans-Litereated Pudenda" 

Bil Smith Composer (2011-2012). 

For String Orchestra and String Quartet.

This work was realized with a generous commission from Kuwait Airways, a new partner of Laboratorie New Music. 

We are thankful for their support and contribution to this project.

RECORDING on SoundCloud: