"Sound Morphology" (Bil Smith Composer)
The next word on new music.
Thursday, April 25, 2024
"Crater 34" For Soprano Voice A WET (Words, Events and Text) Score
The Single Page Score and The Erosion of Conventional Structures
"If You Find Her Reemergence Strange" for B Flat Trumpet. Bil Smith Composer
"If You Find Her Reemergence Strange"
for B Flat Trumpet
2023
Bil Smith Composer
Published by LNM Editions
Link To PDF Score
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pInyEOM5hvgaxZRJh0Wi1PiFSqpb3om_/view?usp=sharing
This epicyclic tablature consists of a musical notation system that uses epicycles, which are mathematical curves generated by the motion of a small circle inside a larger circle, to represent various elements of music. This type of notation system is designed to convey complex musical structures in a visually intuitive and accessible way.
In epicyclic music notation, each epicycle represents a specific musical element, such as pitch, rhythm, or dynamics. The size, orientation, and movement of the epicycle are used to convey information about the specific characteristics of the note or sound, such as its duration, amplitude, or frequency.
The impact of epicyclic music notation on the performer can vary depending on their experience with the system. For performers who are familiar with experimental notation systems, epicyclic notation may be seen as a creative and expressive way of projecting and interpreting the score, allowing for greater flexibility and creative exploration in performance.
“Tesellect Ausarta et al Delicon” for Solo Violin
“Tesellect Ausarta et al Delicon” for Solo Violin
Bil Smith Composer
Published by LNM Editions
“Tesellect Ausarta et al Delicon” for solo violin utilizes a dense multi-modal notation system based on the fluctuations of iconographic shadows and mutable planes to create an immersive performative experience that expands momentary perception into hybrid topological spaces.
Rather than a static representation, the notation traces topographical pathways across both horizontal and vertical surfaces in constant flux. The performer navigates this impermanent terrain of lines and shifting graphic contours through a personalized orientation to the score’s internal logic and codes.
Auditory stimuli echo visual negations, resonating both presence and absence simultaneously from a single bow stroke thanks to the notation’s reductionist yet evocative minimal language.
Amidst the apparent chaos lies a hidden logic. The scores establishes a "reductive simplicity" within the system, a code accessible to those who engage with its intricacies. This accessibility, paired with the score's inherent visual intrigue, invests the piece with a peculiar authority – the authority of rational thought and reason applied to the seemingly irrational realm of shadows.
Processing these clustered graphic traces requires refined perceptual focus within each instantaneous choice point, at once losing and finding one’s place again repetitively. The resulting sound world therefore reflects the continual re-stabilization of perspective amidst registers of enduring change.
In this way, rational thought intersects intuitive flow states to birth an intricate counterpoint grounded by persistent instability. As listener, we enter fugal worlds where each singular tone intimates a multiplicity of concurrent alternate musical realities that flicker at the edges of our awareness.
Monday, April 22, 2024
Fundamental Assumptions and Forgotten Lore” For Piccolo Oboe. Bil Smith Composer
Fundamental Assumptions and Forgotten Lore”
For Piccolo Oboe
Bil Smith Composer
Link to Full Score PDF
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W4pbc91kOjsInli9jZEfkDSlGO1KXXFt/view?usp=sharing
The score's foundation in liminality—its inherent resistance to being confined within the precise, well-defined borders of traditional notation—serves as a critical point of departure for understanding its essence. To fully engage with this piece is to embrace a fluidity and ambiguity that traditional musical analysis often seeks to circumvent. This embracive attitude toward the liminal allows this work to exist in a state of continuous conversation across a myriad of categorical divides, thereby challenging the performer to consider the piece not only as a composition but as a dialogue with the broader world of art and ideas.
The visualizations are not mere adornments but are integral to the piece's structure, offering a cinematic collage that intertwines with the music to create a multisensory experience. The score's engagement with complex concepts such as diasporic Blackness and theorizations of the Global South provides a fulcrum for its wide-ranging explorations, positioning the piece not merely as a musical work but as a scholarly investigation into the intersections of culture, identity, and history.
This approach to composition and notation—where the score becomes a site of interdisciplinary inquiry—reflects a broader trend in contemporary art toward the dissolution of boundaries between artistic mediums. "Fundamental Assumptions and Forgotten Lore," in its refusal to adhere to the conventional limitations of its form, invites us to reconsider the potential of the musical score as a vessel for conveying complex, nuanced ideas. The piece's reliance on visual and conceptual elements to complement and complicate its musical content encourages a mode of engagement that is both intellectual and emotional, demanding of its audience not passive consumption but active participation in the work's multifaceted dialogue.
This is not music as known to ears that crave the comfort of resolution, nor is it art to eyes that seek the solace of clarity. It is, rather, an aesthetics of imperfection, a deliberate pursuit of the unfinished, where the value lies not in the answers provided but in the questions posed, in the improvisation that unravels composition, in the contingency that unravels certainty, in the openings that defy closure.
This composition, in its refusal to adhere to the dictates of form, in its celebration of the unfinished, poses a challenge to the very notion of understanding. It demands a relinquishment of the desire for completion, an acceptance of the perpetual state of incompletion, as the truest expression of the spirit.