"The Contrarian Multimodal Scores of Bil Smith." by Alex Kim

"The Contrarian Multimodal Scores of Bil Smith"

by Alex Kim

Link to PDF File (Article). 26 Pages

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uC6aGadOpG4x2tR4xS1Tns8LoqS6qzhm/view?usp=sharing

Fragments of Sound and Vision in Bil Smith’s “Artworks”

A musical score laced with phentermine diet pills, thermochromic metals, and graphite dust might sound like a mad chemist’s experiment rather than a composition. 

Yet this is precisely the territory of Bil Smith’s contrarian multimodal musical scores, which he pointedly frames as artworks. On his website’s “Artworks” section, titles like “Orgone Dossier” (2024) and “Broke and Broken Cogito” (2024) greet the viewer with cryptic allusions and unconventional materials. These visual scores are not merely eccentric for shock value; they are deliberate explorations of what a musical score can be when freed from tradition. Smith’s compositions are graphic and tactile creations.  His musical tablatures unify sound, image, text, and even chemistry into one sensory experience. In this way, each score becomes an art object and philosophical statement at once, inviting the performer and audience into a recursive game of interpretation and introspection.

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Work In Progress. - JAN 17 2026

 

"Space Events". For Flute, Banjo and Cello

The work Space Events is organized around isolated musical "events" distributed across the page, with significant use of spatial notation. These events are positioned in ways that demand the performer assess distance, density, and proximity, not simply as visual cues, but as parameters of timing and articulation. There is no fixed meter or tempo; instead, the score relies on relational time. Durations are implied through spacing and graphical weight.

The visual format rejects conventional linearity. Each page can be understood as a modular field...as an object in which time is mapped laterally, vertically, and occasionally non-sequentially. This non-linear framework invites a reorientation of standard interpretive practices.

From the outset, one notes that the score operates not merely as a transmission of sonic material, but rather as a palimpsestic field in which the material is negotiated, destabilized, and recursively interpreted.

Their spatial distribution is non-metrical yet their relationality is far from arbitrary. I inscribes each event with an implicit mass, a gravitational pull that draws the performer’s eye and cognition toward temporary centers of interpretive gravity. These centers are inherently unstable.

This instability is not a failure of clarity but a deliberate strategy of saturation. Take, for instance, the simultaneous deployment of gestural graphic elements and standard notehead-based figures. Rather than juxtapose them dialectically, I embed one within the other. The result is a form of notational simultaneity in which the 'readable' and the 'intuitable' are inextricably intertwined echoing certain tendencies in Derrida’s notion of the pharmakon: that which cures and poisons, reveals and conceals.

Instrumentally, I made a choice in including the banjo as a gesture that forcibly estranges the ensemble from historical acoustic referents. The banjo, neither percussive nor lyrical in the Western classical sense, destabilizes the anchoring of the trio’s timbral identity. It becomes the pivot through which the other instruments are recontextualized. The cello’s foundational tone is problematized, forced into registral and textural negotiations it would not encounter in conventional contexts. The flute, meanwhile, operates as an acousmatic vector: it traverses the space between pitched materiality and breath-based articulation, refusing stable footing.

There is no beat here, no sequential derivation of musical discourse. Instead, we are presented with what I would term chronotopological multiplicity (a temporal structure in which multiple possible durations coexist within the same visual plane). The notation neither prohibits nor prescribes; it compels recursive decision-making, a practice of interpretive iteration that is, by design, inexhaustible.

Crucially, one must recognize that Space Events is not a work ‘about’ space, nor even ‘in’ space, but rather through space: the score operates as a mechanism by which space is made audible. Here, the spatialization of notated information is not an aesthetic embellishment but the core epistemological engine of the piece. Each page must be engaged as an architectural document, a schematic for enacting time through spatial traversal.

In Space Events, one does not perform a composition so much as one is inscribed within it. The performer is compelled to inhabit the notational field, not as a transmitter of information but as a co-agent in a distributed epistemology...restless, incomplete, recursive.

Feeling Sound: Nelson Howe’s Fur Music and the Tactile Avant-Garde

Feeling Sound: Nelson Howe’s Fur Music and the Tactile Avant-Garde

Source: Music of the Avant Garde, the influential journal that ran from 1967 to 1973, was a melting pot of radical musical ideas. It introduced readers to works that defied traditional categories, exploring the boundaries of sound, notation, and performance. Among these groundbreaking pieces was Nelson Howe’s Fur Music, a composition that reimagines sound as a tactile experience, inviting musicians and listeners alike to "feel" music in an entirely new way.

What Is Fur Music?

Fur Music is one of Nelson Howe's most notable experimental works, challenging conventional expectations of what music can be. Instead of focusing on melody, harmony, or even rhythm, Howe’s piece centers around texture. The title alone hints at the central concept: sound as something tangible, almost like fur. In this work, Howe treats sound not as something that exists solely to be heard but as something that could be felt, both metaphorically and physically.

This emphasis on texture was revolutionary. Howe’s score abandons traditional notation in favor of abstract visual cues, such as dots, lines, and fur-like textures. These graphic symbols suggest tactile qualities rather than specific pitches or rhythms, offering the performer clues to guide the sound's “feel” rather than its exact shape. The result is an open-ended score that relies heavily on interpretation, challenging performers to transform visual textures into auditory sensations.

Breaking Down the Textures of Fur Music

Howe's score for Fur Music is more like a piece of abstract art than a typical musical manuscript. Instead of notes on a staff, performers encounter shapes and symbols that evoke tactile experiences. A cluster of short, dense lines might suggest a rough, gritty sound, while soft, sweeping curves could imply something smoother or more fluid.

This graphic approach to notation offers complete freedom to the performer. It’s a visual guide to texture, not a prescriptive set of instructions. The performer is encouraged to "play" the textures on the page, experimenting with instrumental techniques and improvisation to bring the score to life. In a sense, Fur Music is a collaborative work between Howe and the performer, with each interpretation producing a unique, one-of-a-kind performance.

The Influence of Indeterminacy and Chance

Fur Music is also deeply influenced by the principles of chance and indeterminacy, popularized by John Cage and other avant-garde composers. Howe provides only a loose structure. This approach ensures that each performance of Fur Music will be different, shaped by the performer’s individual responses to the score’s textures.

In this way, Howe embraces the idea that music doesn’t need to be a fixed, unchanging entity. Instead, it becomes a living, evolving process, shaped by the interaction between the performer and the score. By incorporating indeterminacy, Fur Music allows for an element of unpredictability, a sense of discovery and spontaneity that makes each performance a fresh experience.

The Legacy of Fur Music in Avant-Garde Sound Art

Fur Music had a significant impact on the world of sound art and experimental music. By focusing on texture and sensation, Howe’s work opened the door for later artists to explore music beyond the auditory. His idea of translating visual and tactile cues into sound has influenced sound installations, multimedia art, and performance pieces that seek to engage multiple senses.

Textural Exploration in Sound Art: Howe’s approach to sound as a tactile experience has had a lasting influence on sound artists who use physical materials in their installations. Inspired by Howe’s vision, many sound artists have sought to create immersive environments that engage the senses of sight and touch, as well as hearing.

Graphic Notation as an Artistic Tool: Fur Music is part of a broader tradition of graphic notation, which challenges traditional musical symbols and invites a more interpretive approach. Howe’s score is not just a set of instructions; it’s a canvas for interpretation, encouraging performers to respond to the music on a personal, sensory level. Today, graphic scores are widely used in experimental music and sound art, and Howe’s work remains a reference point for composers interested in breaking free from conventional notation.

Tactile and Indeterminate Music: Howe’s use of indeterminacy and tactile association aligns him with other avant-garde composers who seek to blur the boundaries between sound, touch, and visual art. His work helped to define a genre of music that is as much about the experience of sound as it is about its production. This genre of tactile music, which prioritizes the performer’s interaction with the score and their sensory perception of sound, continues to inspire composers and sound artists today.

The Lasting Impact of Fur Music

Nelson Howe’s Fur Music exemplifies the experimental spirit of Source: Music of the Avant Garde, and its influence is still felt in the world of sound and multimedia art. By challenging performers to approach sound as a tangible, touchable experience, Howe expanded the boundaries of music, inviting audiences and musicians alike to “feel” music in new ways.

In the years since its publication, Fur Music has become a touchstone for artists interested in the intersection of sound and sensory perception. Howe’s work encourages us to question what music is, and what it can be, shifting our understanding from sound as an abstract concept to sound as a physical, interactive experience. Today, Fur Music remains a compelling example of how avant-garde music can redefine our relationship to sound, inviting us to explore its texture, its touch, and its impact on all the senses.

"Lest the Muscle Grow Flaccid and Lose its Definition.” For Thein Wooden Tristan Trumpet and Cimbasso

Thein Wooden Tristan Trumpet

Reductive Scores: Subtracted Music Notation II

"Detlin's Baby" for Celeste and Bass Flute.  Bil Smith

Subtraction as Aesthetic Strategy

The allure of subtraction in artistic practice is not mere austerity. It is instead an architecture of absence, or an act of clearing away in order to reveal. Within the space of musical notation, the reductive score proposes not a diminution of content but a recalibration of meaning: gestures voided, staves erased, clusters pared down to single resonances. This practice echoes a lineage of visual and conceptual artists who employed elimination as their primary act of creation, crafting works that are as much about what is not present as about what remains.

John Baldessari's "Wrong"

The Visual Arts of Elimination

Consider John Baldessari’s iconic 1960s and 1970s canvases where photographic images are overpainted with flat fields of white or punctuated with adhesive dots obscuring faces (Wrong, 1966–68; Commissioned Paintings, 1969). His method is less about addition than obliteration. Similarly, Alberto Burri, with his series of combusted plastics and punctured tar (notably the Combustioni Plastiche, 1960s), reduced painting to the act of burning, removing, and excising, until the artwork’s wounds became its defining features.

Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases (Concetto spaziale, Attese, 1959–60) are equally acts of deliberate defacement, where incision replaces brushstroke, and the void becomes the essential gesture. Robert Rauschenberg went further still in his radical Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), where the removal of another artist’s hand became both critique and creation. And in the realm of more systematic reduction, Agnes Martin’s gridded fields of near-invisibility (Untitled #10, 1975) enact a near-erasure of figure, reducing painting to breath, pencil line, and silence.

Robert Rauschenberg 's  Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953),

These acts of artistic subtraction are not destructive but revelatory. By cutting, burning, erasing, or effacing, they expose strata of hidden form. They prepare the ground for understanding reductive music notation not as privation but as an alternative fullness.

Musical Notation as Reductive Act

In a similar register, reductive notation employs subtraction as its grammar. Instead of proliferating signs, it pares the score back until what remains vibrates with intensified presence. A silenced measure becomes more resonant than its sounded counterpart. A single dynamic mark, standing alone on an otherwise empty staff, becomes a monument to intensity.

This is a tradition not unfamiliar to music: Helmut Lachenmann’s Pression (1969) dismantles the cello’s traditional voice through techniques of negation; Morton Feldman’s late scores (Triadic Memories, 1981) reduce material almost to stasis, inviting the performer into the infinite depth of minute variation; Salvatore Sciarrino’s Sei Capricci (1976) enacts disappearance through whispered harmonics and vanishing gestures. In each, subtraction is not absence but excess turned inside out.

The Dialectic of Masking and Revealing

The reductive score is at once mask and aperture. What is removed frames what remains. Performers encounter not a transparent set of instructions but a visual riddle, one whose omissions are as telling as its inscriptions. Each erased line, each withdrawn note, insists on interpretive labor: the performer must inhabit the absent space as much as the notated one.

In this way, reductive notation mirrors Baldessari’s occluded faces where the viewer cannot help but imagine the hidden countenance beneath. The performer, too, cannot help but fill the silences with speculative sound, the unwritten with imagined resonance.

Surface Depth and Latent Potential

Reduction also cultivates a peculiar form of surface depth. Just as Burri’s charred surfaces hold the violence of their making within their scorched texture, the reductive score’s thin notational trace harbors the intensity of what has been stripped away. An empty stave suggests what once might have filled it; a solitary gesture implies a constellation of possibilities now rendered invisible.

In this sense, reductive notation becomes an archaeology: a palimpsest where absence speaks as forcefully as presence. The performer is drawn into dialogue not with what is written but with what is deliberately withheld.

Toward a Poetics of Subtraction

Reductive scores, then, are not minimalist for the sake of clarity, nor ascetic by temperament. They belong to the same aesthetic genealogy as Baldessari’s obliterations, Burri’s burnings, Fontana’s incisions, and Rauschenberg’s erasure. They remind us that subtraction is not negation but transformation.

Through these scores, the composer enacts a kind of notational sleight of hand: revealing by concealing, offering resonance through silence, and delivering narrative through the gaps. The reductive score does not diminish music, but multiplies its interpretive density, drawing both performer and listener into the unstable, fertile terrain of what is missing.

"Capitulated Fantasy". For Echo Cornet