The Brutalist Tablatures

Brutalist Tablatures are structured upon the principles of Brutalist architecture.  They reject the ornamentation and historical continuity of the five-line staff. Instead, it embraces a stark, materially direct framework that prioritizes density, stratification, and spatial concreteness as primary vehicles of sonic articulation. Through an analysis of notational ergonomics, cognitive resistance, and semiotic deconstruction, this whitepaper presents Brutalist Tablature as an autonomous aesthetic object, not merely a container for sound.

Deconstructing the Five-Line Staff: Towards a Concrete Semiotics

The five-line staff, despite its entrenched cultural status, operates primarily as a passive intermediary.  It emerges as a translucent screen upon which sonic intentions are projected. By contrast, Brutalist Tablature foregrounds the structural grid as an active participant in compositional determination, embedding sonic parameters within an explicit architectonic topography. The redundant lines of traditional staff notation yield to an array of thickened slabs, subdivided by deliberate fissures that articulate durational instability and registral ambiguity.

Brutalist Tablature does not seek to be intuitive. It is obstinate, a site of tension between performer, score, and interpretative praxis. It demands that notation itself be as resistant to instant comprehension as the music it encodes.

Materiality as Notational Imperative: Density, Compression, Striation

Rather than relying on staves as mere orientation devices, the Brutalist Tablature enforces a stratified, monolithic approach to pitch organization.

• Density: Musical elements are inscribed in reinforced blocks, their relative opacity indicating degrees of parametric congestion. Verticality is no longer an index of absolute pitch but an indicator of polyphonic mass.

• Compression: Instead of barlines, partitions of sonic mass are delineated by intrusion zones.  They are where musical materials coalesce into singular gestural entities before erupting into fracture lines.

• Striation: Sonic artifacts:  Articulations, timbral specifications, and extended techniques exist as textural encrustations within a framework of structured erosion.

This spatialization of musical matter ensures that the score exists as an object of interpretation rather than transcription, requiring performers to engage with notation as material rather than symbolic suggestion.

The Architectonics of Gesture: Performative Agglomeration and Resistance

Brutalist Tablature does not grant the performer passage as it obstructs, resists, and asserts its own presence. Each gesture must be excavated from a matrix of encoded density, a process of confrontation rather than mere execution. It subverts the prescriptive function of traditional notation in favor of a topological relationship between player and material.

Gesture is no longer a matter of indicated movement but of structural intervention:

• Thickened zones denote haptic intensity, requiring shifts in bodily pressure rather than merely volume or dynamic contrast.

• Collapsed spaces function as sonic voids, sites of non-action that demand interpretative inertia as much as engagement.

• Forced overlap disrupts sequential legibility, requiring the performer to engage with multiple layers of simultaneous decision-making.

The result is a score that exists not to instruct but to provoke, an active field of resistance against conventional interpretative fluidity.

Brutalist Tablature is neither an alternative notation nor a mere reorganization of conventional graphic principles. It is a concrete sonic architecture.  It is a mass of musical raw material, an insistent structure of sonic determination.

In this model, the score ceases to be a translucent vehicle for sound. Instead, it manifests as an autonomous brutalist object, imposing its own weight upon the performer, demanding excavation rather than passive reading.

Notation becomes concrete, raw, indelible.

Music, in turn, emerges not from the passive act of playing but from an architectural confrontation between body, score, and sound.

Codex Corpus Pharmaceuticum: Mechanics, Function, and Ontology of a Drug-Centered Musical Script

Toward a Pharmacopoeial Notation

This ongoing project represents a radical interrogation of the boundary between the somatic and the sonic, currently manifesting as the primary development of Volume 1. This inaugural collection is composed specifically for the piano, an instrument re-imagined here as a high-precision diagnostic interface for the administration of the Codex. In this context, the piano functions not as a tool for artistic expression, but as a delivery system for complex frequency-based formulations where the traditional note-head has been supplanted by the rigid, clinical iconography of the pharmaceutical pill.

The work posits that the score is a living pharmacopoeia, where each pill-shaped glyph carries the weight of regulatory finality and metabolic intervention. These icons of modern synthesis...the capsules, tablets, and perforated solids represent discrete, quantifiable units of time and affect, implying a half-life and a rate of absorption rather than a simple musical duration. The "ingestion" of the score by the performer translates these chemical artifacts into acoustic events, where the physical properties of the pill...its density, surface architecture, and "solubility" dictate the mechanical onset and decay of the sound.

The breath and range of this system are anchored by the symbolic power of the accidental. Sourced from a vast array of historical and microtonal traditions including the Just Intonation of Ben Johnston, the archaic flourishes of the Renaissance, and the hyper-precise Spartan-Sagittal systems act as essential catalysts. They represent the "molecular" fine-tuning of the performance, modifying the primary pharmaceutical directive with a staggering depth of historical and biological subjectivity. As Volume 1 unfolds, the pianist navigates a landscape where the ancient geometry of the pitch meets the cold certainty of the dose, treating the act of performance as a controlled trial that seeks the exact point where notation becomes a prescription for the human spirit.

This notational system proposes a fundamental reorientation of how musical information is encoded, perceived, and acted upon. Rather than treating sound as an abstract temporal phenomenon to be mapped onto staff, pitch lattice, or gestural instruction, it adopts the pharmacopoeia as its primary conceptual and visual substrate. Musical events are framed not as notes to be executed but as administered conditions, dosed states, and regulated interventions within a sonic body.

At its core, this system understands notation as a technology of control, mediation, and belief. Traditional Western notation encodes idealized relationships between symbol and action, presuming a stable subject who reads, interprets, and performs. By contrast, pharmacological imagery foregrounds ingestion, latency, metabolism, tolerance, side effects, and systemic uncertainty. Sound is no longer something simply produced. It is something introduced, absorbed, resisted, and transformed over time.

Mechanics of the System

The functional center of the notation is the pharmaceutical object itself. Pill-like forms act as the primary carriers of musical instruction. Their geometry, surface articulation, scale, and internal segmentation encode temporal span, density, dynamic pressure, and spectral emphasis. Rather than representing pitch directly, these objects define conditions under which pitch behavior may occur. Duration is implied through mass and volume. Articulation emerges from surface complexity or smoothness. Density and repetition are suggested by modularity and patterning rather than counted beats.

Type functions as a secondary but critical layer. Text does not label sound in a conventional sense. Instead, it operates as regulatory metadata. Like pharmaceutical labeling, it conveys dosage, constraints, and thresholds rather than expressive intention. The typography is deliberately clinical and procedural. It instructs without persuasion. It informs without interpretation. In this way, language becomes a stabilizing force that tempers the visual excess of the system while reinforcing its bureaucratic authority.

The symbolic accidentals play a decisive role in destabilizing expectation. Sourced from disparate historical and speculative tuning systems, they refuse a single lineage or hierarchy. Johnston, medieval solmization, Renaissance chromatic theory, sagittal systems, Wyschnegradsky’s micro-intervallic expansions, Klein-Zimmermann variants, and other notational frameworks coexist without reconciliation. These symbols no longer function as precise pitch modifiers alone. They operate as signals of deviation, contamination, or noncompliance within the pharmacological field. Each accidental marks a departure from normative dosage rather than a simple alteration of frequency.

Functionality and Performance

Functionally, this system does not demand uniform realization. It invites calibrated interpretation. Performers are positioned less as executors and more as clinicians or test subjects, navigating a score that prescribes conditions rather than outcomes. Decisions emerge through exposure and accumulation rather than linear reading. Repetition does not guarantee stability. Increased familiarity may instead produce distortion, fatigue, or resistance.

Time in this system is non-linear. Like pharmacokinetics, it acknowledges delayed onset, overlapping effects, and residual presence. A notated object may remain active long after it has been visually passed, just as a drug continues to act after ingestion. Silence is not absence but clearance. Change is not modulation but interaction.

Philosophical and Ontological Implications

Ontologically, the system reframes music as a form of administered knowledge. The score becomes an instrument of belief as much as instruction. To read it is to accept a set of assumptions about efficacy, authority, and compliance. The pharmacopoeial metaphor is not decorative. It exposes the degree to which musical systems, like medical ones, rely on trust in abstract representations that promise predictable effects while masking variability and risk.

By grounding notation in pharmaceutical imagery, the system aligns itself with broader questions of agency and autonomy. Who controls the dose. Who defines normal response. What constitutes an adverse reaction in sound. The visual language of medication carries cultural weight related to care, dependency, optimization, and surveillance. When translated into notation, these associations destabilize the romantic notion of musical expression and replace it with a model of managed intervention.

Purpose of the System

The purpose of this radical notation is not to replace existing systems but to reveal their underlying assumptions. It foregrounds the fact that all notation is a fiction that produces real consequences. By drawing from the aesthetics and logic of pharmacology, it makes explicit the transactional nature of performance. Sound is administered. Bodies respond. Outcomes vary.

In doing so, the system resists virtuosity, expressivity, and narrative closure. It privileges condition over gesture, state over phrase, and consequence over intention. The pharmacopoeia becomes not merely a metaphor but a structural foundation. Music is treated as something taken into the body of a performer and audience alike, something that alters internal states rather than illustrating external ideas.

This is notation as regulation, as speculation, and as quiet coercion. It does not promise cure or clarity. It offers a controlled exposure to uncertainty and asks what it means to perform under such terms.

Hypermetric Notation

 

Hypermetric Notation: The Interstitial Logic of Complexity

In the rarefied domain of contemporary new music, the advent of Hypermetric Notation marks a moment of rupture and recalibration in the relationship between composer, performer, and score. Hypothetical as its origins may be, its conceptual terrain is a labyrinth of overlapping densities, topological disjunctions, and interpretative infinities. Functioning both as a tool of precision and an apparatus for obfuscation, Hypermetric Notation embraces a methodology that privileges the interaction of multiple graphic systems, each imbued with its own semiotic weight and systemic intricacies. The result is a notational paradigm that eschews linearity in favor of dynamic polyreferentiality.

At the Edge of Representation

At its core, Hypermetric Notation operates on the premise that traditional staff-based systems are insufficient to articulate the multifaceted demands of contemporary compositional thought. What emerges is a system of representation where metric structures become spatialized, embodying a hyper-functional simultaneity that renders each notational layer autonomous yet interdependent. Metric frameworks, rather than being confined to the grid of temporal units, now expand into hypermetric planes presenting spatial matrices that exist within and between conventional durational hierarchies.

For example, a single hypermetric "unit" might encode not only rhythmic subdivision but also performative gestures, pitch constellations, and dynamic modulations, all mapped onto a single, multi-dimensional glyph. These glyphs, consisting of dense conglomerates of micrographic symbols eschew simplicity in favor of exhaustive specificity, serving as hermeneutic keys to the compositional fabric. The notation itself, then, becomes a performative object, demanding not just realization but intellectual excavation.

The Performer as Decoder

Hypermetric Notation shifts the locus of interpretative agency decisively toward the performer. The performer is no longer merely a translator of composerly intent but an active participant in reconstructing the work’s latent structure. The graphic systems within Hypermetric Notation, while ostensibly prescriptive, often yield layers of ambiguity and moments of indeterminacy that resist immediate rationalization. Thus, the performer must oscillate between deciphering its algorithmic exactitude and responding intuitively to its aesthetic provocations.

Take, for instance, the inclusion of nested graphic systems: a grid overlay that maps rhythmic polyphony against a secondary system of kinetic vector lines indicating directional movement within pitch space. These overlapping systems demand a hyper-awareness of micro-temporalities and macro-gestural arcs, producing a performance that operates in simultaneous realms of technical rigor and imaginative interpretation.

Functional Density as Expressive Terrain

The density of Hypermetric Notation is not an end unto itself but a mechanism for creating expressive tension. The juxtaposition of layered notational systems, each competing for primacy, engenders a productive dissonance that mirrors the music’s inherent contradictions. The graphic surface becomes a site of conflict, where clarity and opacity vie for dominance, compelling the performer to navigate its labyrinthine architecture with both analytical precision and aesthetic intuition.

For example, the notation might juxtapose proportional rhythms encoded in fractal grids with graphic shapes whose curvature suggests interpretative phrasing. The hypermetric framework thus transcends its function as a mere representational device, becoming a medium through which the work's conceptual underpinning are materially enacted.

The Syntax of the Impossible

One of the defining features of Hypermetric Notation is its deliberate courting of impossibility. Brian Ferneyhough has often spoken of notation as an "exhortation to the impossible," and Hypermetric Notation amplifies this ethos to an extreme. By encoding overlapping layers of temporality, gesture, and spatiality, it constructs a system whose full realization perpetually eludes the performer. Yet it is precisely in this elusiveness that its aesthetic potency lies. The score becomes less a set of instructions and more a speculative architectur.  It becomes a framework for reimagining the act of performance as a site of negotiation, failure, and transcendence.

Hypermetric Notation as Aesthetic Object

While its primary function is to facilitate musical performance, Hypermetric Notation also asserts itself as an aesthetic object in its own right. Its graphic systems, reminiscent of architectural blueprints or data visualizations, invoke an uncanny sense of order and disorder. The hypermetric plane, with its intricate layering of grids, glyphs, and spatial trajectories, invites prolonged visual engagement, blurring the line between musical score and visual artwork. This dual identity underscores its conceptual ambition: to challenge not only how music is performed but also how it is seen and understood.

Toward a Hypermetric Aesthetic

Hypermetric Notation represents a radical rethinking of the score as a site of interaction between composer, performer, and listener. Its functional density, far from being a mere technical exercise, reflects a deeper philosophical inquiry into the nature of musical time, space, and perception. In embracing the complexities of hypermetric systems, contemporary composers assert the necessity of pushing the limits of notation, not as an exercise in virtuosity but as an exploration of music's potential to articulate the ineffable.

As the boundaries between visual and sonic art forms continue to dissolve, Hypermetric Notation stands as both a testament to and a catalyst for this convergence. Its challenges are as immense as its possibilities, demanding of its practitioners not only technical mastery but also a willingness to inhabit the interstitial spaces it creates. In doing so, it opens new pathways for musical thought...pathways that are as rigorous as they are revelatory.

Perisetta, Barefoot and Dusted with Refinery Ash for Treble String Quartet

 "Perisetta, Barefoot and Dusted with Refinery Ash"

Notational Topographies and the Transfigured Spatialization of Time

This score, in its most rudimentary conceptualization, exists as an interlocutionary medium between composerly intent and performative instantiation. Yet, far from serving as a mere cartographic delineation of musical events within a preordained chronology, the score operates as an autonomous aesthetic entity.  It emerges as a topology of gestures, inscriptions, and semiotic resonances that both encode and resist interpretation.

In Perisetta, Barefoot and Dusted with Refinery Ash, I advance a radical recalibration of the notational archetype by invoking a dual-modal system wherein quantitative serialism and photographic indexicality coalesce into a stratified matrix of performative potentialities. This work, composed for string quartet, not only problematizes traditional taxonomies of rhythm, articulation, and gestural transmission but also articulates a methodology wherein the visual domain, predicated upon the works of Hanne Darboven and Thomas Ruff, becomes inseparable from the aural resultant.

The tabular inscription in Perisetta manifests as an interstitial form between Darboven’s numerological topographies and Ruff’s quasi-clinical representations of physiognomy. This aesthetic lineage gestures toward an intricate systematization of time, wherein numerical constructs dictate musical morphology in a manner that eschews linearity in favor of multi-directional simultaneities. Through this prism, the act of reading (a function historically tethered to conventional notational epistemologies) is reconceived as a kinetic engagement with a notation that is at once spatialized, deconstructed, and architectonic.

Temporality and Numerological Encoding: Toward an Anti-Linear Chronology

Temporal configurations within Perisetta resist metered regularity, instead favoring a synthetic elasticity of durational proportioning that derives from Darboven’s engagement with cross-sum calculations, recursive date formations, and vectorized numerical configurations. Where Darboven’s oeuvre posits an algebraic concretization of temporal succession, This score appropriates and mutates this approach by deploying a modular numerical syntax wherein additive and subtractive procedures dictate the relational properties of pitch, contour, and bowing pressure.

The score itself is structured around a matrix of algorithmically derived temporal units, each functioning as an independent isochronous cell, which may expand or contract according to a secondary, non-fixed durational logic. This results in a phenomenon wherein the act of execution becomes a form of chronological negotiation rather than a realization of pre-determined rhythmic stratification.

The recursive encoding mechanisms are an explicit reference to Darboven’s calendar systems, wherein the artist developed a distinctive conversion methodology that transformed numerical configurations into graphical transcriptions. In Perisetta, this logic is repurposed such that each performance instance is inextricably bound to a localized, yet infinitely permutable, durational syntax.

 Computational Indexing and Serialist Layering

The parametric layering within the score derives not from a conventional serialist approach but from an interlocking permutation of vectors that dictate the density and gradation of sonic material.

These strata are defined through:

A numerically inscribed tablature system, which situates pitch, articulation, and dynamics within a set of spatial coordinates.

A performative indexing matrix, wherein each quadrant of the page is assigned a gestural function, corresponding to a discrete set of bowing techniques and contact points.

An integrated phonographic notation, in which pre-composed photographic portraits of performers dictate gesture, posture, and tension thresholds.

This three-tiered structuration operates as a non-hierarchical field of encoded parameters, necessitating a form of interpretation that is both visual and kinetic, yet simultaneously resistant to traditional modes of reading.

Photographic Realism as Notational Inscription: The Thomas Ruff Parallax

A defining element of Perisetta is its engagement with photographic realism as a notational extension. By integrating high-resolution portraiture inspired by Thomas Ruff’s aesthetic objectivism, I introduce a physiognomic coding system that directly influences performative decision-making.

Where Ruff’s portraiture achieves an apparent neutrality through the suppression of emotive signifiers, I utilizes this aesthetic mechanism as a precondition for gestural determination. The extraction of temporal specificity from the physiognomic field creates an image-based notation wherein performer identity is implicated within the structural mechanics of execution.

By employing photographic indexicality, I establish a threefold dialectic between:

The encoded visual gesture, wherein the formal properties of the performer’s portrait inform the mechanics of bow pressure, vibrato articulation, and attack envelope.

The aleatoric stratification of visual sequences, leading to a form of notation that resists singular interpretation, instead favoring contingent realizations based on individual performer morphology.

The residual trace of photographic memory, transforming the execution of the score into an iterative process of re-inscription, wherein the visual referent lingers as a mnemonic structure.

Thus, Perisetta becomes a palimpsest of interstitial codes, wherein notation, performance, and photographic inscription merge into a single, mutable entity.

Aesthetic Idealism and the Chronotopic Collapse of Musical Time

The culmination of these methodologies (Darboven’s temporal inscription, Ruff’s documentary realism, and my notational expansionism) results in a radical reconceptualization of musical temporality. In Perisetta, the chronotopic parameters of the score do not function as a singular linear sequence but rather as a multi-axial structure of durational interpenetration.

This approach aligns with Darboven’s assertion that time cannot be objectified outside of human perception, and that its representation is inherently synthetic. Consequently, Perisetta engages with:

The dissolution of fixed temporality, where performative events exist within a spectrum of probabilistic occurrences.

A recursive re-framing of notation, wherein symbols operate not as direct imperatives but as relational possibilities.

A visual-auditory dualism, collapsing the distinction between performative gesture and encoded structure.

Notation as Temporality, Notation as Image

Perisetta, Barefoot and Dusted with Refinery Ash exemplifies a radical departure from traditional string quartet idioms, engaging with notation as a performative cartography wherein inscription, duration, and embodiment are inextricably linked. By synthesizing Darboven’s numerological inscriptions, Ruff’s photographic realism, and an experimental tablature system, I present a work wherein notation itself becomes a performative entity...a site of multiplicity, subjectivity, and transformation.

Rather than merely codifying sound, the score reconfigures our fundamental assumptions about temporality, notation, and musical semiotics, positioning itself not as a static document, but as an evolving palimpsest of aesthetic potentialities.

W.I.P. V 2.0>>>>>>>>>>>>The Notation as Kinetic Cinematograph

 

The Notation as Kinetic Cinematograph

This score, titled via a vertical golden banner as LIMOLLELEOPELLI, embodies the confluence of kinetic energy, choreographic fragmentation, and the industrial topology of the notational machine. It is at once a mechanical scroll, an exploded diagram, and a trans-musical fiction.  It emerges as a proto-instrumental architecture rendered as a surrealistic map.

At its core, this work is neither traditionally musical nor purely graphic.  It is a performative prosthesis, bridging auditory experience with biomechanical form. It invites the performer not to interpret, but to engineer presence, to activate a serialized cinematic body.

More to come...