Preview of New Commissioned Compositions for 2023: Works in Progress: Trio for Flute Bassoon and Tuba (Guillioche)

In this new piece for the trio of Flute, Bassoon and Tuba, I employ a Guillioche design aesthetic as a compositional tool.  Guilloché (/ɡɪˈloʊʃ/; or guilloche) is a decorative technique in which a very precise, intricate and repetitive pattern  is mechanically engraved into an underlying material via engine turning, which uses a machine of the same name, also called a rose engine lathe. This mechanical technique improved on more time-consuming designs achieved by hand and allowed for greater delicacy, precision, and closeness of line, as well as greater speed.

From Cardew's Treatise Handbook....

"However, the years of work on Treatise have furnished me with a fund of experience obviously distinct from the experience embodied in the score itself.  And this fund continues to accumulate , since my experience of and with the piece is by no means completed with the completion of the score ; so some of the excreta of this fund may as well be made available to those who, because it 's published, may shortly wish to be occupied with the score."

"The Library Forecourt At Some Private Reversed Murmur of Surprise" for Two Sopranino Saxophones. Donatiene Martin, Composer.

"The Library Forecourt At Some Private Reversed Murmur of Surprise" for Two Sopranino Saxophones.  Donatiene Martin, Composer.

Excerpt:"The Library Forecourt At Some Private Reversed Murmur of Surprise" for Two Sopranino Saxophones.  

Donatiene Martin, Composer.

Premiere November in Espoo, Uusimaa, Finland

A Commission from The Guidance Foundation, The Fredrik Idestam Trust and Nokia Corporation.

Excerpt:
"The Library Forecourt At Some Private Reversed Murmur of Surprise"
for Two Sopranino Saxophones.
Donatiene Martin, Composer.

Excerpt:
"The Library Forecourt At Some Private Reversed Murmur of Surprise"
for Two Sopranino Saxophones.
Donatiene Martin, Composer.

Excerpt:
"The Library Forecourt At Some Private Reversed Murmur of Surprise"
for Two Sopranino Saxophones.
Donatiene Martin, Composer.

Excerpt:
"The Library Forecourt At Some Private Reversed Murmur of Surprise"
for Two Sopranino Saxophones.
Donatiene Martin, Composer.

"Western Fantasy" for Inderbinen DaVinci B Flat Trumpet

"Perimeter Walls" (2002) Bil Smith Composer.

 

"Perimeter Walls" (2002) Bil Smith Composer.  An Oulipo inspired composition for for a solo percussionist, to be used in whole or in part to provide a solo or ensemble for any combination of pianists, string players and percussionists.

"Memphis Design" (Dedicated to Ettore Sottsass) For Bassoon

"Memphis Design"

(Dedicated to Ettore Sottsass)

For Bassoon

Bil Smith Composer

Link To Full PDF Score:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1z84Fw-chgJ5uesZM-agM_qB7l96BQBZc/view?usp=sharing

Why No "Performance Notes?"

Why no "Performance notes?"

Yes, I understand, my scores are not traditional in the academic music sense. I know that many composers who create different notational systems and unconventional tablatures will provide performance notes for their scores. 

I guess I am a bit different in that regard in that I do not subscribe to a “one size fits all” approach.  I like to understand the proficiencies/ strengths of each performer that I am working with by listening to them perform other works, whether audio or video performances. It gives me insight as to how to craft specific performance notes for that individual. 

In effect, it changes the aesthetic of the score and ultimately the final output (the performance).  

Back in 2017, the pianist Nicolas Horvath, performed a world premiere of a piano piece I wrote at Carnegie Hall.  I spent several months listening to his previous performances so I could construct a performance directive that accounted for his style and nuanced performance skills.  

I enjoy the journey of learning about the performer and how they will impact the work.  The score is a framework; a foundation. 

"Clue for Viola"

"Clue"

 for Viola

Bil Smith Composer

A Commission from Grupo Aval

Published by LNM Editions

IN PROGRESS: Two Pages of Score of New Work for Tuba.

 

IN PROGRESS: 

Two Pages of Score of New Work for Tuba.

Bil Smith Composer

2022

To be Published by LNM Editions

In this work for solo Tuba,  I have a simple premise as with many of my compositions.  I pretend that objects, notational elements and tactile visualizations form a self-composition.  This work consists of allowing the score to compose itself.  I believe that by incorporating new musical lexicons, I am creating compositions more relevant to today.   

"ROW BOANITINININ" for Recorder. Bil Smith

ROW BOANITINININ

Amid the explosive ebb and flow there are fleeting moments of relative calm. "Row Boanitininin", with its striated washes of sound, echoes the slick sheen of briny tide pools. Here, I, Bil Smith and Penone are at our most abstract and revelatory, where the forms of the waves are given over to the caprice of visual complexity.  — at Laboratorie New Music Studios.

An Ashbery poem often elides logic while slipping gracefully between the erudite and the vernacular. In the slippage, an otherwise unattainable, unsayable truth can appear. In his few verbal statements on his work, Willem de Kooning often  remarked on the importance of glimpsing and that his paintings were attempts to fix the act of a glimpse—in other words, to destabilize the static object of a painting by putting time back into it. He achieved this by covering and recovering the canvas quickly, scraping it down at the end of each day and starting from the traces, the stains, on the next.

 

"Dark Matter Facticity." For Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Sax and Percussion.

"Dark Matter Facticity"

For Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Sax and Percussion

The ‘orchestration of futurity’ that will allow ‘the future of composition to be thought of

as a game of chance’ brings into play a set of assumptions whose provenance is a bizarre mix of stereotyped curves, flying bombs, and kicking horses. 

Here probability figures not as incomplete knowledge, but as a supplementary construction that requires a ‘leap of faith’—a ‘cocktail’ of knowledge and generic idealization that is necessary in order to make indeterminacy go ‘live’ as an effective machine-part. 

"Predictive Predication" for Cello

Three Vignettes for Thein Contrabass Trombone with Two Slides

Post-Conceptual Composition

Conceptual composition may or may not be played out. Certainly the works that have come to define it have created a recognizable framework for critical appreciation and as I see many much younger composers taking up its approaches in what feels like a formulaic way, that seems to signal a phase of exhaustion to me, but perhaps not to others.

What I am addressing are the ways conceptual composition is the indicative aesthetic in our time—for reasons that have to do with larger cultural shifts.

Not everyone will remember the resistance to conceptualism’s place in music history, but in the 1990s, it was in response to the prevalent notion that minimalism had been the single most important development of the 1960s.

What composition and aesthetics are, and how we understand them, is not unrelated to what they do, or how they show and indicate other changes.  I sense emergent phenomena in the current culture that are expressions of a collective voice, at a scale, and with a willing participation in group think that is different from that which characterized modernism, romanticism, and contemporary work.

Will it displace other modes? Take its place alongside? Change values and aesthetic practices?

Questions as yet unanswerable.

Lascivious, Palsied and Oversolicitous