The past year has given many musicians opportunities to work with electronic music when they otherwise wouldn't(actually more accurately, it's taken away most non-electronic music opportunities, so that's what's left). My first piece of electronic music in this era is directly inspired by my favorite novel, Italo Calvino’s "If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller". One of Calvino’s central tenets in writing the book was that novels’ beginnings are more interesting than the rest of the book, or at least convey a substantially different kind of interest; one based on disorientation that allows readers to entertain multiplicities of interpretation as they explore a forming world, until uncertainty collapses at the end of chapter 1. This reminded me much of a trait of symphonic vocal jazz wherein songs begin highly chromatically and are daring in their gestures and orchestration, but by the time of the vocal arrival they find a tonic to settle into and the instruments assume their usual functions. Just as Calvino constructed his book with a frame story that strung together incipits to keep the disorientation going without collapse, this piece collages together samples of these orchestral intros, with minimal editing (constrained to cropping, fading, applying reverb, and the addition of some sine waves).

List of samples used, in order of first appearance:

Sarah Vaughan - Summertime
Nancy Sinatra - You Only Live Twice
Frank Sinatra - Lost in the Stars
Sarah Vaughan - Deep Purple
Sarah Vaughan - A Foggy Day
Abbey Lincoln - Brother Where Are You?
Ella Fitzgerald - The Man I Love
Nancy Wilson - Love Dance
Sarah Vaughan - Black Coffee
Frank Sinatra - There Will Never Be Another You
Sarah Vaughan - Tonight I Shall Sleep With a Smile on My Face
Ella Fitzgerald - I Wished on the Moon
Ella Fitzgerald - You Couldn’t Be Cuter
Sarah Vaughan - Autumn in New York
Ella Fitzgerald - My One and Only Love
Helen Merrill - Troubled Waters
Ella Fitzgerald - Single-O
Ella Fitzgerald - Early Autumn
Rosemary Clooney - Imagination
Johnny Hartman - Stella By Starlight
Rosemary Clooney - Yours Sincerely
Diahann Carroll - Gradually
Carmen McRae - The Thrill is Gone
Carmen McRae - Without a Word of Warning
Carmen McRae - Summertime

Gradually, the Thrill is Gone. Without a Word of Warning, Summertime...

A short live improvisation using an acoustic guitar and a simple granular synthesis PureData patch I made. Title matter inspired by Karen Barad, Bruno Latour, George Lewis, and related writers.

Porous Distributions Across (Intra)Actors: Glitch Improvisation

A companion piece to my piece from earlier this year that was recently renamed to "Gradually, the Thrill is Gone. Without a Word of Warning, Summertime...", together under the umbrella title "If on a Summer's Night (a Thrill)...". The program note from the first work (which all applies to this piece as well) is copied and pasted below.

The past [two] year[s] has given many musicians opportunities to work with electronic music when they otherwise wouldn't(actually more accurately, it's taken away most non-electronic music opportunities, so that's what's left). My first piece of electronic music in this era is directly inspired by my favorite novel, Italo Calvino’s "If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller". One of Calvino’s central tenets in writing the book was that novels’ beginnings are more interesting than the rest of the book, or at least convey a substantially different kind of interest; one based on disorientation that allows readers to entertain multiplicities of interpretation as they explore a forming world, until uncertainty collapses at the end of chapter 1. This reminded me much of a trait of symphonic vocal jazz wherein songs begin highly chromatically and are daring in their gestures and orchestration, but by the time of the vocal arrival they find a tonic to settle into and the instruments assume their usual functions. Just as Calvino constructed his book with a frame story that strung together incipits to keep the disorientation going without collapse, this piece collages together samples of these orchestral intros, with minimal editing (constrained to cropping, fading, applying reverb, and the addition of some sine waves).

List of samples used, in order of first appearance:

Linda Ronstadt - When Your Lover has Gone
Helen Merrill - I’ve Never Seen
Carmen McRae - You’re Mine
Billie Holiday - You’re My Thrill
Doris Day - But Not for Me
Nat King Cole - You’re My Thrill
Carmen McRae - Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye
Sarah Vaughan - The Touch of Your Hand
Ella Fitzgerald - You Keep Coming Like a Song
Carmen McRae - My Man’s Gone Now
Ella Fitzgerald - Now It Can Be Told
Sarah Vaughan - But Not for Me
Sarah Vaughan - My Man’s Gone Now
Ella Fitzgerald - Remember
Johnny Hartman - Long Ago (And Far Away)
Shirley Bassey - Let’s Face the Music and Dance
Carmen McRae - Do You Know Why?
Chris Connor - I Wonder What Became of Me
Chris Connor - You Stepped Out of a Dream
Chris Connor - Something I Dreamed Last Night
Chris Connor - But Not For Me
Chris Connor - High on a Windy Hill
Chris Connor - The End of a Love Affair
Chris Connor - These Foolish Things
Diahann Carroll - Goin Out of My Head
Chris Connor - Suddenly It’s Spring
Chris Connor - All Too Soon
Sarah Vaughan - My Heart Stood Still

You're My Thrill, But Not; For Me, You're My Thrill Everytime We Say Goodbye

A live recording of the premier of a solo bass piece, written and performed for a concert of five different realizations/interpretations of James Tenney's "For Percussion Perhaps, Or... (Night)" (1971). Adapted/extended from an etude I wrote about a year ago with the purpose of training my ears and fingers for extended just intonation and microtonal shifts. The title alludes to both Tenney and to Tartini tones, of which I attempt to achieve expanded versions.

Performed December 21st, 2022 at Common Sage.
Ari Smith - Contrabass
Special thanks to Tim Russell and Liz Sexe for putting together the event.

Tar-Tenney Tones (for Solo Contrabassist)

This is an electroacoustic study I started in 2019, inspired by some ideas about sound and sculpture. I was particularly interested in how the recognizability of an instrument's sound is a product of both its overtone structure and its amplitude envelope, which can be difficult to tease apart. To investigate how they impact each other, this study was inspired by considering (classical) sculpture arts as an act of rendering the form of one thing with the substance of another. The piece, which was constructed in Audacity off of phone recordings, uses envelope followers to change the envelope of one instrument/recording to match that of another, either in a 'positive' or 'negative' relief, to see how it changes our perception of timbre and what parts of it a listener pays attention to. The only four sound sources used are piano, upright bass, a cluster of bells, and white noise (which itself has no inherent envelope/'form').  In studying in preparation for this piece, I looked for inspiration from sculptors in what I felt to be corresponding media; Jan Holschuh in ivory, Masahiko Kimura in bonsai (sculpting a tree into the shape of itself), Haegue Yang's sculptures made of bells, and Kenneth Price's ceramic sculpture (clay perhaps also having no inherent original shape). Work on the piece was interrupted in 2020 when the pandemic closing down UW campus cut off my access to a piano to record excerpts on for manipulation. I have recently decided that I'll probably never finish this piece, so I'm uploading the current progress, which I think is interesting in its own right, even if the narrative direction of it seems inconclusive.

The photo is of a statue tucked in the corner of a dance studio at UW Madison, that I occasionally use as a rehearsal space with my band Laminal Animil.

Post-Hylomorph: Electroacoustic Study On Sculpture (2020)

Loosely based on a sarabande dance form, and written as an opportunity to practice/explore baroque improvised ornamentation practices on repeated forms. Also inspired by the music of Linda Catlin Smith and Harold Budd. Cover picture is an excerpt from choreography of a baroque sarabande by Raoul-Auger Feuillet, in Beauchamp-Feuillet notation.

Ari Smith - keyboard

Sarabande

From a show at Communication (Madison, WI), sharing a bill with Hiver. Photo by Carson Borbely.

Ari Smith - guitar, vocals
Frank McKearn IV - trumpet-synthesizer
Matt Blair - keyboard
Tim Russell - percussion

Setlist/times:
00:00  Street Scene 2 (Curb) 
03:14  No Easy Sacrifice                           
07:37  It Only Has to Happen Once (Ambitious Lovers cover)  
14:23  Unlike                                               
18:55  (Solo interlude, leading into...)       
24:26  Tumbleweeds                                  
30:41  Cruise Control                                 
33:16  Public Life/Public Art/The Art Life                    
37:36  Street Scene 1 (Birds)                     
40:02  The Next TIme Might Be Your TIme (Blue Gene Tyranny cover)

Curb Furniture live at Communication 5/30/2025

Nick Politi - piano
Ari Smith - bass guitar, effects
Hugh Kline - drums
Recorded January 4th, 2018

Trio Improvisation (with Nick Politi and Hugh Kline)

Composed on July 1st, the one day so far this summer that I've been back home in Shaker Heights. Recorded on my phone using a Hammond organ at Oberlin Conservatory. Inspired by Messiaen's organ works such as L'Ascension and La Nativité du Seigneur.

Chorale Opaque (after Messiaen)

Program Note:
Skylines and (B-2) Spirits is a piece for harpsichord that I composed over the summer of 2018 at the mostly empty campus of Oberlin College and Conservatory. One of the very few things that populated the campus over the summer was a 3 week Baroque Performance Institute, which inspired me to write for the harpsichord (and also gave me easier access to one). The piece is additionally loosely based on a painting by Ruby Denneen entitled Skyline. Denneen graduated from Oberlin High School in the Spring of 2019, and I purchased the painting from her in the Summer of 2018 from a school-sponsored art sale. Certain gestures, such as broad parallel lines and shapes made by dripping paint, are directly mimicked in the piece, but I also tried to capture some images that I was extrapolating from the painting. In particular, the painting brings to my mind the form of a B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, and I felt that the aircraft - being mechanical, notoriously quiet, and striking intimidation in myself - had similarities to the harpsichord, which further strengthened my vision for this piece.

Recorded on April 27th, 2019 at Stull Recital Hall in Oberlin Conservatory at a rehearsal for my senior recital (during which I made many more mistakes than anticipated).

Ari Smith - harpsichord

Picture by John Jiang

Skylines and (B-2) Spirits, for Harpsichord

An old phone recording from January 2019 of me playing through an extension/completion of my "Orchestra Sketch" piece from further down my Soundcloud profile. Based on the second movement of Zoltan Kodaly's Seven Pieces for Piano, Op. 11, which is a transcription of a Szekely Song. It would be nice to go back eventually and orchestrate the rest of it too, I had some vague ideas for it...

More Variation on Kodaly's Documentation of a Szekely Song

Jazz and avant-garde bassist and contemporary classical composer, graduated from Oberlin Conservatory in 2019. Based in both the Twin Cities and Madison, Wisconsin areas. Assistant Professor of Computer, Information, and Data Science at UW River Falls.

Personal/Professional Website: https://ari-smith-research.github.io/music-bio/
Find other Recordings at: https://ari-smith-research.github.io/recordings/

Ari Smith

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