Ari Smith

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Please contact me if you wish to perform a piece or get access to a score.


(Score Excerpt from Contour Without Cut)

Selected Completed Works (in Reverse Chronological Order)

Caring Promiscuously and Experimentally (CPE) for Violist and Harpsichord/Clavichord-Player (after C.P.E. Bach’s Empfindungen and the Care Collective’s Care Manifesto) - 2024, 9’

Power Tools III: To My Pressure Pump (After Lorine Niedecker) for Organist - 2024, 10’

(Fantasia on) Nickel Under the Foot (from Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock) for Percussionist and Soprano Saxophonist - 2023, 2’
  intended as an encore piece alongside Coffee Grinder for T-Bone Slim

Tar-Tenney Tones for Solo Contrabassist (realization of James Tenney’s For Percussion Perhaps, or… (Night)) - 2022, 10’ link

Power Tools II: Coffee Grinder for T-bone Slim for Percussionist and Alto Saxophonist - 2022, 7.5’
  commissioned by Greg Riss and Joe Connor

Sad-ish Pavane for Hamish Fulton / Slowwalk for Some Distracted Times for Violinist and Cellist (after Hamish Fulton and Thomas Tomkins), arrangement and expansion of ‘Of Species in Gradus…’ - 2022, 9’
  written for Sahada Buckley and Trace Johnson

To Attend to (Two Attend Two) for Violinist and Cellist (after the Care Collective and Susan Leigh Star) - 2022, 10’
  commissioned by Sahada Buckley and Trace Johnson

Simple Machines are Also Power Tools: The Wedge as Boundary Maker and Boundary Object (After Susan Leigh Star) for String Quartet - 2022, 18’

If on a Winter’s Night a Thrill… (After Italo Calvino) for 2-Channel Fixed Media - 2021, 6’42” link

Contour Without Cut (Barad in Penthesilea) (after Karen Barad, Italo Calvino, Sam Gilliam, Bruno Latour, George Lewis, and Roscoe Mitchell) for Celesta-Player - 2021, 10’

Death and Transliteration for Mezzo-Soprano and Cellist (text by the composer) - 2021, 2’

Post-Hylomorph: Electroacoustic Study on Sculpture (After Masahiko Kimura, Jan Holschuh, Haegue Yang, and Kenneth Price) for 2-Channel Fixed Media - 2020, 6.5’ link

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Same River Twice (After Heraclitus, D.T. Suzuki, and Wallace Stevens) for String Quartet and Jazz Trio - 2020, 10’

Se non vero, trovato (after Giordano Bruno, Frances Yates, Morton Feldman, Andy Goldsworthy, and Stefania Heim) for Solo Pianist - 2020, 14’

Form Against Ornament Rends the Firmament, While the Melody-Mediator Made Mends with Its Filament (Variations on Lorem Ipsum) for Four-Octave Carillon (or Celesta, or Four-Octave Vibraphone) - 2019, 7’

Sonnet for the Woodlands for Pianist and Spoken Word (either live, or pre-recorded and emanating from inside the piano) (text by the composer) - 2019, 4’

Gemini Contrived (For Seare Farhat) for Solo Percussionist (Prepared Vibraphone, 29” Timpano, and Riveted Ride Cymbal) - 2019, variable duration

A Hopeless Semantic for Solo Contrabassist - 2019, 6’

Of Species in Gradus, in Steps of my Gait for Solo Guitarist (after John Dowland and Hamish Fulton) - 2019, 5’

Skylines and (B-2) Spirits for Solo Harpsichordist - 2018, 5’ link

Works in Progress

Grain by Grain (For Seare Farhat and Asher Wulfman) for Tenor and Violinist
  co-written with Carson Borbely

Joined Subjects and Grazed Knowledges (JS & GK) for Piano Four Hands (after Gyorgy Kurtag’s transcriptions of J.S. Bach)

Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse: Cento-Madrigali, Book of Madrigals for SATTB, or SATB plus Instrumentalist (texts by Roland Barthes*, Alain de Lille, Marianne Moore, Giordano Bruno, Octavio Paz*, St. John of the Cross, Jaden Smith) - currently ~35’ long
 * texts used without permission

Other

Seare Farhat’s composition Body Counterpoint (after Paul Valery) for Mezzo-Soprano and Alto Flute (or Violin) (2019) sets a text of the same name that I wrote