"Hammock Hanging Upon Girders Like A Weary Pupa". The Score for Bass Clarinet or Baritone Saxophone

"Hammock Hanging Upon Girders Like A Weary Pupa"

The Score for Bass Clarinet or Baritone Saxophone

Bil Smith

Commissioned by Getinge

Published on LNM Editions

(Laboratorie New Music)

"The Oligarchy" Bil Smith Composer. Commentary by John Carpenter and Recording Link

"The Oligarchy" Bil Smith Composer                                                                               

THE RECORDING:  https://soundcloud.com/bil-smith/the-oligarchy-excerpt-1

This may be Bil Smith"s most revolutionary message, I think, it is also probably his simplest: the subject must take responsibility for his own subjectivity.

This is a message nobody wants to hear. Especially not today, when the drink of choice is postmodern skepticism: "I am aware of what I am doing but I do it anyway." Smith takes aim at the post-structuralist, the postmodernist, the post-whateverist, the empty Foucauldian fad, the politically correct, the practicing non-believer, the all-too-comfortable victim, and then he throws lots of vegetables at their big silly phallic performance.

Let's remember what his music surmises.

Smith, is very good in his particulars and has a consummate grasp of the great composers of the modern age.

Musical ideology for Smith (the theoretical Multimodality and Compaction themes) is something that is constantly spat out, in contradistinction for whom it is all subsumed, refined, and processed into knowledge which, is solid as a Slovenian sausage and as unsavory in its mode of production.

For him, there is no sublime except in the twilight of life's contradictions, where concepts of being and time are turned on their heads like salt and pepper shakers.

Again, as we listen, we are startled by Smith, the composerist's itemized insights as much as we are baffled by the way he waffles between abhorring and embracing popular culture and between expostulating and identifying with advocates of sonic democracy.

In all, this recording is like an old roller coaster beefed up with modern metallurgy, and wanting more of that; but at its best down deep, dips where the wood shakes.

- John Carpenter

"Patch" for B Flat Trumpet

Opening Pages of Score for New Composition - Inspired by Fortunato Depero and F.T. Marinetti's Metal Book

Score 30' X 30"

To Be Published on Aluminum and Bolted Binding

Inspired by Fortunato Depero and F.T. Marinetti's Metal Book

 

"A Westbound Party Of Mannequins"

"A Westbound Party Of Mannequins"

harpe

piano 1

piano 2

cb

vcelle. 1

vcelle 2

alto 2

alto 1

vl. 1

vl. 2

vibr. 1

vibr. 2

tuba

trb.sord. sèche

trp. picc. en ré. sord. sèche

cor en fa

bsn

clar. b. ben Si

cor de b. en fa

htb. d’a

picc.

"Venerated Fantasy" for Pocket Flugelhorn

'Position, influence". David Coll Composer. A Recapitulation by Bil Smith Composer. Inspired by S'natra's "Can't See Me"

"Revenity BroadSpring" for Piano

"Gantusa". For Flugelhorn, Vibraphone and Alto Trombone

"Gantusa"

 For Flugelhorn, Vibraphone and Alto Trombone

Bil Smith Composer

PDF Score:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yscFDf6X0NAj5lqF9OxUIF8-HZbj0ghv/view?usp=sharing

"One At A Time Please" For Piano. Bil Smith Composer

"Temperation". For Piano.

"UnLaced" for Bass Trombone

 

"UnLaced" 

for Bass Trombone

Bil Smith Composer

Link to Hi-Res PDF Score

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wjxw4qm5NW6MI4A1a-IAeN9DZpPrZACw/view?usp=sharing

The Compositional Palimpsest: "Detlin's Baby" for Celeste and Bass Flute

"Detlin's Baby" for Celeste and Bass Flute

A compositional palimpsest always enacts a double play of concealment and revelation, erasing one notational passage to inscribe another and then suppressing the latter to display the first. 

The compositional palimpsest obstructs to make a view possible. 

Appropriately, the word means both a document that has been erased as well as one on which composition appears, and it records that doubling notational etymologically. “Palimpsest,” from the classical Latin palimpsestus (paper or parchment that has been written on again), derives from the Hellenistic Greek παλίμψηστος (scraped again) and παλίμψηστον (a parchment from which writing has been erased), which in turn ultimately derive from the ancient Greek πάλιν (again) plus ψηστός, from the verb “to sand.” 

Blanchot’s verbal doubling explains itself. The marked repetition of “sable coulant et s’écoulant” not only mimes the doubled layering of sounds described in the passage, but it also encrypts a palimpsest— literally, “to re-sand,” “to sand again”— as the literary analogue of the silence that reveals sound, the breathing that both masks and permits speech. 

Bringing into view by erasing, the compositional palimpsest is a parchemin ablué: composition that has undergone both a cleansing removal and a restoration. 

Ablution, that restorative cleansing or cleaning of a surface, here attracts its near twin “ablation,” another word associated, as it happens, with sand. “Ablation” can of course denote any removal, as in the surgical excision of a body part, but it most commonly refers to removal of the surface layer of an object by sanding, or sometimes, specifically, the removal of sand itself (as by wind).

"Wild Divine" for Suspended String Quartet