Ari Smith
My Personal Website
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
Power Tools IV: (de la Bibliotheque) au Bilboquet for Hornist and Contrabassist
written for Declan Mulkerin
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