What He Gives Us to Read: A performer's account of Bil Smith's textual imprinting, from the inside.

What He Gives Us to Read

A performer's account of Bil Smith's textual imprinting, from the inside.

He sent the story four days before the performance. No explanation. No instruction about what to do with it, or when, or how many times. Just the story, attached to an email whose subject line read: for Sunday. I read it twice that evening, once before bed, and once more on Sunday morning, sitting in the kitchen in my coat because I had not yet turned on the heat. I put it down. I drove to the venue. I played the piece.

I am still not entirely sure what happened. But I know that something happened, and I know it was not the same thing that happens when I prepare for a performance by studying the score.

I have been working with composer Bil Smith for three years now, across six pieces, and in that time I have read a weather log, two aphorism collections, something he called a catalog essay but which I experienced more as a letter addressed to no one in particular, a short story set in a city I could not identify, and the story I read that Sunday in my kitchen with my coat on. The literary works are not programme notes. They are not explanations of the music. Several of them have no apparent connection to the music at all, not thematically, not imagistically, not structurally,  and this turns out to be precisely the point.

What the score does and does not do

I want to be careful here, because I am not interested in dismissing the score or suggesting that there is something insufficient about it. The score is doing exactly what a score should do. It is communicating pitch, duration, dynamics, articulation, the relationships between parts, the architecture of time. It is an extraordinarily efficient system for transmitting the structural facts of a piece of music from the composer's mind to the performer's hands.

But there is something the score does not transmit — cannot transmit, was never designed to transmit — which is the quality of attention with which I bring my hands to the instrument. The quality of listening. The degree to which I am genuinely inside the music I am playing rather than executing a series of correctly noted tasks.

Every performer knows the difference between these two states. We have all had performances where the notes were right and the music was elsewhere. We have all had performances where something we cannot name was present, and the audience could feel it, and we could feel them feeling it, and none of us could explain what had happened or guarantee it would happen again.

Bil is doing something about that gap. Something I have not encountered anywhere else.

The morning of the weather log

The first time, I was skeptical. The piece was a solo work for extended cello techniques... spectral, slow, obsessively focused on the acoustic properties of individual harmonics. He sent me a weather log. Handwritten entries, daily observations, temperature and barometric pressure and the quality of the light at different hours. Not poetic weather, not weather as metaphor. Actual weather, recorded with the patience of someone who had decided that what was outside the window deserved the same careful attention as what was inside it.

I read it the morning of the performance in a café near the venue and my first genuine response was: this has nothing to do with my piece. My second response came about a paragraph later and was harder to articulate. Something about the quality of attention in the log. The way each entry gave the morning it described the full weight of its own particularity. The way the writer seemed to believe that fifty-eight degrees Fahrenheit at seven forty-five on a Tuesday in March was worth recording precisely, not because anything dramatic had happened, but because it had happened, and because it was going to stop happening, and because the record was the only form of respect available.

I put the log away. I walked to the venue. I set up. I played.

The first ten minutes of that performance were unlike anything I had done before with that piece. I was not playing differently, technically. I was listening differently. Each harmonic was what it was. Each silence was exactly as long as it was. I was not managing the performance toward an intended effect. I was attending to it, in the way the weather log had attended to the temperature at seven forty-five on a Tuesday.

Afterwards I sat with the instrument in my lap for a long time without putting it away.

What it is not

I want to be precise about what textual imprinting is not, because the obvious misreading is available and I have offered it to myself more than once.

It is not programme music by proxy. He is not asking me to feel a particular emotion and express it through the music. If anything it is the opposite.  The texts tend to produce in me a state of attention that is prior to interpretation, prior to intention, prior to the question of what the music is about. The texts produce a quality of being present that then shapes the micro-decisions of performance without directing them.

It is not meditation or breathing exercises or any other preparation technique I have encountered, though it shares some qualities with those practices. The difference is that the text is an object outside me that I have genuinely encountered. It has its own intelligence. It is not a technique I am applying to myself. It is something I have read, and the reading has changed the interior of the morning.

It is not inspiration in the Romantic sense. I do not arrive at the instrument filled with the feeling of the text. I arrive having read something carefully, and the careful reading has placed me in a mode of receiving rather than projecting. The music comes to me rather than coming from me. This distinction sounds mystical but I experience it as practical and repeatable.

On the irreversibility problem

There is something Bil has said to me about why the literary text works in a way that conventional performance notes cannot. He calls it the irreversibility of the reading. Once you have read something, you cannot un-read it. The text has entered you without asking your permission. You cannot hold it at arm's length and decide whether to apply it, the way you can decide whether to follow a performance instruction.

This is correct, and it is also (from the performer's side) slightly alarming, which I mean as a compliment. The score gives me agency. I can follow it or deviate from it. I can interpret it or query it. I can hold it out in front of me and work with it consciously. The literary text does not give me that distance. It has already done its work by the time I am aware it is working.

There is a question of trust involved that does not exist in the conventional score-performer relationship. When a composer writes a dynamic marking, I can assess it against my own musical judgment and make a decision. When a composer sends me a story four days before a performance, I am trusting that the story is doing something useful to my interior landscape without being able to inspect the mechanism. I am agreeing to be changed in a direction I cannot fully predict.

I have found, over three years and six pieces, that this trust is warranted. But I want to name it as trust, because I think the ethics of the practice depend on that naming. I am a willing participant in my own conditioning. That willingness is not passive. It is an active, ongoing decision that I renew each time I receive a text.

What I notice in ensemble

In ensemble contexts, the practice produces something I find genuinely strange and genuinely valuable. All of us have read the same text and none of us have discussed it. We arrive at the rehearsal having shared an experience without sharing a conversation about the experience. We are inside the same room, imaginatively, without having agreed on what the room looks like.

What this produces, in the first few minutes of playing together, is a quality of listening that I can only describe as already tuned. We are already attending to each other before we have played a note together, because we have already been inside the same weather or the same story or the same set of aphorisms that have been asking the same question from seventeen different angles. The shared text is a frequency we are all already broadcasting on before the music starts.

I have played in ensembles where this was the preparation and in ensembles where the preparation was purely musical and technical. The difference in the quality of listening, in the first minutes of playing, is audible. I am not sure it is always audible to the audience. I am sure it is audible to us.

On the notation question

Bil says the literary text is part of the score. I have thought about this for three years and I am still not sure I agree with the framing, not because I think he is wrong about what the text is doing but because I am not sure the word score is the right container for it.

The score tells me what to do. The text changes who is doing it. These feel to me like different categories of instructio, or rather, the text is not an instruction at all. Instructions are addressed to my will. The text is addressed to something prior to my will, something that produces the conditions under which my will operates.

What I would say is this: if we define a score as everything that shapes the performance, then yes, the text is part of the score. If we define a score as the set of communicable intentions a composer transmits to a performer, then the text is doing something different from and complementary to what the score does. It is conditioning the receiver of the score. It is preparing the instrument of interpretation, which is not the cello... it is me.

Whether this is notation or something else, I genuinely do not know. What I know is that it works, and that I have not found any other explanation for certain performances than this: he gave me something to read, and I read it, and when I put it down the music was already different, before a single note had been sounded.

The story in my coat

I have not told him what the story in my coat was about. I mean I have not told him what I understood it to be about, which I am certain is different from what he understood it to be about, and which is part of the point. He does not need to know. He designed the mechanism, not the outcome. The outcome is mine, and it is unrepeatable, and it happened once on a Sunday in a kitchen where I had not yet turned on the heat.

I drove to the venue. I played the piece.

I am still thinking about it.