What Tools Do I Use to Create My Scores?

 

What Tools Do I Use to Create My Scores?

A musical score is, at its most basic, a set of instructions. But what if the page itself were also a participant? What if the materials that constitute the score, not just what is drawn on it but what it is made of and what has been done to its surface, were themselves carrying meaning, generating behavior, and asking something of the person who encounters them?

This is the question that has driven my practice for the better part of a decade. What follows is an account of how I actually make these works: the digital infrastructure, the physical materials, and the thinking that holds them together.

The Digital Foundation

My digital workflow is built around the Adobe Creative Suite, but the suite functions less as a production environment and more as a set of distinct instruments, each with its own role.

Illustrator is where the glyph families and proportional grids live. It is the most architectural of the tools, responsible for the structural logic of the page and the relationships between notational elements. Photoshop handles what I think of as the surface weather: the abrasions, the accumulated micro-histories, the sense that a page has been through something before the performer ever picks it up. Substance 3D Designer, Stager, and Dimension allow me to model notational elements with genuine spatial depth, to cast shadows from one symbol onto another, and to proof how a mark reads when it begins to behave like a three-dimensional object rather than a flat inscription. InDesign assembles the final folios and maintains structural legibility across multiple pages. Fontographer is close at hand for the letterforms I cannot find anywhere else.

The Astute Manager plug-ins extend the work in two directions simultaneously, toward precision and toward chance, which is not a contradiction but a productive tension that I rely on. Topaz Gigapixel enters the process at the finishing stage, when a plate needs to scale to wall dimensions without surrendering its grain and surface particularity.

To this toolkit I have added Dassault Systemes' CATIA, the aerospace and industrial design platform that most people associate with the engineering of aircraft and complex mechanical systems. In my practice, CATIA provides something that no conventional design application offers: the ability to model notational elements as genuine engineered forms, to subject them to structural and spatial logic borrowed from industrial design, and to bring a kind of technical rigor to the construction of visual forms that would otherwise remain purely intuitive. When a notational symbol in one of my scores appears to have structural weight, to occupy space in a way that feels load-bearing rather than decorative, CATIA is often where that quality was developed.

The Physical Materials

The analog bench is where the work becomes irreversible, and irreversibility is part of the point.

Conventional oils, pastels, and pencils go down first, establishing the initial surface relationship between mark and substrate. Then I bring in materials that operate by different rules.

Mica flakes and molten salt, used in works such as Luxtrapathy, Capitalocene and the Logicade, introduce a crystalline, mineral quality to the surface, something that catches light differently at different angles and refuses to settle into a single resolved appearance. Conductive ink and xylene appear in the same work, the conductive ink carrying an implicit charge that is not merely metaphorical, and the xylene as a solvent that opens the surface to further intervention. Colored pencil worked into metallic spray foam creates a layered density that reads differently at different distances, intimate at close range, almost architectural from across a room.

Liquid metal under a wash of gilding adhesive, as seen in The Criminality on the Staircase, produces a surface that is simultaneously precious and industrial, the gilding adhesive holding and also slightly obscuring what lies beneath. In the same work, thermochromic metallic paint and photochromic metallic paint introduce genuine instability to the finished object: the surface changes with light and warmth, which means the score is not a fixed thing but a responsive one, different in a cold room than in a warm one, different under natural light than under artificial.

Methylene chloride, when applied as a sculpting agent, attacks the substrate in controlled ways, creating depressions, textures, and surface events that could not be achieved by addition alone. The page is not simply built up but excavated.

Other works introduce entirely different material logics. Sky and Dye incorporates carbon fiber, PLA filament, copper tubing shavings, graphene-based superlattice, and black phosphorus alongside more conventional oils and inks, all on Hahnemühle Deckle Edge paper. These are not randomly assembled materials. Carbon fiber carries associations of engineered lightness and tensile strength. Black phosphorus is a two-dimensional semiconductor. Graphene-based superlattice is a material of extraordinary electronic properties. Their presence in a musical score is a statement about what kinds of knowledge and what kinds of material culture belong together on the same surface.

Legends Carved into the Void's Mantle uses Replexium, doped graphene, Tyvek, infrared charcoal, turmeric paste, and moss pulp together, each material bringing its own temporal quality: some stable, some fugitive, some transforming slowly over years. Entangled Dreams in the Concrete Mirage, the viola score, combines acrylic, Cupuacu oil, shape-memory polymer foam, Criollo tobacco, French Poudre B, and Blue Tansy oil on Canson Infinity Baryta Photographique, a substrate chosen for its photographic archival quality. The shape-memory polymer foam has the property of returning to a previous form when stimulated: it literally remembers. The tobacco carries centuries of cultural weight and a particular quality of slow combustion. These are not decorative choices.

Interiority uses liquid europium, a rare earth element with luminescent properties, alongside burst charge powder, neem oil, and piezoelectric foam, materials that respond to electrical pressure, to biological chemistry, to force. Reality Bends to the Whim incorporates azurite, rhodium, and graphene oxide alongside more conventional graphite and pencil, the azurite a pigment with a history stretching back to ancient Egypt, the rhodium one of the rarest and most reflective metals on earth.

Proproxasant uses nicotine, salt crystals, aerodynamic foam, elemi oil, and Pyrodex, the last a smokeless powder propellant, on Hahnemühle Sugar Cane and Legion Colorplan Vellum. Calavist, Opreach, Revune and Trayke, among the largest works, incorporates spider silk, bioluminescent bacteria, and magnetized iron filings alongside sand, crushed circuit boards, and resin. These are not materials borrowed from another context for their associative value alone. They are chosen because of how they behave: the spider silk for its tensile strength and near invisibility, the bioluminescent bacteria for its capacity to produce light through biological process, the magnetized iron filings for the field lines they make visible.

The substrates themselves are chosen with equal care. Fujifilm Crystal Archive Maxima, Ilford Galerie Prestige Gold Fibre Silk, Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta, Kodak Professional Endura Premier Metallic Paper, Moab Entrada Digital Rag, Canson Infinity Platine Fibre Rag, Bergger Prestige Variable CB: these are photographic and fine art papers chosen not only for their archival stability and surface qualities but for the specific way each one receives and holds the materials applied to it. The conversation between substrate and substance is not incidental. It is compositional.

The Underlying Principle

I do not treat any of this as special effects, surface decoration, or the application of interesting materials to an otherwise conventional score. The piano is wood, felt, steel, and air working together. The page should answer in kind. Every material decision is a decision about what the score is asking and how it is asking it. The score that incorporates a shape-memory polymer is a score that has built memory into its physical substance. The score that uses thermochromic paint is a score that changes its appearance with the conditions of its reading. The score that carries rare earth luminescence is a score that produces its own light.

This is not notation enhanced by materials. It is notation constituted by them.

A Minute Is Not Small: "Helen Was In The Bedroom; I Had Exactly A Minute Left" for Haynes Amadeus Grenadilla Piccolo

On "Helen Was In The Bedroom; I Had Exactly A Minute Left," for Haynes Amadeus Grenadilla Piccolo

The piece lasts about a minute. That is not what happened when I ran out of material, and it is not a miniature in the usual sense of the word, a small charming thing you admire once and set back down. It lasts a minute because it is about a minute, the specific one named in the title, and I wanted the form to last exactly as long as the situation it carries. When you have exactly a minute left, the minute is not small. It is the largest unit of time there is.

I am not going to explain Helen, or the bedroom, or what the minute was for. The title gives you one person in one room and another person elsewhere with a countdown already running, and the not knowing is the condition I wrote from. A last minute is charged precisely because you cannot see over its edge. You do not get the sequel. The piece is the inside of that minute and nothing on either side of it.

I wrote it for the Haynes Amadeus grenadilla piccolo, and the instrument is not incidental. The piccolo is the most exposed voice in the orchestra, the highest and most piercing, the one that cannot slip into a texture and disappear. The grenadilla, African blackwood, gives it a body underneath the brilliance, a darkness in the wood that keeps the top from turning to pure whistle. Written where this sits, an octave above an already high line, it rides at the ceiling of hearing. There is nowhere up there to hide. The player cannot rest, cannot coast, cannot let a phrase carry itself. A minute on this instrument at this density is punishing to play, and the brightness makes every event vivid to the edge of pain. That is not a side effect I tolerated. That is what a last minute feels like from the inside, and the piccolo is the only instrument that says it without translation.

The whole thing is one bar. Twenty six eighths, a single span, with no interior barlines to reassure anyone that time is being counted off in tidy fours. One breath of time, undivided. There is no development, no recapitulation, no second subject, because a last minute does not develop. It does not build to anything or resolve. It continues, in one unbroken present tense, until it stops. I wanted the notation itself to refuse the comfort of the measured grid, so the eye moves through the line the way the mind moves through a minute you know is ending, without the small reassurances of regular return.

And it is packed. Nearly every note carries an accidental, a microtonal arrow, an inflection bending it off true. The beams stack into thirty seconds and sixty fourths. The tuplets nest inside one another. None of this is decoration and none of it is difficulty for its own sake. When you have a minute left you do not pad it, and you do not drift through it at half attention. The density is the sound of a minute lived at the absolute ceiling of attention, every instant inflected because every instant is the last of its kind. A slow, sparse, spacious last minute would be a lie about what a last minute is. This one refuses to waste a single one of the twenty six eighths it is given.

This is where the brevity earns its place, and why I want to argue for it rather than apologize for it. Brevity in music usually gets read as modesty. The sketch, the aphorism, the small form you excuse for being small. Webern taught everyone that a piece can be over in seconds and still be complete, and that lesson is real, but I am after something next to it rather than the same. The brevity here is not miniature. It is terminal. The shortness is not a reduction of scale, it is the whole subject, because the piece is a countdown and a countdown that lasted ten minutes would not be a countdown, it would be a wait. A minute that is genuinely full does not feel short while you are inside it. It feels total.

There is also an honesty in it that longer forms let you evade. You cannot hide a weak idea in a minute the way you can bury it in forty. There is no slow movement to coast through, no development section to fill with competence, no coda to let the audience down gently. Brevity is the most exposing form there is, for exactly the reason the piccolo is the most exposing instrument, and I put the two together on purpose. Everything is on the surface. Everything is audible. If a second does not carry its weight you hear the failure immediately, because there is only a minute of seconds and each one is load bearing.

The line thins at the very end into rests, quick and broken, the minute expiring in real time on the page. The last events are almost torn off. Then it stops, and whatever the minute was counting toward is on the other side of the barline where the music does not go. Helen is still in the bedroom. The minute is gone. The piece does not tell you what it was for, because at the moment it ends I did not know either, and that is the truest thing about it.

So I want to be precise about the word. The piece is not short. It is exactly long enough, which is a different thing, and the difference is the whole point. A minute is not small when it is the one you have left. It is everything you have, and the only honest way to write it is to make it last exactly that long and to fill it completely.

A Volume of Calls: On the Clarion series for trumpet, six pages becoming fifty-nine

A Volume of Calls

On the Clarion series for trumpet, six pages becoming fifty-nine

Clarion began as one page. I wrote a single sheet for solo trumpet, one centered stave with the whole apparatus climbing up and down from it, a fanfare that stated itself and stopped. Then I wrote five more. Somewhere inside the sixth I understood that I had not written six pieces. I had found a form, and the form wanted a volume. So the six are now the opening of fifty-nine.

The word clarion is not decoration on the title. A clarion is a trumpet, the high clear one, and a clarion call is the thing the instrument was invented to do, to cut through, to announce, to summon across a distance. I wanted works that remembered that the trumpet is a herald before it is anything else, before it is a jazz voice or an orchestral section or a virtuoso vehicle. So each page is a call. Not a movement, not an etude, not a character piece. A call. The trumpet is the one instrument whose entire history is signal, and I wanted a body of work that stood inside that history rather than politely beside it.

Each Clarion is one page and only one page. Nothing spills onto a verso, nothing is marked to be repeated, nothing continues elsewhere. The single page is the complete unit, and I mean complete in the strong sense, that the work is exactly the size of one sheet a player can take in at a glance. The eye receives the whole call before the lips begin it. That is a formal decision every bit as consequential as choosing the instrument, because the page is the form. A call that needed two pages would not be a call. It would be a speech, and a speech is a different genre with different obligations. The discipline of the single sheet is what keeps each of these works honest about what it is.

And each page is dense. One stave, the apparatus growing vertically off it until the stave itself is nearly buried, the trumpet pushed to the ceiling of what a single sheet can hold, tonguing and valve work and mutes and microtones and breath all stacked into one continuous gesture. The brevity of the page is not the brevity of the sketch. It is compression. Every one of these pages is a maximum folded down until it fits inside a single glance, which is the opposite of a miniature. A miniature is small because there is little to say. A Clarion is small because there is too much, and it has been forced into one page on purpose.

But the single page is only half of the form. The other half is the volume, and this is the part that changed when I passed from six to fifty-nine. One call is an event. Fifty-nine calls, ordered and bound, is something else. It is an accumulation, a census of nearly everything the trumpet can be asked to announce, a wall of signals rather than a signal. I keep thinking of Hanne Darboven's walls of dated sheets, where no single page is the work and the seriality itself is the content. The volume is a form in its own right, and no individual page carries it, the way no single day carries a year. The move from six to fifty-nine is the move from a suite to a body. A suite is a handful of related pieces you play together in an evening. A body is a complete population, and the meaning of any one member is partly that it is one of fifty-nine.

This matters for how the pieces are meant to live. You do not have to perform all fifty-nine, and most players never will. A trumpeter can take three of them, or one, and the call still sounds. But all fifty-nine have to exist, because each page is written knowing it belongs to a fixed and finite set, and that knowledge is inside the writing. A call that knows it is one of fifty-nine is composed differently from a call that thinks it is alone. The volume is the context every page is answering to, even when it is performed by itself.

And the volume stops at fifty-nine, not sixty, and the missing round number is deliberate. I do not build systems that come out even, because nothing true comes out even, and the round number is almost always a lie you tell to make a body of work look designed. Fifty-nine is a prime. It cannot be halved or quartered into tidy sub-suites of neat equal length, which is exactly why it is the right size for a volume meant to resist being tidied. It terminates one short of the number you were expecting, and that small refusal is the signature. The same instinct that puts one deliberate flaw in every score puts the whole volume one page short of the round, so that the set as a whole carries the imperfection its individual pages carry.

When it is finished it will be fifty-nine single pages for trumpet. Fifty-nine calls, each complete in a glance, and none of them complete without the other fifty-eight. The six that exist now are not a preview of the volume. They are the first six terms of it, and they already know how many follow. The trumpet has been calling since long before anyone wrote a note down. This is one attempt to write down fifty-nine of the calls it still has left to make.

The Score as Structure: Archigram, Morphosis, and the Brutalist Stave

I have started to think that the most consequential decision I make in a piece is not the ensemble, not the pitch material, not the form in any sense a theory teacher would recognize. It is the stave. Not what I write on it, but what it is. For most of the history of Western music that question never came up, because the staff was settled property, five lines, evenly spaced, a neutral grid on which anything could be hung. I no longer accept that the grid is neutral, and once you stop accepting it, the whole apparatus opens up. The place I have found the richest thinking about grids that are not neutral is not in music at all. It is in architecture.

This is not a metaphor I am reaching for to sound serious. Architecture and notation are doing the same job. Both are systems of marks on a plane that instruct someone, later, in another place, to bring a structure into physical reality through time and labor. A score is a drawing that a building crew of musicians has to erect in the air, once, and then let fall. The architect and I both draw the thing that does not yet exist so that other people can make it exist. The difference is that architecture has spent a century interrogating its own drawing conventions with a seriousness that notation has mostly avoided. So I go and borrow.

Three architectural moments have changed how I build a stave. They pull in different directions, which is exactly why I want all three.

Brutalism, or the honest section

Start with the heaviest. Brutalism gets accused of being too exposed, too direct, too indifferent to charm. Those are the qualities I want in a stave. The traditional staff is a curtain wall, a thin even facade that hides its own structure so that any harmony can hang on it smoothly. Brutalism refuses concealment on principle. In béton brut the concrete shows the grain of the formwork that cast it, the joints where the pours met, the scars of the process. Nothing is cleaned away because the cleaning would be a lie about how the thing was made.

When I let that ethic into the stave, thickness starts to matter. Line weight, offset, extrusion. A heavy line and a hairline are no longer the same line drawn with different pens; they are different structural members carrying different loads. The grid stops being a passive index of pitch and starts carrying information about density, resistance, and instability. Blocks of blackened cells read as shear walls or service cores. Fine repetitive grids read as the fenestration of a housing block. Negative space, the unmarked void in the lattice, becomes as load-bearing as any marked cell, because in a section drawing the courtyard is not absence, it is program.

The practical consequence is that a barline is no longer a fence. It is a beam. Things can hang from it, cantilever past it, thrust outward beyond the apparent frame of the piece the way Breuer and Lasdun push mass out over empty air until you can feel the building testing gravity. A sound event that extends past the barline is not a notational error to be tidied with a tie. It is a cantilever, and it is doing structural work. Once the performer can see where the stave is strong, where it is thin, and where it might buckle, reading becomes an act of structural judgment rather than transcription. That is the Brutalist gift: the score is honest about its own supports.

Archigram, or the score that is never finished

Brutalism is heavy and permanent. Archigram is its opposite, and I need the correction. In the 1960s a group of young British architects, Peter Cook, Ron Herron, Warren Chalk and the others, published a magazine full of buildings that were plug-in, clip-on, walking, inflatable, and mostly unbuildable. The Plug-In City imagined a megastructure of standardized service armatures into which dwelling capsules could be craned in, lived in, and craned out again when they wore out or when you simply wanted a different view. Herron's Walking City proposed buildings that got up on legs and relocated. Instant City was an idea for dropping a temporary cultural event into a dull town by airship and taking it away again.

What Archigram gave notation is the idea that the structure is a chassis, not a monument. The permanent part is the armature, the network of connection points; everything else clips in, has a lifespan, and is designed to be removed. When I build a stave on that principle, the five-line body becomes the service core, and the actual musical events become capsules that plug into it, occupy it for a duration, and detach. Some capsules are standardized and reusable across pieces, a library of clip-on cells. Some are single-use. And crucially, the score stops pretending to be a finished object. It is a system in a state, a snapshot of what is plugged in right now, with visible sockets where other things could be plugged instead.

This is where indeterminacy stops being a philosophical gesture and becomes an infrastructural one. Archigram did not offer choice as a vague freedom; it offered specific, engineered connection points and a discipline about what could dock where. A score built this way gives the performer real options because it gives them real sockets, not an invitation to do anything, which is always secretly an invitation to do nothing. The chassis is rigorous precisely so that the plug-ins can be free.

Morphosis, or the network instead of the system

The third is contemporary, and it resolves a problem the first two leave open. Brutalism gives me weight and honesty. Archigram gives me modularity and impermanence. Both, though, still assume a spine, a main body, a corridor you read along even if you can leave it. Thom Mayne and Morphosis pushed me past the spine.

Mayne's drawings, and the thinking in his work around combinatory urbanism and what he has called strange networks, treat a building or a city not as a hierarchy descending from a central axis but as a network, a field of nodes and the relationships between them, where order is emergent rather than imposed and no single route is the correct one. The Morphosis sheet is famously hard to read in the old way because it is not organized around one dominant line. It layers plan, section, and exploded detail on one field, connects them with leader lines and reference bubbles, fragments and tilts its own panels, and asks you to assemble the logic yourself from the connections rather than receive it from an axis.

Apply that to a score and time stops being a corridor. Events become nodes distributed across the field. The lines between them are not staff lines; they are edges, relationships, dependencies, and the reading of the piece is a path traced through the network rather than a scan from left to right. Some nodes are hubs where many relationships converge and the music is dense and load-bearing. Some are isolates, connected to nothing, reachable by no path, sounding alone. Time is no longer given by the page. It is chosen, a route through the web, and because the network is combinatory there is more than one legitimate route, which makes the choice of path a compositional parameter rather than a loophole.

This is the most radical of the three because it attacks the one assumption Brutalism and Archigram both keep: that you read a score in an order the page hands you. Morphosis hands you a network and makes the order your problem, which is to say your material.

Choosing the stave is the first act of composition

I do not want any of this to sound like decoration, like I am garnishing scores with architectural references to borrow their seriousness. The point is the opposite. These three ways of thinking change what the stave is before a single note goes on it, which means they change the piece at its foundation.

So I have started building a library of structural staves the way an architect keeps a vocabulary of structural typologies. One template is a heavy Brutalist section, thick load paths and blackened piers, built for dense brass and speech and things that need weight. One is an Archigram chassis, a rigorous armature full of sockets, built for pieces where the performers assemble the object from a kit. One is a Morphosis network, a field of nodes and edges with no spine, built for pieces where the path is the point. Choosing among them is not a formatting decision I make at the end. It is the first structural choice, and it is as consequential as choosing the instruments, because it decides whether the performer will inhabit a slab, a plug-in city, or a strange network.

If traditional notation is a smooth facade that hides how sound is held up, the notation I am after is a cross section that never lets you forget sound has weight, a chassis that admits it will be rebuilt, and a network that refuses to tell you which way to walk. The stave is not the neutral thing the music sits on. It is the first thing I build, and everything else is an occupation of it.

Brutalist Tablatures

Brutalist Tablatures

Brutalism has always been accused of being too heavy, too exposed, too direct. Those are exactly the qualities I want in a stave. The scores I build  do not treat the staff as a neutral container. They treat it as a structural system. The score is not a five line grid waiting for polite notes. It is a megastructure, a sectional drawing in which musical events occupy cells, buttresses, voids and cantilevers.

The new stave in my work grows from the same sensibility that produced béton brut. It is unapologetically rough in its geometry, precise in its modularity and indifferent to decorative flourish that does not carry load. Brutalism gives me both a visual vocabulary and an ethic. The stave becomes architecture for sound.

From the Five Line Staff to the Structural Stave

The traditional staff is a kind of curtain wall. Thin, equally spaced lines produce a smooth facade on which any harmony can be hung. It hides the structure. Brutalism refuses that concealment. In the new stave, thickness matters. Line weight, offset and extrusion announce hierarchy, function and risk. Each segment of the staff has a specific task.

Grids no longer simply index pitch. They carry information about density, resistance, instability. Blocks protrude and recede. Negative spaces in the lattice are as important as marked cells. The performer does not read from left to right as if scanning a street of identical townhouses. They move through a complex section drawing, where the eye jumps across terraces and voids, mapping circulation routes rather than a single corridor.

Le Corbusier and the Ethics of Raw Surface

Le Corbusier’s late work, with its exposed concrete and imprinted formwork, advances a key idea. Surface should reveal process. In my staves, the grid does not pretend to be seamless. You can see the joints where modules meet, the incomplete lattices, the abrupt terminations.

These incongruities function as cues. The stave shows its casting scars. Notational “imperfections” are not cleaned away. They become triggers for articulation and color.

Alison and Peter Smithson: Streets in the Score

Alison and Peter Smithson spoke of “streets in the sky” in projects like Robin Hood Gardens. Elevated walkways fold circulation into the elevation itself. I borrow this idea by pulling pathways out of the notational plan.

In the tablature, certain linear channels in the grid function as aerial walkways. Instrumental lines ride along these channels, sometimes abandoning the main body of the stave, then reattaching at another elevation. The score becomes an urban section in which multiple routes are available. The choice of path is a compositional parameter.

Paul Rudolph and Layered Section

Paul Rudolph’s drawings are notoriously dense. Overlapping hatch patterns and stacked levels create depth without traditional perspective. This is extremely instructive for a new stave.

The horizontal “beams” in my templates are often layered, as in the central mass of the attached score. A performer reads them not as simple registers but as stacked platforms of time. 

The Brutalist lesson is that complexity does not require ornament. Rudolph uses repetition and overlap. I use repeated modules of grids and blocks, shifted slightly, to create polyphonic instruction inside the stave itself.

Lina Bo Bardi: Play and Heavy Industry

Lina Bo Bardi’s SESC Pompéia complex combines raw concrete spans with playful catwalks, bright color and provisional structures. This mixture of severity and improvisation is central to my scoring templates.

Within a single Brutalist stave I can let one zone behave like an industrial hall, with rigid metric beams, while another zone behaves like a temporary scaffolding. The isolated forms to the right read almost like detached silos or towers. They are not marginal decorations. They are annexes. Performers deploy them as optional spaces for insertions, cadenzas, or auxiliary sound behaviors.

Bo Bardi makes room for occupation, not just observation. I want staves that invite occupation, misuse, squatting. Performers are encouraged to treat certain grid clusters as unprogrammed public space.

Marcel Breuer, Denys Lasdun and the Cantilevered Barline

Breuer and Lasdun both use heavy cantilevers that push mass outward into space. Their buildings feel as if they are testing the tolerance of gravity. My barlines and sectional breaks work the same way.

Blocks that thrust outward from the main horizontal mass act as temporal cantilevers. They permit sound events that extend past the apparent frame of the piece. 

Lasdun’s National Theatre terraces suggest a stepped stacking of acoustic zones. I translate that into terraced grids within the stave. Dynamics, density, and ensemble clustering climb up and down these terraces. A barline is no longer a fence. It is a structural beam from which sound platforms hang.

Reading the Attached Score as a Brutalist Plan

Seen through this lens, the attached score is a site plan. The long central body reads as a horizontal slab punctured and extruded into multiple wings. Each wing is a different acoustic program. Clusters of black cells resemble shear walls or service cores. Fine grids suggest the repetitive fenestration of social housing blocks.

To perform this score is to inhabit the diagram. Players trace routes through corridors of measure units. They pause at structural piers of blackened cells. They treat the open white voids as courtyards for resonance and decay.

The smaller fragments positioned above and to the right operate like detached towers or infrastructural appendages. They invite momentary departures from the main complex. Performers can “commute” to those towers and return, altering ensemble geometry in the process. The stave template is therefore not a line. It is a campus.

Toward a Brutalist Template Library

For me the goal is not to decorate scores with architectural references. It is to let Brutalist thinking change the ontology of the stave. Templates become structural typologies.

One template might emulate a Smithson style deck, optimized for layered, noisy brass textures and speech fragments. Another might take its cue from Rudolph, dense and cross hatched, suited to maximalist percussion routings. A Bo Bardi template could be more porous, with large unmarked grids that invite player generated behaviors.

By codifying these into a library of Brutalist staves, I can compose at the level of structural choice. Choosing the stave becomes as consequential as choosing the ensemble. The stave is no longer a framing device. It is the first act of construction.

Conclusion

Brutalist architecture gives me a way to imagine the staff as concrete. It is heavy, explicit, and filled with joints that refuse erasure. The new staves in my work expose their own load paths. Performers see where the structure is strong, where it is thin, where it might buckle.

In that exposure lies a different kind of musical ethics. The score is honest about its supports. It shows the scaffolding of its own time and pitch systems. It invites occupation, adaptation, and sometimes demolition.

If traditional notation is a smooth facade, Brutalist notation is a cross section that never lets you forget that sound has weight. The new stave is not a line on which music rests. It is a building that music must enter.

Ankhrasmation: Wadada Leo Smith's Visual Language of Creative Music

 

Ankhrasmation: Wadada Leo Smith's Visual Language of Creative Music

When trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith created his first graphic score in 1967, he was not simply finding a new way to write music. He was constructing an entirely new language, one that would fundamentally reimagine the relationship between notation, performance, and creative agency.

That language, which he calls Ankhrasmation, combines ankh (an ancient Egyptian symbol meaning life force), ras (father), and ma (mother). The name itself signals the system's ambitions: to create a notational framework as fundamental as life itself, drawing on multiple cultural and spiritual traditions to establish a universal approach to creative music-making.

Over nearly six decades, Ankhrasmation has evolved from cuneiform-like symbols into vibrant visual compositions that exist simultaneously as musical scores and works of art. Smith's colorful scores are visual compositions filled with energy and mystery that illustrate the musician's vibrant conversation between improvised and formally scored music. These are not conventional instructions for performance. They are invitations to research, interpret, and create.

The Language, Not the Notation

Smith explicitly distinguishes Ankhrasmation as "a musical language as opposed to a musical notation system". This distinction is crucial. Traditional notation prescribes specifics: which pitches, which durations, which dynamics. Ankhrasmation provides parameters and possibilities, creating a framework within which musicians exercise genuine creative choice.

Smith abandoned instrumentation, meter, and choice of notes, making it a framework not so much for what to play as for how and when to play it. Rather than notes, Ankhrasmation privileges discrete moments of activity, for which he provided only general determinants: number and duration of notes, tempo, pitch, phrase length.

The scores employ a visual vocabulary of shapes, colors, lines, and symbols. The notation's signature glyph is the pennant, referred to as a velocity unit. Other elements include geometric forms, calligraphic gestures, and color fields that performers must interpret through both scientific precision and imaginative fantasy.

Color as Conceptual Territory

Color functions in Ankhrasmation not as decoration but as semantic field. The color spectrum referenced in Ankhrasmation language scores, such as yellow might be considered as a sunflower, or a banana, or a cantaloupe, or any object or idea that's imagined that can be represented by the color yellow. The color yellow can be identified scientifically by its numerical number.

This dual approach, simultaneously scientific and imaginative, characterizes the entire system. Performers are expected to research the objective properties of colors, shapes, and symbols (their wavelengths, their geometries, their cultural meanings) while also bringing personal associations and creative interpretations. The score becomes a site where empirical data meets individual imagination.

It could be referenced scientifically, according to nature or biology, or it can be referenced according to fantasy, imagination. So when all these components are connected, that guarantees the possibility of success.

The Score as Obsolete Object

Perhaps most radically, Smith asserts that the score itself becomes obsolete the moment the object has been rendered. The notation exists not as permanent instruction but as catalyst for creative action. Once the performance occurs, the score has fulfilled its purpose. Each realization generates new information that supersedes the written page.

This temporality inverts conventional relationships between composition and performance. In traditional practice, the score remains authoritative, the standard against which performances are measured. In Ankhrasmation, the performance becomes authoritative, generating knowledge that the score could only suggest.

Individual Sound as Collective Practice

What unifies all of Wadada Leo Smith's projects is what also makes them so different from each other: Smith's commitment to every musician having an individual sound. This philosophical position has practical implications for how Ankhrasmation functions.

The scores demand that performers bring their complete musical personalities to the work. There is no subordination of individual voice to ensemble blend, no requirement that musicians suppress their distinctive approaches in service of unified sound. Instead, Smith describes the performance as a community, a family of people from different cultures, different backgrounds, with different pieces of knowledge who collectively, not knowing what knowledge the other person has, put their knowledge into the performance space.

This creates music characterized by what might be called productive heterogeneity. Individual voices remain distinct, operating in dialogue rather than fusion, creating collective sound through the interaction of genuinely different approaches rather than the subordination of difference to uniformity.

Visual Art and Musical Instruction

Smith's scores are considered works of art and have been exhibited at UCLA's Hammer Museum, The Museum of Rhythm, Museum Sztuki in Łódź, Poland, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and the Kalamazoo Institute Art Museum. This dual status as both musical instruction and visual art is not incidental to Ankhrasmation but constitutive of it.

The scores exist visually before they exist sonically. Some are defined by large blocks of color and bold singular shapes, either geometric or calligraphic in nature. Others resemble a schematic for what could be a fourth law of thermodynamics. Their visual impact is immediate and powerful, independent of any eventual sonic realization.

This visual primacy means that looking at an Ankhrasmation score is itself a form of encounter with the work, not merely preparation for the "real" experience of performance. The scores circulate in galleries and museums, reaching audiences who may never hear them performed, functioning as complete aesthetic objects in their own right.

Precision and Openness

The relationship between precision and interpretive freedom in Ankhrasmation resists easy summary. While the language is extremely precise in terms of the relationship between discrete musical events, performers are invited to research the meaning of the various symbols and colors.

The precision concerns structure, relationships, and parameters. The openness concerns content, interpretation, and realization. A score might specify exactly how many sound events occur and their temporal relationships while leaving the specific pitches, timbres, and articulations to the performer's discretion.

This combination creates music that is simultaneously tightly organized and radically open, rigorously structured and freely improvised. The apparent contradiction resolves in practice, where performers navigate the score's specificity while exercising genuine creative choice within the established framework.

Historical Context and Evolution

Smith developed Ankhrasmation in the late 1960s as a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in Chicago, alongside figures like Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Leroy Jenkins. His first visual score, "The Bell," premiered on saxophonist Anthony Braxton's influential 1968 album 3 Compositions of New Jazz.

Over subsequent decades, the language has evolved considerably. Three sets of scores represent three different stages of Smith's evolution in his Ankhrasmation Language: the complete twenty-two panels of iEacigmei (1971); five never-before exhibited panels from Luminous Axis (2002), and three panels from Kosmic Music.

Early scores retained more elements of traditional notation, incorporating standard staff lines and rhythmic values alongside graphic symbols. Later scores have moved increasingly toward pure visual language, eliminating traditional notation entirely in favor of color fields, geometric shapes, and symbolic glyphs.

Implications for Contemporary Practice

Ankhrasmation offers a model for how notation can function in creative music contexts where improvisation and composition exist not as opposites but as interrelated practices. The system acknowledges that skilled improvisers bring knowledge, technique, and creative vision that should be honored rather than constrained by overly prescriptive notation.

At the same time, it demonstrates that "open" notation need not mean vague or unstructured. Ankhrasmation's rigor lies in its precise articulation of relationships, durations, and structural parameters, even as it leaves crucial elements to performer discretion.

The language also models how notation might engage multiple sensory and cognitive modes simultaneously. Performers approach Ankhrasmation scores through visual perception, symbolic interpretation, scientific research, and imaginative association. This multifaceted engagement produces performances richer than any single interpretive mode could generate.

The Cosmology of Sound

Smith's work has been described as a cosmology and a spiritual meditation about creation in the grand intergalactic sense. This characterization captures something essential about Ankhrasmation's ambitions. The system does not simply provide a more flexible way to write music. It articulates a vision of how creative music-making might function as a model for collective human activity more broadly.

In Ankhrasmation performances, musicians from different backgrounds bring distinct knowledge to shared creative space, negotiating difference through sound rather than subordinating it to predetermined outcomes. This process models a form of collaboration that preserves individual agency while generating collective work, that honors diversity while creating coherence.

The scores themselves, with their layered references to Egyptian, Ethiopian, and universal symbols, enact a kind of cultural synthesis that refuses hierarchy. Ancient and modern, scientific and spiritual, precise and open: these apparent oppositions coexist in Ankhrasmation's visual and conceptual space.

Conclusion: Language Still Evolving

Now in his eighties, Smith continues developing Ankhrasmation, creating new scores that push the language in unexpected directions. The system remains alive, evolving, responsive to new creative challenges and contexts.

This ongoing evolution is itself consistent with Ankhrasmation's foundational principles. A living language must change, must incorporate new information, must remain open to transformation. The scores are not fixed monuments but active proposals, invitations to future musicians to bring their own knowledge, imagination, and creativity to the work of making sound.

Ankhrasmation stands as one of the most sustained and sophisticated attempts to reimagine musical notation for creative music contexts. It demonstrates that precision and openness need not contradict, that individual voice and collective music-making can coexist, and that scores can function simultaneously as visual art, structural framework, and invitation to creative research.

The language continues to speak, in colors and shapes and symbols, calling future performers to bring their whole selves to the act of making music together.