"Good Days and Their Extremity" for Oboe, Bass Clarinet, Trumpet, Trombone, Violin and Double Bass

 "Good Days and Their Extremity" 

for Oboe, Bass Clarinet, Trumpet, Trombone, Violin and Double Bass

Bil Smith Composer

Commissioned by Univar

Link to Full Score (PDF):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zf4vt5IBmPYf8S0jX_gCRlFd4Ag1q8I8/view?usp=sharing

"Primary Cardinal" for Piano, G Trumpet and Clarinet in A

The Complete Score

"Primary Cardinal" 

for Piano, G Trumpet and Clarinet in A

Bil Smith Composer

Commissioned by Rosneft Oil Co OJSC, Moscow

World Premiere Moscow, February 2016

"Vibrating From The Shock Of The Blows". For Ensemble

"Vibrating From The Shock Of The Blows"

For Ensemble

Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn, Trumpet, Trombone,

Percussion I and II, Violin I and II, Viola and Cello

Bil Smith Composer

A Commissioned Work From BAE Systems

The Full Score (PDF File)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByXT8veODB_TSzhaa0czWlNMYlk/view?usp=sharing

"Premier Hitters" for Contrabass Sarrusophone

Contrabass Sarrusophone

"Premier Hitters" for Contrabass Sarrusophone emerges as an ontological puzzle, challenging the very fabric of musical and material relationships. Crafted with a nodal notation system that pivots around a technique dubbed “extroflection,” the piece serves as a manifesto against the crystallization of music into a finite, digestible message.

Herein lies the paradox: the more the piece unfolds, the more it wraps itself into a Gordian knot of infinite interactions, forever suspending the possibility of a singular interpretation.

The performer might see in its complexity a reflection of our own entanglements with the Real, an attempt to articulate the inarticulable space between the Symbolic and the Imaginary. The notational system of the piece, focusing on extroflection, is not merely a technical innovation; it is a subversive act, a refusal to conform to the symbolic order of traditional music notation and its inherent limitations. By opting for this system, I invite us into a realm where the musical score becomes a visual sculpture, a tangible manifestation of the forever elusive, yet undeniably present.

The material relationships demonstrated within the score speak to a deeper, more profound contemplation of our existence within a nexus of natural and built environments. It is here that the piece ventures beyond the realm of music into the philosophical, engaging with the ontological question of how we coexist with our surroundings. This contemplation is not passive; it demands active engagement from the interpreter, a temporal investment that mirrors the time-based actions required to perform the piece. The score, in this sense, becomes a map of potentialities, a series of suspended states that resist the closure of interpretation, inviting both performer and audience into a state of reinforced reflection.

Yet, it is the double entendre at the heart of "Premier Hitters" that encapsulates its most profound commentary. On one level, the title suggests a celebration of mastery, of being at the forefront, the premier hitters in the game of life. But on another, it hints at the Sisyphean nature of our efforts, the realization that, despite our central role in our personal narratives, we are but specks in the vast expanse of the universe. This realization does not lead to nihilism but rather to a liberating acceptance of our place in the great scheme of things, a cosmic joke that we are in on.

One might argue that "Premier Hitters" embodies the quintessential act of subversion, challenging us to confront the fundamental antagonisms of our existence. The piece does not offer answers but rather complicates the questions, forcing us into a confrontation with the Real. In its refusal to crystallize into a finite message, the composition acts as a mirror, reflecting our own desires, fears, and the infinite complexity of the human condition.

"Premier Hitters" finds musical meaning by spotlighting the instrument itself. Both score and philosophy eschew the quest for absolute truths; they display rather than declare. The floating, unresolved figures mirror the concept of “family resemblances”—the overlapping commonalities that connect disparate ideas and objects across time.

"Premier Hitters," as contemplative passages allow resetting of perspective. Through reinforced reflection upon one’s situatedeness within multiply-entangled environments, personal ontology interlinks with materials. The visual-sculptural score aesthetic enacts this enmeshment; sound and symbol entwine.

About the Contrabass Sarrusophone:

The contrabass sarrusophone is the largest and deepest sounding member of the sarrusophone family of double reed brass instruments designed in the mid-19th century by French instrument inventor Pierre-Louis Gautrot. Its unusual design combines loud projecting qualities of a saxophone with the rich, nasal tones of an oboe. Yet despite its novelty, the instrument remains obscure even among brass players. This article examines the history, anatomy, and performance practice of the deep-voiced contrabass sarrusophone.

The name “sarrusophone” derives from the French army bandmaster Pierre-Auguste Sarrus (1813-1876) who envisioned and collaborated with Gautrot on early designs in the 1850s. Their aim was to streamline the orchestral wind section and fill gaps in tone quality between high woodwinds and low brass. Initial sarrusophone models were patented in 1856, with the contrabass range expanding downwards in the 1870s. Prominent Continental composers like Gounod and D'Indy wrote parts for the new instruments, but they failed to supplant traditional sections and periodic revivals of interest have not secured a permanent orchestral seat for sarrusophones.

Visually akin to an oversized saxophone, contrabass sarrusophones stand around 7 feet in height with a long curved metal body, a conical bore, and a flared bell. The mouthpiece and double reed closely resemble those of a bassoon or contrabassoon. Keywork extends down much of the instrument with up to 25 tone holes manipulated via metal pistons or modern needle spring keys. Materials consist primarily of brass, treated wood, nickel silver, and bronze. Professional models are hand crafted for smooth technical facility across the extended range of three and a half octaves from notated Bb1 to F4.

Due to its weight and size, the contrabass must be supported by a floor peg or metal stand played in a seated position. Skilled performers utilize refined embouchure control, breath support, and fingering dexterity to shape nuanced timbres from brawny to delicate. The tonal palette ranges from reedy woodwind textures to powerful buzzing tones to warm undercurrents blending with tuba and string bass sections.

Calibrated Column in Notation: Neologistic Messaging and Space Notation

The Calibrated Column  presents itself as taxonomy, instruction manual, perhaps even manifesto. Sixteen horizontal planes stacked vertically, each bearing a neologism in clinical yellow text against grey industrial metal. To the right of each shelf: musical notation fragments paired with ovoid forms containing graphic marks consisting of eyes, dots, waves, crescents. The system appears to organize. What it organizes remains deliberately uncertain.

This is notation that has abandoned the pretense of transparency. Where traditional musical scores promise univocal translation.  This symbol produces that sound.  The calibrated column offers something closer to a periodic table of unnamed elements, each slot containing a term that feels almost recognizable yet resists definition. MYTHOSCAPISM. PANARCANISM. ECROPELISM. The suffixes suggest systems of belief or practice, the roots suggest nothing at all.

The Architecture of Invented Language

What distinguishes this from mere whimsy is the precision of its construction. Each neologism occupies its designated shelf with the confidence of established terminology. The musical notation beside each term functions not as explanation but as parallel mystery. The visual language of Western musical literacy is present but scrambled, recombined, made strange.

The ovoid forms operate as a third layer of encoding. Some contain single dots, others multiple. Some show curved lines, others celestial bodies in phases. Are these pictographic? Diagrammatic? The eye searches for pattern: does DOBOVISM's three-dot configuration relate structurally to its position between OPIOIDISM and SYNTELISM? The column refuses to answer.

Calibration as Concept

The term "calibrated" implies measurement against a standard. But when the entire system exists in isolation, calibration becomes a recursive gesture. The column calibrates itself against itself. Each shelf measures its relationship to the shelves above and below, but the absolute values remain unknowable.

This is notation as cosmology rather than communication. The stacked planes suggest stratification, hierarchy, perhaps even evolutionary progression (MYTHOSCAPISM at the apex, ALOPPISM at the base...why?). The rigid geometry implies order. But order of what? The system presents as complete, internally consistent, and entirely opaque.

Space as Compositional Element

Unlike linear notation that moves left to right across time, the column asserts verticality as primary organizational principle. To read it requires not scanning but surveying.  The eye must take in relationships between distant shelves, trace connections across the vertical span, understand the work as simultaneous rather than sequential.

This spatial arrangement transforms meaning-making into an act of navigation. The viewer becomes cartographer of unknown territory, attempting to map a landscape whose features remain unnamed. RETIGRATISM sits between EXOFORMISM and ONTOGENISM and what does this adjacency signify? The column offers no legend.

The musical fragments beside each term compound the spatial complexity. They exist in parallel to the neologisms, neither illustrating nor contradicting them. Two columns run simultaneously: one of invented language, one of deconstructed musical grammar. The relationship between them must be inferred, constructed by each viewer according to their own pattern recognition protocols.

The Ovoid Index

Those strange forms on the right are neither purely abstract nor clearly representational.  They function as yet another layer of possible signification. They recall cellular diagrams, astronomical notations, alchemical symbols. Some are filled (black moons), others outlined (empty vessels). Some contain concentric marks (ripples? orbits?), others show asymmetric distributions of dots.

If the neologisms suggest concepts and the musical notation suggests actions or processes, perhaps the ovals represent states or results. Or perhaps they're portraits of the practitioners themselves.  They may be adherents of CYTROPISM marked by their particular configuration of internal forms. The column refuses disambiguation.

Curatorial Context

This work belongs to a lineage of notational systems that prioritize invention over communication: Hildegard's pneumatic notations, John Cage's time brackets, Cornelius Cardew's graphic scores. But where those systems eventually reveal their logic the calibrated column maintains its opacity.

It suggests instead the notation systems of lost or fictional cultures. The taxonomies in Borges' "Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge." The elaborate classificatory schemes in Perec's Life: A User's Manual. Notations whose primary function is not to enable performance but to assert the existence of a complex system operating just beyond comprehension.

The Performer's Task

What, then, does one do with the calibrated column? Attempts at decoding prove circular.  There is no code, only structure. Attempts at performance encounter the same problem.  How does one enact BELOEMICISM? What sound does the paired notation produce?

Perhaps the work asks us to simply inhabit its systematic mysteriousness. To recognize the human impulse to organize, categorize, notate and to sit with the discomfort when those systems refuse to resolve into meaning. The column calibrates nothing except our desire for calibration.

The sixteen shelves stand there, precisely rendered, each term confidently proclaimed. PHOLOTIRISM. DECOMIDISM. PREQUATISM. They sound like they should mean something. The notation looks like it should instruct. The ovals appear to diagram. But the system remains sealed, complete, and gloriously useless. It is notation as pure form, space as pure structure, language as pure surface.

This is the calibrated column's final gesture: to present organizational clarity as its own kind of content, to make taxonomy itself the territory being mapped. We are left not with what these terms mean but with the shapes they make when arranged in vertical space, the patterns they form when viewed as architectural elements rather than carriers of sense.

The column measures nothing but the distance between language and comprehension. That, perhaps, is calibration enough.

 

Light Sensitive: Photography, Photorealism, and the Score

 

Light Sensitive: Photography, Photorealism, and the Score

Bil Smith · Sound Morphology

A score is usually a promise about the future. It tells a performer what will happen, in what order, at what speed. A photograph is the opposite: a receipt from the past, proof that light once fell on something in a particular way. For several years I have been putting the two side by side, and lately inside each other. My scores now carry photographs the way older scores carried tempo markings: as instructions about how time should feel.

People sometimes ask why a composer needs a camera at all. My answer is that the camera is the most honest notational instrument I own. It cannot lie about light, only about context. And context is exactly what a performer has to build, every time, from nothing.

So the photographs in my scores are not illustrations. They are evidence, weather reports, and occasionally perjury. They sit next to the notation the way a witness sits next to a judge: not deciding the case, but changing how every word in the room is heard.

Plate from a recent score: copper, wire mesh, and cotton under hard light

The lineage

I study photographers the way I study painters: for their operations, not their subjects. Each of these artists taught me something a score can do.

Thomas Demand: the model that disappears. Demand builds full-scale rooms out of paper and cardboard, photographs them with a large-format camera, and then destroys them. What survives is an image of something that was always a replica. I recognize my own scores in that loop. A tactile score is a built object; its photograph becomes the document that travels; the object itself may never be seen by an audience. Demand taught me that the photograph can be the work and the model can be the score, and that the gap between them is where the performer lives.

Olivo Barbieri: the city as a miniature. Barbieri photographs real cities from the air using selective focus, so that a band of sharpness runs through the frame while everything else falls into blur. Real streets suddenly look like architectural models. That trick of scale is a lesson in attention. In my scores, a passage can be "in focus" while everything around it softens: the performer learns to play a narrow band of clarity inside a wide field of suggestion.

Andreas Gursky: the composite that looks like truth. Gursky's vast images are often assembled from many exposures, seamlessly, until a stock exchange or a supermarket shelf becomes a pattern no single eye could see. He taught me that a believable surface can be constructed. My score plates are often composites too: many captures, many lights, one image that behaves like a single moment but contains several.

Thomas Struth: the viewer inside the picture. Struth's museum photographs show people looking at famous paintings, so the act of looking becomes the subject. A score is always watched by someone: the performer reading it, then the audience watching the performer read. Struth reminds me to design for that double gaze.

Cindy Sherman: the self as character. Sherman photographs herself in roles, costumes, and invented film stills, and in doing so shows identity as something staged. I ask performers to do something similar: to read the score as a script for a character who happens to share their hands. Some of my Performance Guidance texts are written for that character, not for the musician.

And others. Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose grids of water towers and blast furnaces turned repetition into structure. Hiroshi Sugimoto, whose long exposures of cinema screens compress an entire film into a rectangle of white light: a whole duration held in one frame, which is exactly what a sustained chord tries to do. Jeff Wall, whose staged scenes look like accidents but were built with a director's patience.

Three cameras, three kinds of truth

I work with three cameras. Each lies differently, and each lie is useful.

The Nikon Coolpix 8800: memory. This is an old camera, a prosumer compact from the mid-2000s with an 8-megapixel CCD sensor and a long stabilized zoom. By today's standards it is limited: noise rises quickly, highlights clip, detail is soft at the edges. I love it for exactly those reasons. Its color has the slightly sweet, slightly synthetic cast of early digital imaging, the color of photographs from a decade we now remember mainly through screens. When I photograph a score object with the Coolpix, the image already looks like a recollection.

In the score, Coolpix images mark the past tense. They appear where the music refers back to something: a quotation, a return, a passage the performer is asked to play "as remembered, not as written." Their softness gives permission. The performer does not have to be precise; they have to be faithful to an impression.

The Hasselblad X2D: testimony. At the other end is the Hasselblad, a 100-megapixel medium format camera, which I use with several lenses, including a macro lens for surfaces. It sees more than I do. Under hard light it records every scratch in copper, every fiber in a cotton ball, every thread of wire mesh. Under soft light it gives wood and wax a depth that feels almost tactile.

X2D plates are the evidentiary layer of the score: the definitive record of an object, a material, a surface. Where these images appear, the performer is asked for exactness. Clarity in the image becomes a demand for clarity in the sound. A fortissimo, in this system, is not only loud. It is fully resolved, every edge visible.

The Lomography Sprocket Rocket: rupture. The third camera is a plastic 35mm panoramic camera that exposes the film right across its sprocket holes, and lets me wind back and expose the same strip again. The results are wide, overlapping, and unpredictable: images bleed into one another, edges vignette, and the perforations of the film itself appear in the picture like a row of rests.

I use the Sprocket Rocket for passages about time itself. The sprocket holes are a ready-made rhythmic grid, a ruler printed by the film stock. Overlapping exposures become simultaneous events. When a Sprocket Rocket strip runs across a score page, the performer reads it left to right as a duration, with each perforation a possible pulse and each double exposure a moment where two times share one space.

Olivo Barbieri

Techniques, and what they ask of the performer

Around the three cameras sits a set of experimental methods. Each one changes how a page reads.

Selective focus. Borrowed from Barbieri's miniaturized cities. A band of sharpness crosses an image of a score object while the rest dissolves. The performer plays the sharp band as foreground and lets everything else become resonance.

Multiple exposure. With the Sprocket Rocket, two or three exposures share one frame. In the score, these mark layered time: a passage the performer may play over itself, or two tempos that must coexist.

Focus stacking and compositing. With the Hasselblad, I combine many exposures at different focus distances into one image sharp from front to back, the way Gursky builds images no single exposure could hold. These plates ask for total control: every voice audible, nothing allowed to blur.

Photographing the model. Following Demand, I build small physical scenes, sometimes from cardboard and paper, photograph them with the X2D, and keep only the image. The performer receives the photograph of an object they will never touch, and must play the distance between image and thing.

Staged self-portraits. Following Sherman, some scores include images in which a performer, or I, appear in character. These are not portraits. They are role cards, telling the player who they are while they play.

Degraded and transformed prints. Images printed and then heated, scratched, soaked, or exposed to sun, using photochromic and thermochromic inks on some plates. The image changes during the life of the score, so no two performances read quite the same page.

Thomas Demand

What this does to the score and the performance

The three cameras give me a scale of fidelity, and that scale becomes musical.

Image source	What it signals	What the performer does
Hasselblad plate	Testimony, exactness	Play with full clarity and control
Coolpix image	Memory, the past tense	Play as recalled, not as written
Sprocket Rocket strip	Time, rupture, simultaneity	Read as duration and layered events

In performance, the photographs can stay on the page or move into the room. Some are projected while the music is played, so the audience sees what the performer is reading. Others are deliberately withheld, so the audience hears the influence of an image it never sees. Either way, the images change the performer's relationship to the notation. A pitch printed beside a scorched copper plate is not the same pitch printed beside a soft, faded Coolpix photograph of the same object. The notes match; the testimony does not.

Closing

When I am asked which camera I prefer, I answer that I need all three, because each tells the truth about something different. The Hasselblad tells the truth about surfaces. The Coolpix tells the truth about memory. The Sprocket Rocket tells the truth about time, which is that it overlaps, slips, and never quite lines up with its own edges.

Demand builds a world and keeps only its image. Barbieri shrinks a city until we can hold it in our attention. Gursky assembles a moment no eye could witness. Struth turns looking into a subject. Sherman becomes someone else in order to show us how selves are made. A score can do all of these things, and the camera is how I learned that it could.

The work is written for a performer, yet it assumes several kinds of eyes: the lens that recorded the object, the reader who interprets the page, the audience that watches the reading. What you hear in performance is an instrument, of course. But you also hear copper under hard light, a memory rendered in early digital color, and a strip of film counting its own perforations like a metronome that refuses to keep still. That is the music I want to share.

Revisiting Gemano Celant's 2015 Article: “Delinquent Spirit of a Drowned City for Solo Piano:” Sonic Concretism

 

Revisiting Gemano Celant's 2015 Article: “Delinquent Spirit of a Drowned City for Solo Piano:” Sonic Concretism

Link to Full Article (12 Pages):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Pb9229BfhF_thplFmOc4YFyGFQUH1xEL/view?usp=sharing

Early in 2015, an unusual tableau unfolded on the stage of Carnegie Hall. Pianist Nicolas Horvath sat before the piano not just with a traditional score, but with an art object...an expansive, multi-layered manuscript by composer Bil Smith titled Delinquent Spirit of a Drowned City. This piano composition, written expressly for Horvath and premiered amid a marathon tribute to Philip Glass, stands at the intersection of music, visual poetry, and philosophy. It is a work as much seen as heard: a dense weave of textual fragments, graphic notations, and musical directives that collectively evoke what one might call a “concrete” music-text hybrid.

The Score as Visual-Textual Artifact

The score of Delinquent Spirit of a Drowned City exists as a striking visual-textual artifact, blurring the line between musical score and artwork. Smith’s composition is not delivered in conventional notation; instead, the score consists of four large boards (approximately 27.5” x 17.5” each) accompanied by three translucent overlays, a booklet of performance notes, a portfolio case, and even an oil-on-canvas integuments. In one section of the score (shown above), words coil and scatter across the page in spiral patterns, overlapping with angular shapes and translucent strips. These textual constellations consisting of snippets of phrases, neologisms, and syllabic clusters are placed with the deliberate care of a concrete poem. Indeed, Smith’s notation eliminates the familiar staves and notes, replacing them with a “complex system of imagery and layers.” The result is a score that one must read spatially and visually, as if decoding an abstract painting or an architectural blueprint of sound.