Chromatocellular Ataxia for Trumpet

 

Chromatocellular Ataxia for Trumpet

2025

Bil Smith Composer

"Audit" for Inderbinen Euphonium

"Valentina Gabor: Fairy Godmother". Bil Smith Composer

"Valentina Gabor: Fairy Godmother".  Bil Smith Composer.

for Viola, Pardessus de Viole, Alto Guitar, Pedal Steel Guitar, Archlute and Mandocello.

Premiere Performance:

MIPTV.  Palais des Festivals, Cannes, France

Commissioned by Foxtel

Publisher: Laboratorie New Music

"Unregulated Industrial Species" For Six Percussionists

"Unregulated Industrial Species"

For Six Percussionists

Bil Smith Composer

A Commission from Axxial

Published by LNM Editions

(Laboratorie New Music)

Each Percussionist to choose four (4) instruments from this list:

Desiring Machines and Impressions: Raymond Roussel and the Notational Logic of Subjective Mechanics

Desiring Machines and Impressions of Africa: Roussel and the Notational Logic of Subjective Mechanics

At the surreal edge of early 20th-century invention lies Impressions d’Afrique, Raymond Roussel’s theatrical hallucination of mechanical marvels, linguistic automata, and ritualized absurdities. It is not merely a play or novel, but a structural machine in itself—one powered less by plot than by processes of invention. Within its eccentric tableaux, Roussel presented machines that operated without function, rituals without precedent, and contraptions whose logic bypassed utility altogether. These artificial systems, unconcerned with realism, foreshadowed a lineage of conceptual machinery that would be retooled by artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia—figures who took Roussel’s perverse mechanization and rendered it into a language of erotic engineering and poetic obstruction.

Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique presents a world governed not by mechanical efficiency but by mental interference. His machines are metaphysical jokes, often producing aesthetic or linguistic results rather than physical outcomes. It is precisely this tension—between the machinic and the subjective—that so deeply influenced Duchamp’s own diagrams of desire, most notably in his Large Glass, or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. Here, the bachelor machine is an erotically frustrated system—a parody of Newtonian logic in which fluids stall, pistons hesitate, and desire misfires across layers of transparent glass. The machine, like Roussel’s inventions, is designed to not work—at least not according to the traditional laws of motion or cause-and-effect. Picabia, too, followed suit, his drawings populated with mechanical forms that were more symbolic than operational, drawn from crankshaft schematics and sexual innuendo rather than engineering blueprints.

Where Roussel gave us machines that symbolized inner thought and circular logics, Duchamp and Picabia imagined a new class of mechanism altogether: the bachelor machine—a machine not for production but for interpretation, not for utility but for symbolism, governed not by thermodynamics but by erotic failure. The machine becomes a vessel for inner contradiction, a ritualistic object capable of enacting desire, delay, and conceptual comedy.

It is in this precise tradition that my notational systems evolve—not as devices for translating composerly intent into performance, but as score-machines, configured to resist linear instruction while inviting interpretive friction. My approach is not one of symbolic legibility but of architectural complexity. Visual notational elements are placed within, under, next to, and inside each other—not as mere superimposition, but as a designed refusal of standard compatibility. Like Roussel’s inventions, my notational forms are compatible with their own material logics, but not necessarily with the performer’s expectations. They invite an ontology of notation that is self-sufficient—self-imagining, even—where the signs refer not to sound, but to their internal relations, interdependencies, and disobedient syntax.

The performer, in this scheme, is not a reader of instructions, but a decipherer of tensions. The score-machine, like the bachelor machine, is eroticized—not in the sexual sense, but in its pursuit of affect, resistance, and entanglement. It draws attention to itself as a structure, not simply a path. If Roussel could invent a phonographic plant that grows wax cylinders or a machine that translates color into sound into gesture, then I too aim to place glyphs and forms in paradoxical constellations—notations that resist being performed as they insist on being seen.

Thus, these scores become a mode of material abstraction, animated not by a drive to be played but by a drive to be solved, misread, and misremembered. In this light, the influence of Roussel is not merely aesthetic, but mechanical and conceptual. His legacy passes through Duchamp’s transparent partitions, Picabia’s eroticized cogs, and lands here—in the flickering tension of a page where notation has ceased to instruct and instead begins to dream.

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"The Cable Passed Through Her Clenched Fingers" For One Percussionist. Bil Smith Composer

"The Cable Passed Through Her Clenched Fingers"

For One Percussionist

Bil Smith Composer

Link To Hi-Res PDF Score

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16lCQ8Kt256rRQGHY68j9v-e2Jfdrfjeo/view?usp=sharing

Dynetic Notational System. Work in Progress for Solo Cello.

 

Auraland

Auraland

A Zone of Sonic Typography, Perceptual Banality, and Auditory Mirage

Definition (Compositional Ideology):

Auraland is a conceptual compositional aesthetic in which music functions as a geographic fiction—a flattened landscape of sound-events, typographic cues, and spatial ambiguity. The term fuses aural (relating to hearing) with the suffix -land, suggesting a place, a mythos, a map—yet one built from detachment, signage, and misdirection.

Inspired by Ed Ruscha’s linguistic pop minimalism, Auraland treats each composition as a zone, a billboard, or a souvenir postcard from a place that may or may not exist. It resists expressive depth in favor of surface tension—sound as stylized artifact, notation as architectural signage.

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Key Features:

• Typographic Notation as Place Marker: Textual directives like “Pause Here,” “Start Over There,” or “Fade Like a Streetlight” dominate the score, replacing conventional dynamics or phrasing. These are not instructions—they’re signs on a highway of sound.

• Flat Dynamics, Wide Space: Compositions often emphasize emotional neutrality—deadpan harmonies, understated gestures, slow unfolding over expanses of quiet. The space between sounds matters as much as the sounds themselves.

• Visual Layout as Cartography: The score might resemble a road atlas, a cinema title card, or a supermarket directory—each page a pseudo-functional design that gestures toward movement, but leaves orientation ambiguous.

• Minimal Gestural Material: Repetition is common. Musical ideas may return like franchise logos—slightly altered, corporate, but familiar. Variation happens without narrative intent.

• Ambiguous Tonal Signposts: Tonality flickers—never fully gone, never fully present. Triads dissolve into monochromes. Scales flatten into harmonic signage.

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Philosophical Underpinning:

Auraland embodies a paradox: music as both location and illusion, a map without a destination. It assumes that music today exists not in its performance, but in its surface presentation—as something seen before it is heard, like a Ruscha word painting hung in a pristine white room. In Auraland, meaning is neither hidden nor declared—it hovers in the title, in the font, in the space between gestures.

It reflects a world where sonic culture is aestheticized into lifestyle signage, where music is consumed like branded nostalgia or the ambient promise of a cinematic road trip.

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Composer in Auraland:

The composer is less an architect than a designer of affective signage. Each score is a false map to an imaginary auditory place. The goal isn’t to move the listener—it’s to suggest they’ve already arrived… somewhere. Somewhere between a soundcheck and a mirage.

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Closing Image:

Auraland is what plays

in a laundromat at 3 a.m.,

on the screen of a drive-in that hasn’t shown a movie in years,

written in Helvetica on the cover of a score

you never quite remember composing.

It’s not music.

It’s where music might have been.

"Bizzarrini" for Euphonium with Performance Guidance (PDF Link)

"Bizzarrini"

for Euphonium with Performance Guidance

Bil Smith Composer

2024

44" X 44"

Link to Full Score (Hi-Res PDF)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SuV337qS4dd5_SuYfNXObQeYmU3mkp_T/view?usp=sharing

The score for "Bizzarrini" is designed to represent a dynamic field of three-dimensional neometrical structures, where linear induction plays a pivotal role. This induction mechanism allows facets within the score to open and close, akin to a breathing organism that responds to the stimuli of musical interpretation. As these facets shift, they mold the framework of the composition, crafting a tapestry of perspectives that blur the lines between the spatial continuities of inside and outside.

One of the key aspects of the "Bizzarrini" score is its use of visual notational vectors. These vectors are not merely ornamental but serve as metaphors that guide the interpretation of the music. They elaborate the principal themes of the composition less like a mathematical proof and more like a gravitational center, exerting a centripetal force that draws all elements toward a cohesive auditory experience.

Paying homage to the concept of hypothetical modularity, "Bizzarrini" embraces a structure that allows for varying interpretations and performances. This modularity is not just a feature of the music's construction but also a reflection of the compositional philosophy behind it.

The concept of "hypothetical modularity" refers to a theoretical framework or approach where systems, designs, or structures are conceived as being modular, but such modularity isn't physically instantiated in a fixed manner. Instead, it remains a conceptual tool used to explore and manipulate the flexibility and potential configurations of a system.

OPICTORIOUS

 

Untitled

 

"Louis Meets Schmeling, 2016" for Alexander Strauch

"Louis Meets Schmeling, 2016"

For Alexander and Alexandra Strauch

Solo Piccolo

Bil Smith Composer