"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

"Eclipse Belief-Based Competition"

"Eclipse Belief-Based Competition"

For Glockenspiel, Rope and 22" Robert Spizzichino Ride Cymbal"

Bil Smith Composer

3'18"