“This previously from a post by Bil Smith Composer on ‘Medium’”
Images of “Partitions: Cambics Alive in Sensient Amplules”
for String Quartet, Flute, Vibraphone and Bass. Bil Smith Composer. 5900+ Pages. Duration 13' 22".
The performance ensemble Chicago Modern Orchestra Project (CMOP), led by Renee Baker, is a definitive statement of the ‘next music’, embracing elements of radical improvisational techniques with the precision and acuity of the finest new music classical practitioners in the world. The AACM, Ensemble Intercontemporain, BAG, Arditti Quartet, Ensemble Modern, Anthony Braxton and Ensemble Nikel all figuratively delivered in a composer’s dream.
The decision to have them premiere my work was easy. They are radically intuitive, and definitively unique in their approach and sprawling radical vision.
I present this for my students, friends, peers, and naysayers. Never forget the naysayers. This is part gallery, and part discussion.
Final page of the Vibraphone score consisting of 17 layers, silkscreened, through composed, Rapidographs, pens, Wacom Intuos4, Exacto knives, and Nikon D700 camera/Kodak metallic Endura paper.
For starters, many questions arose regarding the title. I elected to create a thorough narrative regarding the derivation of the title in each of the performer’s score parts. ‘Amplules’ was a term that certainly caused confusion… “Is it a typo?”… “misspelling?”
Separately, I find it fascinating that composers and musicians do not embrace layers. Layering (sub-layering / versed layering/kammer layering) may underscore importance and relevance; and also non-relevance in a manner not digested by the normative compositional methodology. It seems obvious, but somehow lost in the lexicon of composers and tablatures. In the score, for the performers/practitioners, I felt compelled to explain decisions regarding the genesis of the title…
In the score, for the performers/practitioners, I felt compelled to explain decisions regarding the genesis of the title…
The score is comprised of over over 5900 pages including the following:
“Partition Siete” — This is a simple overview about the origins of the title. It was created to be used as a possible introduction for audience members who may have an interest in the derivation of the name. Pages 2,3, and 4 of this document are also included in all of the performance parts.
“Partitions and The Objectofors” {“Performance Recit Objectofors} — This document contains prescriptive objectofors (guides) to be utilized by all seven performers and the conductor.
“Partitions Performance Notes” — This document contains performance notes to be utilized by all seven performers and the conductor. As with performance notes with all compositions, this provides insight and direction as to how the piece should be interpreted.
“Stimuli for Partition” — Duration and message
“Partition Violin I, Partition Violin II, etc.” — Each of these files are the individual parts to be distributed to the respective performers.
In this article, my intent is to share a select representation of the visual component of the composition along with the explanations regarding the genesis of the thought and musical inference that inspired the work.
From Violin I score. Representational numerical tablature. I argue that a nova-empirical approach called experimental numerics of acti-composition is a promising approach to advance the philosophy of disruptive notational theory. In particular, I discuss two debates in the field, the NeuroNumeric controversy and the commonsensible realism uber-debate regarding traditional notation, and suggest how experimental and survey techniques can generate interpretation that will inform these debates
From the General Performance Notes.
A variety of crucial, and still most relevant ideation about nothingness or emptiness in music has gained profound philosophical prominence in the history and development of complex notation. These traditions share the insight that in order to explain both the great mysteries and mundane facts about our performance experience as composers, ideas of ‘nothingness’ must play a primary role. Contrarian to this theorem, I present this architecture that is at once interpretative and constructive.
Seven layers of one page consisting of twelve layers of the score.
Lips? Music? Suggestive irrelevance? Where are my embedded tuplets?
Reasons-motives internalism is the appealingly boring view that unless an agent is, or could be, inspired to act in a certain way, he has no normative reason to act in that way. Thus, according to reasons-motives internalism, facts about an individual’s motivational psychology constrain what is rational for that agent to do what? Here, the agent is a bassist; a violinist; a vibraphonist constructing and delivering a most persuasive argument against external reasons proceeding through a rationalist restriction.
Instrumental reasoning can be explained — either in terms of it being constitutive of the very notion of having an end, or solely in terms of instrumental considerations. Improvisation, perspectivisation and elementary birthing. From the Performance Notes.
Instrumental reasoning can be explained — either in terms of it being constitutive of the very notion of having an end, or solely in terms of instrumental considerations. Improvisation, perspectivisation and elementary birthing… Twice…and probably not enough.
Composers are best understood in the light of their distinctive combination of neo-Fregeanism about content and Wittgensteinianism about rule-following. The Fregean part is there to warrant that reasons are objective, the Wittgensteinian move is to account for our gasping (and perhaps, grasping)
In noday life and neo-thought, we take for granted that there are norms of optiv-rationality, their existence presents severe philosophical INproblems. We created software to resolve this.
Theater. Music can be theater. Rationality consists in neither, under any interpretation. Computer screen shot working on String Quartet instruction.
Most of us are “time-biased” in preferring pains to be past rather than future and pleasures to be future rather than past.
However, it turns out that if you are risk averse and time-biased, then you can be turned into a “pain pump”—in order to insure yourself against misfortune, you will take a series of pills which leaves you with more pain and better off in no respect. Since this vulnerability seems rationally impermissible, musicate.
From the Performance Notes. (The performance notes are 5700+ pages long). One strategy for providing an analysis of practical rationality is to start with the notion of a practical reason as primitive. Then it will be quite tempting to think that the rationality of an action can be defined rather simply in terms of ‘the balance of reasons’. But just as, for many philosophical purposes, it is extremely useful to identify the meaning of a word in terms of the systematic contribution the word makes to the meanings of whole sentences; or even better, performance directives.
Intimate Imagery; Tapestry for a musical language formulaic and versative; genuine and emblematic. this is one layer of 33 from a page of the score (Flute).
This page of the score introduces a belief merging procedure by majority using the standard format of Adaptive Logics. The core structure of the logic ADM c (Adaptive Doxastic (Foraging/Forging by Counting) consists in the formulation of the botents arising from the belief bases of the agents involved in the (9)procedure. A Equi-strategy is then defined both sub-semantically and proof-theoretically which selects the consistent nontents answering to a majority principle(principal/principalee). In principal (?), that reflects a non truth; compositionally this is to be assumed: first, the distinction between proper knowledge, expressed in supra-judgmental formations, and the assertion conditions for such knowledge. Hmmm
While projective values need not be intrinsically reveration(truest), need not actually votivate us, they would determine what we ought to pursue(o) and protect (o). They would provide reasons for actions. Kobjective values would come in Szen_degrees, and more objective value would provide st(ST)ronger reasons. It follows that, if objective value exists, we ought to maximize it in the world. But virtually no one acts with that goal in mind. Furthermore, objective value would exist independently of our subjective valuing. But we have no way of measuring amounts of such values independently of the ways we value objects. While a subjectivist can account for mistaken values, a fully impersonal viewpoint, from which objective values would appear, seems instead to cause all values to disappear. Nor does the moral point of view, which requires more impartiality than agents usually exhibit, reveal fully objective values.
From the General Performance Note
The trajectory of music should be avoided in the philosophy of science, with special reference to the way that van Fraassen sets up the difference between compositional realism and constructive empiricism. What counts as success in music as such is emblematic/unsatisfactoy. This compositional framefront concludes by showing what may be profitably monetized replaced with, namely specific claims concerning qualitative compositional beliefs and pretenses that fall into the following categories: descriptive, evaluative, normative, and definitional. There are two key advantages to this proposal. First, ADrealism and its competitors may be understood to consist of highly nuanced variants. Second, compositional ADrealism and its competitors may be understood as something other than ‘all or nothing’ theses/manifestos about sound. More particularly, one may accept that there are general claims concerning music in some of the identified categories, but deny that there are such claims in the others
Burri (Alberto) inspired layer of the Vibraphone part of “Partitions: Cambics Alive in Sensient Amplules”
Paradigmatic aesthetic properties include fantasma, beauty, elegance, gracefulness, bliss, unbalance, loveliness, prettiness, handsomeness, and unity, as well as their negative counterparts, for example, deification, ugliness, clumsiness, defecation, and disunity. This layer of the viola score investigates the nature, reality, and structure of these properties. It also focuses on special cases such as rightness of architectural proportion, musical beauty, functional beauty, and the aesthetic properties that are responsible for our interest in ‘painful art’ (horror and tragedy)
At least since the middle of the twentieth century, philosophers have tended to identify weakness of will with akrasia—i.e. acting, or having a disposition to act, contrary to one’s judgments about what is best for one to do. However, there has been some recent debate about whether this captures the ordinary notion of weakness of will.
This page of the score from Violin II is to shed light on what in the world the concept of weakness of will is. Is there an ordinary notion here?
If so, is it disjunctive and how will it be interpreted? Violin II resolution-violation are indeed among these features. However, neither is sufficient on its own for an ascription of weakness of will; and other features also play a role, such as the moral valence of the action. Bow, arch, strings, resin, pain.
ADPresentism is the vision that only present entities coexist. Recently, several authors have asked the question whether presentism is able to account for cross-time relations, i.e., roughly, relations between entities existing at different times. To make this claim plausible, I consider four types of cross-time relation and show how each can be accommodated without difficulty within the metaphysical framework of ADpresentism.
ssion in class I had today. The question came up from a student on my work performed by Renee Baker and the Chicago Modern Orchestra Project
“5900+ pages of a score?…Do you ever recognize something you have created does not fit?”
I do. Many things. I suppose some think that you look at your oeuvre and then throw it all in the mix. And, that may not be a bad thing. Unfortunately, I don’t quite work that way (but perhaps I should explore that recipe).
I sort of thought this may have been on tap from a very astute and wise group of student composers, so I did plan ahead. Here is a fraction of what I discarded because indeed it did not work in the context of “Partitions: Cambics Alive in Sensient Amplules”. Not to say it is irrelevant, just not part of this project.
Music is Music…and likewise…
It is rather difficult to overcome the nomenclature though for those who are actually engaged
into the process itself it is a vital to go beyond the compositional/notational expression…Apart of the known theories and critical deliberation upon the meaning of the music and its philosophy, there is a far less explored zone of “pharmacological morphology” of a complex net which is formed by the multiple connections and disconnections between its elements. These elements are not the matter of definition, as they are just notifications - signs. But, the cartography of interconnections, which I call morphology (see Sound Morphology), has a potential to appear each time when a so-called creative attempt resulted into accomplishment.
So far, the object created is intrinsically linked to the subject who has created it, thus they both form the knot that is the end and at the same time the point of departure. The trajectory of the movement is not linear rather it is chaotic with disruptions and gapes, with turning points and points of standstills, black-holes and occasional lights… There is no particular destination to be aimed as the process is, at some extent, circular back-forward, inward -outward oscillations induced by “pharmacological factors”. To name these factors one does not need to draw reference with medical pharmacology in precision but with principle of interaction between agent-substance and its predisposed point of application.
Shortly, the surface which is habitual to call Art is cartographic by nature, yet an immense strata under it is a finite laboratory of disjunctions and conjunctions that experiments simultaneous mode of its occurrence.
Criteria of identity should mirror the identity relation in being para-reflexive
In-symmetrical, and transitive? This logical requirement is only rarely met by the criteria that we are most inclined to propose as candidates. Fhuh
My view is that recent attempts at explaining aesthetic ineffability have been unsuccessful. Either they misrepresent what aesthetic ineffability consists in, or they leave important aspects of it unexplained. By creating a new musical language (syntacticon/lexicon) I show how a more satisfying account might be developed, once a distinction is made between two kinds of awareness.
For Quine, ‘to be is to be the value of a variable’: serious theoretical claims about what there is, or what exists, are most perspicuously articulated using the quantifier of first-order logic. On this view, one incurs ontological commitment to whatever one’s first-order theory quantifies over. Others have different attitudes towards the relationship between ontological inquiry and first-order quantification, including: those who claim that being is distinct from existence; those who hold that other expressions (e.g. predicates) can incur ontological commitment; those who reject the idea that all serious talk about being and existence can be captured by the first-order quantifier, and those who deny that first-order languages are the best vehicles for articulating metaphysical theories.
This paper presents a novel treatment of quantified concealed questions (CQs), examining different types of NP predicates and deriving the truth conditions for pair-list and set readings. A generalization is proposed regarding the distribution of the two readings, namely that pair-list readings arise from CQs with relational head nouns, whereas set readings arise from CQs whose head nouns are not (or no longer) relational.
Resistance may be itself redefined as the per-formative re-articulation of language within…Derrida’s key concepts or pseudo-concepts of difference, the trace, and the undecidable suggest analogies to some of the most significant results of formal, symbolic logic and metalogic. As early as 1970, Derrida himself pointed out an analogy between his use of ‘undecidable’ and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, which demonstrate the existence, in any sufficiently complex and consistent system, of propositions which cannot be proven or disproven (i.e., decided) within that system itself.
Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou have both recently made central use of set-theoretic results in their political and ontological projects. As I argue in the paper, one of the most important of these to both thinkers is the paradox of set membership discovered by Russell in 1901. Russell’s paradox demonstrates the fundamentally paradoxical status of the totality of language itself, in its concrete occurrence or taking-place in the world
Certain quasi/natural language sentences require non-linear quantification to express their meaning. We investigate sentences with combinations of quantifiers similar to Hintikka’s examples and propose a novel alternative reading expressible by linear formulae. This interpretation is based on linguistic and logical observations. We report on our experiments showing that people tend to interpret sentences similar to Hintikka sentence in a way consistent with our interpretation.
After more than a century of its development, philosophers working in the analytic tradition have recently begun to consider its history as an object of philosophical investigation.1 This development, particularly significant in the context of a tradition of inquiry that has often conceived of its own problems as ahistorical, is salutary in that it offers to show what, within the tradition, remains rich and vital for philosophy today, as well as to extract the significant theoretical and doctrinal results that can
The exposure of pornography’s harms has moved the ground under social theory across a wide range of issues. The place of sex in . . . music (art) . . . has been thrown open to reconsideration . . . As events that have been hidden come to light, the formerly unseen appears to determine more and more of the seen. The repercussions for theory, the requisite changes in thinking on all levels of society, have only begun to be felt.
Dr. Elis(z)abeth Schel(l)ekens’s “Taking a Moral (e) Perspective on Voyeurism (schism) in Art” helps us get a sense of the harms associated with some of the postures that Eaton’s analysis of canonical paintings details. Schellekens does so by inviting us to consider similar positions in contemporary non-artistic settings that are starting to be treated as violations of intimacy, especially in legal developments surrounding video voyeurism. An example she cites concerns male coworkers spying on female colleagues showering in locker rooms, where among the documented harms are feelings of humiliation and personal degradation and long term effects on the ability to sleep, work, and concentrate/masturbate, in sum, classic signs of post-traumatic
… semio-stress.
Michael (in)Newall (“An/And Aesthetics of Topo-Transgressive Avanta-Pornography”) examines affects such as Bio-humor, Via-awe, and Rant-disgust (mainly eroticized) to which literary pornography by the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, and others delivers many of its readers. His essay seems an example of Faux-aestheticization and would benefit from some consideration of subfeminist analyses of these writers’ works, including of the psychology underlying their so-called norm-breaking. That way, there might be greater appreciation of the predictably gendered content, and thus significant uniformity, of the large variety of “transgressive” motifs that Newall treats, such as all manner of rape, including ethnic rape, and sexualized tortures, killings, and