"LevelLore" for Guitar

Threading the Fragment: On the Score of LeveLore for Guitar

 LeveLore for Guitar exists as an act of quiet but radical provocation. It is not a score in the traditional sense—it is a memorial architecture, a body plan, and a wound sewn back together. Through it, I mobilize the guitar not as a mere vessel for music, but as a mnemonic organ. The composition becomes the site of reconstitution: a precarious stitching together of memory, gesture, and spatial logic.

Visual Ambiguity and the Blur of Instruction

The score for LeveLore resists semantic anchoring. At first glance, it suggests a schema—a vaguely familiar grid or diagrammatic space. But closer inspection dissolves that order. Its notations refuse fixity: arrows arc with no clear direction, partial shapes interrupt themselves, and fragments of words break into ligatures without resolution. Symbols—some architectural, others anatomical, many entirely invented—float across the page like motes in a half-lit vault.

There is no stasis here. The eye is never allowed to settle. Each reading produces new alignments, each interpretation reveals occlusions. The ambiguity is not a flaw, but a foundational strategy. It destabilizes hierarchies of instruction: there are no bar lines, no clefs, no temporal grid to guide the player into orthodoxy. Instead, Smith offers a topology of memory, where notational elements behave like ghosts—present, but unfixed. It is a score designed to be forgotten and remembered simultaneously, demanding from the performer not just fidelity, but attunement.

Structural Morphism: The Score as Body, Frame, and Memory Palace

To play LeveLore is to inhabit a mutable form. The score operates as a morphic skeleton, subtly echoing the blueprint of both architectural elevations and human anatomy. Arches, cavities, tendon-like curves, scaffolded voids—these forms emerge and recede within the notational layout, constructing a kind of corporeal architecture. Here, the body of the performer is drawn into correspondence with the architecture of the score. Fingering decisions become acts of spatial navigation; sonorities are mapped like interior volumes; silences behave like negative space.

Structurally, LeveLore refuses to settle into linear development. Instead, the piece is organized through nodal morphologies—clusters of material that transform not through variation, but through accumulative memory. That is, one cluster (or visual module) doesn’t evolve from the previous in the traditional musical sense. Rather, it remembers it. It “mends” the prior module’s rupture by offering a rethreading of shapes, orientations, or gestures, suggesting that the act of composing—and performing—is fundamentally an act of repair.

The Thread as Symbol: Fragility, Repair, and Wholeness

Perhaps the most resonant metaphor in LeveLore is that of the thread. Notationally and conceptually, the score is sutured rather than assembled. Visual elements are connected via filaments—lines that resemble stitches, strands of hair, or sutures in a body or garment. In this way, the act of performance mirrors the act of mending: the guitarist is tasked not with mastering the piece, but with healing it, tracing each ambiguous marking as one might trace a scar, not to erase it but to acknowledge it as a site of history.

The thread is more than a linear connector. It is a symbol of fragility, a time-bearing medium. Its very nature implies tension, pull, unraveling. To follow the thread through the score is to witness time fraying and folding upon itself. There is something deeply personal here—a nod perhaps to the way memory works: never complete, always patchworked, often tender and raw. In this sense, LeveLore is not just a guitar piece, but a ritual of interior restoration.

Toward an Inner Piece

LeveLore is, ultimately, a work about interiority. Its visual ambiguity, structural morphism, and use of the thread as both motif and method all point toward a music that is not expressive in the outward, declarative sense, but inwardly excavative. This is not a score to be decoded; it is a site to be inhabited, lived in, and slowly remembered into sound.

“Tesellect Ausarta et al Delicon” for Solo Violin

 

“Tesellect Ausarta et al Delicon” for Solo Violin

Bil Smith Composer

Published by LNM Editions

“Tesellect Ausarta et al Delicon” for solo violin utilizes a dense multi-modal notation system based on the fluctuations of iconographic shadows and mutable planes to create an immersive performative experience that expands momentary perception into hybrid topological spaces.

Rather than a static representation, the notation traces topographical pathways across both horizontal and vertical surfaces in constant flux. The performer navigates this impermanent terrain of lines and shifting graphic contours through a personalized orientation to the score’s internal logic and codes.

Auditory stimuli echo visual negations, resonating both presence and absence simultaneously from a single bow stroke thanks to the notation’s reductionist yet evocative minimal language.

Amidst the apparent chaos lies a hidden logic. The scores establishes a "reductive simplicity" within the system, a code accessible to those who engage with its intricacies. This accessibility, paired with the score's inherent visual intrigue, invests the piece with a peculiar authority – the authority of rational thought and reason applied to the seemingly irrational realm of shadows.

Processing these clustered graphic traces requires refined perceptual focus within each instantaneous choice point, at once losing and finding one’s place again repetitively. The resulting sound world therefore reflects the continual re-stabilization of perspective amidst registers of enduring change.

In this way, rational thought intersects intuitive flow states to birth an intricate counterpoint grounded by persistent instability. As listener, we enter fugal worlds where each singular tone intimates a multiplicity of concurrent alternate musical realities that flicker at the edges of our awareness.

The Score You Cannot See, Only Smell: Notes Toward a Tactile Score

Let us begin not with a score, but with a page. A paper page. Ordinary in thickness, perhaps slightly yellowed from sun, coated not with sound but with instructions for your nose. It is quiet when you look at it. But when you scratch—gently, or violently depending on your interpretive temperament—it exhales. The scent arrives, not like a sign, but like a summons. And then you must act.

You don’t read this score. You smell it. Or rather, you smell it and then you read your own reaction to it. Somewhere, long ago, the scent of coriander met your grandmother’s fingers. That is now part of the score. It will never be the same twice.

A Method of Scores That Refuse to Be Read

These are the tactile scores, or what I now prefer to call the Smelling Sheets, having spent a month in a heatless studio in Tribeca where a soprano with no nose (the result of a childhood skin disease, she told me) performed an entire trio from a score laced with bruised lilac, aged balsamic, and burning rubber. She memorized the scent cues based on audience reaction. Her pitch was perfect. Her lungs were ruined.

We tried patchouli on stave three. It stained her gloves. She wept and said it reminded her of the hallway in a Vienna hostel where she once miscarried.

Was that in the score? Or did the score simply make space for it?

The Mechanics of Emission

Scratch-and-sniff was too crude. We tried microcapsules embedded in gampi paper, but humidity ruined the diffusion pattern. Eventually we settled on an ink made from cedarwood oil, civet absolute, and saffron tincture. You couldn't see it. But when you opened the page, the room changed.

Each scent acted as a trigger. But not for the audience—for the performer.

The bassoonist was instructed:

• If scent resembles resin or pine → sustain note to the edge of breath

• If scent burns → interrupt the phrase with silence

• If scent is floral but impure → modulate into upper register tremolo

These were not “rules,” of course. These were entanglements.

The Taxonomy of Air and Paper

We attempted a codex:

• C1: Myrrh (melancholic harmonic minor)

• C2: Ambergris (drone + vocal fricative overlay)

• C3: Cumin (cut-time rhythm interruption)

• C4: Vetiver (choose silence or multiphonic instability)

• C5: Skin musk (performer memory override—refer to emotional ledger)

Each code was scratched into the margin in invisible ink. The performers could find them only by olfactory triangulation—a score without index or legibility, where performance emerged through forensics of the air.

One violist mistook vetiver for galbanum and began weeping during the second movement. We kept the take.

What Cannot Be Archived

You cannot archive these scores. They rot. They fade. They stink, they fail, they leak memory. That is their instrumental beauty. You might find a page from Trio for Two Nose-Breathers and One Mouth in a library someday, but the patchouli will have turned to mildew, and the sandalwood will have become nothing.

This is part of the design. Decay is the tempo marking.

A Brief Note on My Own Attempt

In 2019, I composed a work called The Misremembered Breath of My Former Lover. Each page of the score contained a single embedded scent, chosen from bottles I had once hidden beneath her sink. I arranged them out of order. I wore gloves to avoid trace contamination. Each scent dictated not a pitch or rhythm, but a confession. The pianist improvised based on what they believed I might have done. It was a mistake. Too literal. Too safe.

In the 2022 revision, I removed the instruments entirely and replaced them with a box of 32 perfumed tissues. Each performer wiped their hands and face with one and sat in silence. The audience coughed. One person fainted. A critic called it “unforgivable.”

But I forgave it. Because some smells are just wounds that haven’t been notated yet.

The Breath Is the Score

All this leads me back to the beginning. A page. Not to read, but to disturb. To scratch. To bruise. To inhale. In these scores, sound is a function of breath, and breath is a function of history, and history is always molecular.

There are no dynamics. Only diffusion.

No tempo. Only decay.

No staff. Only skin.

To perform the tactile score is not to play a part, but to breathe someone else's memories. That’s not performance. That’s possession.

And the best part?

No one can ever prove what you heard.

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Tricky and the Renegade Instrument Makers

Not every instrument sounds the same.  Take "Tricky"the trumpet from Thomas Inderbinen I bought last year. I waited with great anticipation to receive this beautiful work of art of which their are only two in the world.

This instrument is a brilliant timbral innovation; an enormous bell, not typical of a trumpet, unique and unusual plating and a completely different sonority that I have ever experienced. Four valves, quarter tone...time to practice. It's very humbling. Thomas makes one of a kind instruments: completely experimental in every facet of his methodical thought process...His name for the trumpet is "Tricky".

I find myself, as a composer, seeking instruments that possess a specific timbre; whether it be the snare drums of Ronn Dunnett, the OctaBass Flute from Eva Kingman or the unique trumpets from Inderbinen and Zimbauer.

DaVinci

I hear these instruments played and immediately realize they posses a quality that is not captured in a traditional trumpet, flute or snare drum.  

Studie

I have begun to write works which specify instruments based on their manufacturers and while I recognize this may be a limitation, in certain ways, I also know that once you hear these instruments as a composer, you can understand the distinctive characteristics that they possess.


It's compelling and has put me on a path to identify those incredible craftsman who can redefine the fundamental characteristics of traditional instruments.