Saturday, December 30, 2017
Tuesday, December 26, 2017
Monday, December 25, 2017
Friday, December 22, 2017
Friday, December 15, 2017
“Eseltelle Genève” for 2 Orchestras. Bil Smith Composer. Recording on Laboratorie New Music Label: Comment by Bansky
Bil Smith Composer
Commissioned by Boston Scientific and RyanAir. RECORDING on SoundCloud:
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“Eseltelle Genève” for 2 Orchestras: setting for Orchestra II. Bodø, Norway |
In this work the reduced orchestral landscapes demand the large ensembles (Orchestras) to achieve a result that lies at the higher end of acoustical preoccupation. As I am a ‘soundcologist’ surrounded in an environment that is constantly accelerating in a perception of time, I advocate pausation…in the emptiness and silence we encounter ourselves …an absence of sound, and thought.
The concept of "universal music’ (aka: 'Love) is banal” and the only proper attitude towards the world of sonic phonomorphisis is hatred or
apathy. In a previous essay, I suggested a kind of radical
violence, which cuts universally, is necessary to break through the false sense
of universal music, of vacuous tolerance that dominates current discourse.
The response to this tolerant and
empty form of universal music should not be an ethical violence, but more music.
The sentimentality of a kind of ethical music
takes the form of a superegoic demand of the fetishist universe of composers. ‘Love every music!’
"Bil Smith's critics—and there are many of them—have accused the master of deliberate obscurantism and misinterpretation of his sources—if not outright leg-pulling."
- Banksy
"Bil Smith's critics—and there are many of them—have accused the master of deliberate obscurantism and misinterpretation of his sources—if not outright leg-pulling."
- Banksy
Sunday, December 10, 2017
Friday, December 8, 2017
Wednesday, December 6, 2017
Sunday, December 3, 2017
Wednesday, November 29, 2017
Wednesday, November 22, 2017
Saturday, November 18, 2017
Sunday, November 12, 2017
"His Sacral Entertainments". Score For Piano, Bass Clarinet and Bass Flute
"His Sacral Entertainments".
Score For Piano, Bass Clarinet and Bass Flute
2016
Bil Smith
Commissioned by Kirin Holdings
Saturday, November 4, 2017
Friday, November 3, 2017
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.
Breakthrough Music Tablature Experiments Continue with Circos.
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"A Tactical Comparison of the Net and Cutlass" Bil Smith Composer |
Score Excerpt...for Bass Flute 'Implicatio' and Soprano Trombone 'Meta-Induction'
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"Angelita Vorkink, Piliphiliac" The Score: Bil Smith Composer |
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Score Excerpt (Flute) from"Partitions: Cambics Alive in Sensient Amplules" Bil Smith Composer |
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"Phenodynamic A-Life Thesis" |
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"Spectral Codes" for Cornet and Bass Flute |
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