"Mimetized Disasters, Dan Quayle And His Evangelist Wife In A Hotel Room". The Score and Transparencies

"Mimetized Disasters, Dan Quayle And His Evangelist Wife In A Hotel Room". Page One

"Mimetized Disasters, Dan Quayle And His Evangelist Wife In A Hotel Room". 

Instrumentation:

Euphonium

Piccolo Saxophone

(Eppelsheim - Soprillo)

Contraforte

(Eppelsheim-Wolf)

Dynoresonant 

B Flat Trumpet

The Score and Transparencies

Bil Smith Composer

A Commission from Time Warner

"Mimetized Disasters..." explores a rhythm that abandons counting, that engages with speed and duration as primary rather than secondary occurrences, and that emerges through the interface between movement and resistance and from models of force, viscosity, and friction. 

In this work, I examine some of the limitations of existing rhythmic notation and, using examples from non-geometrical’ notational approaches. I had been struggling for some time with concerns about an increasing prevalence of notational grids, and

in particular the overwhelming dominance of the horizontal and the vertical in the notation of rhythm

Hyper- Appropriation:

The (The) inevitable violation.  A perfect conversion of the objective sum and a precise allusion.

Transparency One

Transparency

Luxtrapathy, Capitalocene, and the Logicade for Trumpet and Cello: Notation as Infrastructural Fiction

 

“Luxtrapathy, Capitalocene, and the Logicade”: An Aesthetic Technology for Trumpet and Cello

One does not read this score. One enters it.

Across its partitioned surface etched in chromatic vector and modular topology, we encounter not a composition, but a system of knowing. "Luxtrapathy, Capitalocene, and the Logicade" refuses the linearity of conventional music notation and instead orchestrates a machine for time-experiencing, rendered simultaneously in data, metaphor, and myth.

It is written for trumpet and cello.  Two instruments stretched here not only across register, but across epistemic tension: breath and bow, metallic propulsion and fibrous resistance. The result is less a duet and more a semantic exchange, conducted across contradictory zones of presence and absence.

The first frame of the score is both ornamental and clinical. Brass-gold gradients clash against gunmetal blue fields. These chromatic fields do not merely stage notation; they perform an affective inversion. What glows with visual clarity obfuscates in meaning; what appears simple throbs with recursive complexity.

“"Luxtrapathy,"an invented compound of lux (light, radiance) and pathy (feeling, suffering) designates a form of illumination that blinds even as it seduces. Here, musical gestures are not written as commands but exposures. Notation blooms into calligraphic morphology, part architectural plan, part surgical interface.

Beneath the brass title “TOMIAVA 5” and its shadow-opposite “YALSIVO 9,” a field of spectral glyphs flicker: notated as if haunted, spectralized into the faint, the barely-there. The music becomes a technology of fading, where events are scaffolded on the brink of disappearance. What remains is not the phrase, but its residue.

In another discreet panel, we find ourselves among brands, syllables, and patented fragments: CHERILLISP. TYMAT. LINGSONN. CITO.

They are not names. They are vectors.  They are tokens of a para-economic language. The score here dissolves into corporate surrealism, where every name is both a claim and a veil. Graphically, these are arranged within radiant zones of silver and mauve: not neutral, but institutional. Bureaucratic gradients masquerading as elegance.

Each musical passage here is framed in quasi-algorithmic units. What looks like traditional staves is quietly dismantled by nested brackets, echo clusters, graphic interjections, and the occasional appearance of industrial iconography...a screw, a barcode, an architectural form.

What emerges is a kind of audit of musical labor. Each gesture must justify itself, not through expressive agency, but through diagrammatic consistency. It is the Capitalocene rendered in sound: a place where even breath and bowing technique are abstracted into value flows.

The third panel, perhaps the most elaborately designed, plunges us into the domain of the Logicade. Here the music becomes play, but a regulated play, with its own grammar of control, glitch, and surprise.

Let us define the Logicade as a ludic epistemology: a worldview in which logic becomes game, and the game becomes score. Across this zone, trumpet and cello are cast not as interpreters but as operators.  They become executors of sonic maneuvers inside a semiotic arcade.

Diagrams spiral. Notation stretches and recoils. Glissandi appear beside punctured spheres and orbital scripts. The Logicade rewards fluency not in reading music, but in navigating diagrammatic uncertainty.

Here, the musicians improvise not from instinct but from spatial coordinates. They do not perform; they simulate.

Towards a Lexicon of the Score

To engage with this system fully, we must name its parts.  To score is to invent grammar.  From this work, we derive the following terms:

• Luxtrapathy – The pathology of excessive visibility; when sonic form becomes overlit and evacuated of intimacy.

• Auditonics – The practice of rendering musical decisions legible to bureaucratic logic.

• Glyphonomy – The study of semiotic particles that carry neither pitch nor rhythm, but instructional aura.

• Value Drift – When notational form escapes its origin to accrue alternate meanings through placement.

• Logicade – A designed logic-as-game, wherein instrumental behavior becomes rule-determined action.

• Modal Ciphers – Sonic signatures encoded not as pitch collections but as spatial event triggers

• 
  

  
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Coda: Notation as Infrastructural Fiction

"Luxtrapathy, Capitalocene, and the Logicade" is not a performance score. It is an infrastructural fiction. Its diagrams simulate the behavior of sound within regimes of control, visibility, and abstraction.

Trumpet and cello here are instruments of more than tone: they are epistemic agents.  They emerge as conduits through which the score’s operative logic becomes temporarily audible.

We are not being asked to listen.

We are being asked to navigate.

Recessive Tablatures: A New Frontier in Musical Notation and Interpretation

Recessive Tablatures: Toward a Deconstructive Notion of the Musical Score

To speak of Recessive Tablatures in the Derridean sense is to evoke a site of multiplicity and différance.  They are scores no longer constrained by the rigid binaries of prescriptive and interpretative, but one that operates as a field of constant deferral, of interstitial spaces where meaning and sound dissolve, reconstitute, and dissolve again. The recessive quality here is not merely one of subordination or withdrawal but is a deliberate and generative retreat, where what is withheld becomes as potent as what is given, if not more so. In this way, Recessive Tablatures are not just a notational system but a philosophical interrogation of notation itself, a questioning of its origins, its functions, and its possibilities.

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"Detlin's Baby" for Alto Flute

The Trace of the Score: Erasure, Presence, and Absence

The concept of Recessive Tablatures begins with a fundamental premise: that every mark on the page and carries within it the trace of what it excludes. The traditional musical score, in its seemingly authoritative clarity, is a structure of violence, a suppression of the unmarked, the silenced possibilities that exist at its margins. Recessive Tablatures, by contrast, make space for these silences. They posit a score where absence is inscribed as presence, where what is erased leaves its ghostly imprint, its irreducible remainder.

Take, for instance, a fragment of notation that has been intentionally degraded or obscured...perhaps an eighth note whose stem is erased, whose placement on the staff is uncertain. In the language of Recessive Tablatures, this erasure is not a void but a productive gap, a site where the performer must actively negotiate meaning. The trace of the erased note lingers, not as an absence to be lamented but as a presence to be inhabited, explored, and even celebrated.

A Hypothetical Example: The Dissolving Bar Line

Imagine a score where the traditional bar lines are rendered in fading gradients, moving from bold opacity to translucent shadow. The first bar is clear and authoritative; the last is barely visible, almost a memory. The performer, encountering this fading structure, must decide: Does the dissolution signal a move toward rubato, an abandonment of strict meter? Or does it invite a hyper-precise adherence to the remnants of structure? The bar line, in its recession, becomes an open-ended question, a site of différance where meaning is perpetually deferred.

Writing Under Erasure: Notation as Palimpsest

In Recessive Tablatures, the score functions as a palimpsest, a surface where multiple layers of meaning coexist, overlap, and obscure one another. The composer, rather than presenting a single, unified text, inscribes a series of provisional gestures, each of which points beyond itself to a network of potential interpretations. The performer, in turn, becomes an archaeologist of sorts, excavating these layers and deciding which to privilege, which to ignore, and which to let linger in the background.

A Hypothetical Example: Layered Transparency

Consider a score printed on multiple sheets of translucent vellum. The top layer contains a traditional melody line; beneath it, faintly visible, are alternative pitches and rhythms that suggest possible embellishments or deviations. A third layer might include abstract graphic symbols, and a fourth, textual cues like "hesitate" or "disperse." The performer, manipulating these layers, creates a dynamic reading of the score, choosing which elements to foreground and which to let recede. The act of performance becomes an act of writing, a re-inscription of the score that is unique to each iteration.

The Economy of Différance: Recessive Temporality

Time, in Recessive Tablatures, is no longer a linear progression from one moment to the next but a field of simultaneous possibilities, a temporality that folds back on itself and opens outward in all directions. The score, rather than dictating a fixed sequence of events, suggests temporal flows that are fluid, recursive, and indeterminate.

A Hypothetical Example: Temporal Loops

A passage in the score is marked with overlapping rhythmic structure.  These make take the form of triplets in one layer, duplets in another, and free-floating accelerandi in a third. The performer is instructed to "weave" these rhythms together, not in strict alignment but in a way that allows them to resonate against one another. The result is a temporal texture that feels both anchored and unmoored, a pulse that is perpetually becoming but never fully arrives.

This temporal indeterminacy aligns with Derrida's notion of the "future anterior."  It becomes a sense of time that is always already in flux, where the past is rewritten by the present, and the future is haunted by the traces of what has come before.

The Role of the Performer: From Executor to Interpreter

In the world of traditional notation, the performer is often positioned as a subordinate figure, a medium through which the composer's intentions are realized. Recessive Tablatures disrupt this hierarchy, positioning the performer as a co-creator, an active participant in the construction of meaning.

A Hypothetical Example: Textual Resonances

A passage in the score contains fragments of text: "fractured clarity," "oscillating shadow," "vanish toward brightness." These phrases are not instructions but resonances, verbal textures that invite the performer to consider not just what to play but how to inhabit the music. The text functions as a horizon of meaning, a field of possibilities that the performer must navigate.

Toward an Interdisciplinary Notation

Recessive Tablatures do not exist in isolation; they draw on a broad range of influences from art, architecture, and literature. The score becomes a site of interdisciplinary exchange, where the visual, the spatial, and the textual converge to create a new mode of musical communication.

A Hypothetical Example: The Architectural Score

A section of the score is laid out not in traditional staves but as a spatial diagram that suggest relationships between musical ideas. The performer, interpreting this diagram, must consider not just the sound but the space it inhabits, the way it interacts with the physical environment of the performance.

The Future of Recessive Tablatures

Recessive Tablatures represent a radical rethinking of what a score can be. By embracing ambiguity, deferral, and multiplicity, they open up new possibilities for both composition and performance. They challenge us to reconsider the very nature of musical meaning, to see the score not as a static text but as a living, breathing field of potential.

In this way, Recessive Tablatures are not just a notation system but a philosophical proposition, a call to rethink the relationships between composer, performer, and audience, between presence and absence, between what is written and what is yet to be imagined. They remind us that music, like language, is always more than it appears...always receding, always becoming, always arriving.

"Interiority" for Solo Harp. Bil Smith Composer.

 

"Interiority"

For Solo Harp

Bil Smith Composer

Published by LNM Editions

Link To Full (PDF) Score:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VzpVyDOVz5-33A1nbUqzLKgMPrNiifzs/view?usp=sharing

"Interiority" for Solo Harp is a compositional anthology of projects that defy traditional norms, trapped within theoretical contexts, obscured by fictitious parameters, and entangled in hypothetical physics. This score is not concerned with constructability or adhering to existing praxis; rather, it is a bold inquiry into the unique relationship between the harpist, notation, and composition.

At its core, "Interiority" serves as a manifesto of constructed unrealities, fabricated orthographies, and synthetic syntax. It challenges conventional norms and introduces new dimensions to the world of musical composition. The notational devices within the score become a parallel to the nature of the work itself, manifesting as a web of fabricated histories, projections, and rogue inquiries, both conceptual and physical. This amalgamation of artifice and authenticity becomes the heart of the notation and the composition itself, blurring the lines between reality and imagination.

The score of "Interiority" represents a self-referential proto-typology, an experiment that delves into the curation, articulation, and dissemination of the composition. It invites inquiry, interpretation, and thrives on divergence, pushing the boundaries of what we traditionally associate with musical notation. This departure from the norm serves as a canvas for the harpist to express their artistic individuality, transcending the conventional constraints of music notation.

The construction of new notational vocabularies within "Interiority" may initially bewilder the performer. It challenges our established notions of how music should be communicated, pushing the boundaries of conventional musical language. Yet, the intent is not to confound but rather to stimulate curiosity.

With an understanding of the reasoning behind the deconstructed and reconstructed lexicon, these new constructs cease to appear alien. They become a gateway with its distorted chronological identifiers serving as purposeful contradictions. These artificial chronicles become the foundation upon which the work is built, creating an intricate web of ambiguity.

In this score, the harpist is not just a performer but an explorer of synthetic territories, an architect of fictitious parameters, and a communicator of hypothetical physics.

"Planeta Redoubt" for Solo Clarinet

 

"Planeta Redoubt" 

for Solo Clarinet

Bil Smith Composer

2024

A Commission from Keyence Corporation

The Score as Thought Experiment: Composition Without Performance Intent

 

Let's think about the score not as a route to performance, but as an autonomous object: a speculative instrument built to model musical possibility rather than to realize it. Its primary medium is not sound, but the conditions under which sound could be argued into existence. The notation reads like a protocol, a diagram, a legal brief, an index of exceptions, proposing a compact physics in which contradictions are not glitches to be resolved but structural features to be preserved.

By refusing performance intent, the score dislocates the usual hierarchy of “instruction → execution.” What matters here is not whether the work can be played, but what the score makes thinkable. Its procedures test the limits of legibility and authority: directives that over-clarify, rules that contain their own exemptions, measurements designed for phenomena that cannot stabilize. The result is a compositional practice that treats coherence as a kind of theater and treats rigor as something that can be applied to uncertainty.

Viewed curatorially, the score functions as a thought experiment with material consequences. It stages composition as an epistemic event, where the work’s content is the act of specifying, classifying, and authorizing. The page becomes a site where music is imagined with the force of policy: not to be fulfilled, but to be confronted. In this sense, the score is complete at the moment it proposes its impossible terms.  It becomes an object that performs its own logic, whether or not any body ever agrees to sound it.

What Happens when the Score is Treated as a Constructed Apparatus?

 

What happens when the score is treated as a constructed apparatus, less a prescription for sound than a system for producing it under invented conditions? It privileges the anomaly, the misalignment, and the procedural “failure” as compositional facts, elevating what is usually corrected into primary material. The notation functions like a measuring instrument calibrated for the marginal: hesitation, near-silence, micro-errors, and the gap between instruction and execution.

Rather than expressive interpretation, performers adopt an administrative role, operating rules, issuing authorizations, and enacting corrections that never fully resolve. Form emerges through precise instability: each attempt at clarity generates a new contradiction, each solution becomes the next problem. The performance reads as an experiment that cannot be replicated, a temporary physics in which the overlooked becomes structure and the act of compliance becomes audible.

Polemic Essay Music 1 & 2

 

"The Few Slender Feet of U.S. Sovereignty"

"The Few Slender Feet of U.S. Sovereignty"

For Cornet, Xylophone & Baritone Guitar

Bil Smith Composer

Commissioned by Alitalia

Link To PDF Score

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PT1rEZH4qeVTA_cy3Ah7JVQJVhQq67bD/view?usp=sharing

The Contemporary Score in Transformation: Reinventing Notation Through Interdisciplinary Influences

The evolution of musical notation has often mirrored shifts in cultural, artistic, and philosophical paradigms. As music enters the 21st century, it is increasingly clear that traditional approaches to notation and scoring are insufficient for conveying the complexities and interdisciplinary ambitions of contemporary composers. This period marks the dawn of a transformative reinvention of the musical score.  We are witnessing a metamorphosis influenced by the visual, architectural, and material languages of other disciplines.

In this article, we explore how the oeuvres of Donald Judd, Thom Mayne’s "Strange Networks", Arte Povera, Ed Ruscha, and David Carson can serve as potent sources of inspiration for composers seeking to develop notational systems and scores that transcend conventional boundaries. By examining these diverse influences, we aim to propose a new interpretative framework for crafting notation and scores...one that emphasizes materiality, spatiality, and performative engagement.

Donald Judd: Minimalism and the Dimensional Score

Donald Judd’s minimalist sculptures are characterized by their clean lines, modular forms, and emphasis on materiality. His work challenges viewers to engage with objects in relation to their surrounding space, rejecting traditional notions of representation in favor of pure experience.

Applications to Notation and Scoring

• Modular Scoring: A score inspired by Judd could consist of modular, geometric panels that performers assemble or rearrange during a performance. Each module could represent a different musical parameter allowing performers to construct the composition dynamically.
• Material Interaction: Judd’s emphasis on industrial materials (e.g., metal, plywood) can be translated into tactile scores. For example, a metal panel engraved with notation might require performers to physically trace lines or depress surfaces to generate sound, merging the visual and tactile dimensions of performance.
• Spatial Engagement: A Judd-inspired score might take the form of a three-dimensional installation, with notations spread across a physical space. Performers would move through the installation, activating musical elements through their spatial navigation.

Thom Mayne’s "Strange Networks": Complexity and Organic Systems

Architect Thom Mayne’s work in "Strange Networks" explores the intersection of structural complexity and organic fluidity. His designs often feature nonlinear, web-like forms that challenge traditional notions of order and hierarchy.

Applications to Notation and Scoring

• Network-Based Notation: Drawing from Mayne’s architectural language, a score could be conceived as a web of interconnected nodes, each representing a musical event. Performers navigate these nodes based on interpretative choices, creating unique trajectories through the composition.
• Dynamic Systems: Inspired by Mayne’s adaptive structures, notational elements could shift or change depending on the performer’s actions. For example, a digital score could reconfigure itself based on tempo or intensity, mirroring the responsive nature of Mayne’s designs.
• Organic Aesthetics: Mayne’s biomorphic forms can influence the visual design of scores, replacing rigid staves and symbols with fluid, curvilinear lines that evoke the natural world.

Arte Povera: Materiality and Ephemerality

Arte Povera, an Italian art movement, emphasizes the use of everyday, humble materials to challenge conventional notions of art and its relationship to society. Artists such as Mario Merz and Jannis Kounellis employed raw, ephemeral, and often unconventional materials to create works that defied permanence and categorization.

Applications to Notation and Scoring

• Material-Based Scores: Arte Povera’s focus on unconventional materials such as cloth, stone, cardboard can inform the construction of scores. A score might be etched onto fabric or composed of torn paper fragments, requiring performers to assemble and interpret the pieces.
• Impermanence: Scores could be designed to degrade or change over time, emphasizing the ephemerality of performance. For example, a score made of biodegradable material might dissolve during the performance, leaving only traces of its original form.
• Raw Aesthetics: Arte Povera’s raw, unpolished aesthetic can inspire scores that prioritize texture and tactility over visual precision, inviting performers to engage with the score as a physical object.

Ed Ruscha: Words, Type, and Visual Language

Ed Ruscha’s iconic use of words and type as central elements in his artwork demonstrates the power of text as a visual and conceptual medium. His work transforms ordinary phrases into evocative, multilayered statements through typography, layout, and context.

Applications to Notation and Scoring

• Typographic Notation: Inspired by Ruscha, composers could integrate bold, evocative text into scores as notational cues. Words such as stretch, break, or glide might direct the performer’s actions or techniques.
• Contextual Layers: Like Ruscha’s art, scores could layer text and symbols to create multidimensional meanings. For example, a word might be paired with a graphic element to suggest both a sonic and a conceptual interpretation.
• Narrative Elements: Ruscha’s text-based works often evoke narratives or moods. Scores might incorporate poetic or fragmentary texts that guide the performer’s emotional or interpretative approach.

David Carson: Deconstruction and Typographic Chaos

David Carson, a graphic designer known for his experimental and deconstructed typography, challenges traditional rules of legibility and layout. His work embodies a sense of controlled chaos, where meaning emerges through fragmentation and layering.

Applications to Notation and Scoring

• Deconstructed Scores: A Carson-inspired score might abandon linear notation in favor of fragmented, overlapping symbols and text. Performers would piece together the music through interpretive reconstruction.
• Dynamic Layouts: Carson’s ever-shifting typographic layouts can inspire scores where notational elements move or reconfigure themselves. For instance, a digital score might present symbols that rearrange in response to the performer’s actions.
• Emotive Typography: Carson’s use of expressive typography can inform the visual language of scores, with notational symbols designed to evoke specific emotions or energy.

The Future of Notation: A Transformative Period

The contemporary score is entering a transformative period of reinvention, driven by influences from disciplines as diverse as minimalism, architecture, conceptual art, and graphic design. These influences challenge the traditional notion of the score as a static, two-dimensional document, offering new possibilities for interaction, materiality, and interpretation.

Key Trends

1. Material Innovation: Scores as physical objects, engaging performers through touch and manipulation.
2. Dynamic Systems: Notations that adapt and evolve, reflecting the fluidity of contemporary performance practices.
3. Interdisciplinary Aesthetics: Integration of visual, architectural, and textual elements to create holistic, multisensory experiences.

Conclusion

As composers continue to explore the boundaries of notation, the contemporary score will evolve into a medium that not only encodes music but also embodies the spirit of interdisciplinary creativity. By drawing on the practices of Donald Judd, Thom Mayne, Arte Povera, Ed Ruscha, and David Carson, composers can craft scores that are not only visually and materially compelling but also profoundly transformative in their impact on performers and audiences alike.

A Pharmacopeia of Sound: Prescribing a New Notational Ontology

A Pharmacopeia of Sound: Prescribing a New Notational Ontology

In my latest work, musical notation takes an unprecedented turn into the pharmacological. A series of circular, color-centric diagrams – each one a concentric pharmacological bullseye – anchors this newly emergent prescriptive notational ontology. At first glance, these polished visuals resemble scientific targets or mandalas, ringed with vibrant hues and radial symmetry. Around each bullseye, dense blocks of text read like entries from an otherworldly Physicians’ Desk Reference: drug names, indications, dosages, and elaborate administration protocols. Yet nothing here is merely pharmaceutical.

The diagrams present a hybrid syntax – part medical classification, part poetic disruption – that invites us to experience notation as a wholly new discovery rather than a continuation of his prior compositions. In this curatorial commentary, we will explore the dual nature of this body of work: first, its visual/pharmacological language – the layers of color, clinical tone, and inventive jargon that collide in each diagram – and second, the performative or musical ramifications of these notational structures as a system of command, interpretation, or score.

Through themes of recursive logic, medical epistemology, semiotic overload, synesthetic transfer, and metaphoric decomposition, we encounter an ontology that challenges how we think about scores and the very nature of musical instruction. This text unfolds as a speculative analysis and philosophical inquiry, treating Smith’s project not as a subset of his past oeuvre but as a standalone ontological blueprint – a pharmaco-notational cosmos of its own.

Viewed through a curatorial lens, this pharmacological notational system stands as a speculative artwork in its own right. It transforms the score into a conceptual installation, not unlike a gallery of pill cabinets. The notation’s visual elements – its grids, shapes, and invented labels – can be appreciated aesthetically, even before a note is played. In fact, one could exhibit the scores on a wall and invite viewers to experience them much as they would a contemporary art piece, decoding the interplay of text and image, science and art. This underscores a key point: I bridges disciplines to provoke a deeper exploration of how we create and consume meaning. By appropriating the language of pharmacology, it prompts us to consider how musical performance, like medicine, is bound up with trust, experimentation, and the human desire to be transformed.