Unité: The Brutalist Tablature: The Raw Sonic Aesthetic in Contemporary Composition

 

Brutalist Tablature: The Raw Sonic Aesthetic in Contemporary Composition

I started calling it Brutalist Tablature because I couldn't find another way to say what I meant, which was that most notation lies to you. It promises interpretive freedom and then hedges that promise with a hundred small courtesies: dynamics that suggest rather than demand, phrase marks that invite rather than instruct. I got tired of the invitation. I wanted a score that told a performer exactly what to do and made no apology for it.

The architectural comparison came later, honestly, after a few people had already looked at the pages and said the word "brutalist" back to me before I'd used it myself. But it fit well enough that I kept it. Béton brut, raw concrete, means the material shows itself without finishing or disguise. That's the whole idea. A block of concrete doesn't ask to be liked. It holds weight because it is weight. I wanted tablature that worked the same way, where the notation isn't a symbol pointing toward some more refined musical idea sitting behind it. The mark is the instruction. There's no behind.

I should say what this isn't, since people tend to assume graphic notation automatically means loose, gestural, up-for-interpretation. Mine isn't that. It's dense in a specific way: thick blocks of directive stacked against each other, sometimes in gray tonal layers that read almost like a rubbing taken off a wall. Where a conventional score gives you room to breathe between phrases, I want the page itself to feel heavy in the hand, before a single sound has happened. A performer opening one of these scores for the first time usually goes quiet for a minute. That reaction is not an accident and I won't pretend it is.

The repetition in the notation isn't developmental, and this trips people up more than anything else. In most Western composition, when a figure repeats, you expect variation, transformation, some argument being built across time. I'm after something closer to how a modular housing block repeats a unit without each repetition meaning anything new. Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation is the reference I keep coming back to, not because I want the music to sound like architecture, but because the logic of stacking identical structural units without narrative justification is exactly the logic I wanted for the notation itself. Repetition here reinforces mass. It doesn't develop an idea, it just adds another unit of the same weight.

I cut ornament aggressively. No curved articulation marks, no expressive dynamic swells, none of the vocabulary that softens a score and makes it feel like an emotional confidence rather than a set of instructions. Some of this came out of frustration with how much conventional notation spends on telling a performer how to feel about what they're playing, as opposed to what they're actually supposed to do with their body and instrument. Brutalist architecture doesn't decorate its function. It leaves the structural elements exposed because hiding them would be a kind of dishonesty. I think most ornamental notation is a similar kind of dishonesty, dressing up a directive as an emotional gesture.

Performing this material is not comfortable, and I don't think it should be. Euphonium, contrabass, prepared piano, these are instruments that can produce a kind of heaviness other instruments resist, and the notation asks players to work against their own instinct toward legato, toward line, toward the things that make a phrase sound "musical" in the conventional sense. What I want instead is closer to labor. The performer confronts a block of instruction and has to physically get through it, and that physical difficulty is part of the piece, not an obstacle to it.

People who dislike this work tend to say the same few things. That it obscures nuance. That it's more concerned with how it looks than how it sounds. That it shuts out anyone not already fluent in graphic notation. I don't think they're wrong, exactly. I just don't think those are flaws, or at least not flaws I'm interested in correcting. Xenakis and Ligeti both understood that sonic mass could be a structural principle in its own right, not just texture in service of a melodic idea sitting somewhere above it, and I'm working in that lineage more than in the lineage of anyone who wrote a friendlier score.

If there's a single thing I'd want someone to take from looking at one of these pages, it's that difficulty isn't automatically a failure of communication. Sometimes a score that refuses to be gentle is communicating something a gentler score can't.

Luxtrapathy, Capitalocene, and the Logicade for Trumpet and Cello: Notation as Infrastructural Fiction

 

“Luxtrapathy, Capitalocene, and the Logicade”: An Aesthetic Technology for Trumpet and Cello

One does not read this score. One enters it.

Across its partitioned surface etched in chromatic vector and modular topology, we encounter not a composition, but a system of knowing. "Luxtrapathy, Capitalocene, and the Logicade" refuses the linearity of conventional music notation and instead orchestrates a machine for time-experiencing, rendered simultaneously in data, metaphor, and myth.

It is written for trumpet and cello.  Two instruments stretched here not only across register, but across epistemic tension: breath and bow, metallic propulsion and fibrous resistance. The result is less a duet and more a semantic exchange, conducted across contradictory zones of presence and absence.

The first frame of the score is both ornamental and clinical. Brass-gold gradients clash against gunmetal blue fields. These chromatic fields do not merely stage notation; they perform an affective inversion. What glows with visual clarity obfuscates in meaning; what appears simple throbs with recursive complexity.

“"Luxtrapathy,"an invented compound of lux (light, radiance) and pathy (feeling, suffering) designates a form of illumination that blinds even as it seduces. Here, musical gestures are not written as commands but exposures. Notation blooms into calligraphic morphology, part architectural plan, part surgical interface.

Beneath the brass title “TOMIAVA 5” and its shadow-opposite “YALSIVO 9,” a field of spectral glyphs flicker: notated as if haunted, spectralized into the faint, the barely-there. The music becomes a technology of fading, where events are scaffolded on the brink of disappearance. What remains is not the phrase, but its residue.

In another discreet panel, we find ourselves among brands, syllables, and patented fragments: CHERILLISP. TYMAT. LINGSONN. CITO.

They are not names. They are vectors.  They are tokens of a para-economic language. The score here dissolves into corporate surrealism, where every name is both a claim and a veil. Graphically, these are arranged within radiant zones of silver and mauve: not neutral, but institutional. Bureaucratic gradients masquerading as elegance.

Each musical passage here is framed in quasi-algorithmic units. What looks like traditional staves is quietly dismantled by nested brackets, echo clusters, graphic interjections, and the occasional appearance of industrial iconography...a screw, a barcode, an architectural form.

What emerges is a kind of audit of musical labor. Each gesture must justify itself, not through expressive agency, but through diagrammatic consistency. It is the Capitalocene rendered in sound: a place where even breath and bowing technique are abstracted into value flows.

The third panel, perhaps the most elaborately designed, plunges us into the domain of the Logicade. Here the music becomes play, but a regulated play, with its own grammar of control, glitch, and surprise.

Let us define the Logicade as a ludic epistemology: a worldview in which logic becomes game, and the game becomes score. Across this zone, trumpet and cello are cast not as interpreters but as operators.  They become executors of sonic maneuvers inside a semiotic arcade.

Diagrams spiral. Notation stretches and recoils. Glissandi appear beside punctured spheres and orbital scripts. The Logicade rewards fluency not in reading music, but in navigating diagrammatic uncertainty.

Here, the musicians improvise not from instinct but from spatial coordinates. They do not perform; they simulate.

Towards a Lexicon of the Score

To engage with this system fully, we must name its parts.  To score is to invent grammar.  From this work, we derive the following terms:

• Luxtrapathy – The pathology of excessive visibility; when sonic form becomes overlit and evacuated of intimacy.

• Auditonics – The practice of rendering musical decisions legible to bureaucratic logic.

• Glyphonomy – The study of semiotic particles that carry neither pitch nor rhythm, but instructional aura.

• Value Drift – When notational form escapes its origin to accrue alternate meanings through placement.

• Logicade – A designed logic-as-game, wherein instrumental behavior becomes rule-determined action.

• Modal Ciphers – Sonic signatures encoded not as pitch collections but as spatial event triggers

• 
  

  
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Coda: Notation as Infrastructural Fiction

"Luxtrapathy, Capitalocene, and the Logicade" is not a performance score. It is an infrastructural fiction. Its diagrams simulate the behavior of sound within regimes of control, visibility, and abstraction.

Trumpet and cello here are instruments of more than tone: they are epistemic agents.  They emerge as conduits through which the score’s operative logic becomes temporarily audible.

We are not being asked to listen.

We are being asked to navigate.

Taryn Simon and the Post Scriptual Event: A Continental Reflection on Notation, Apparitions, and the Theological Trace

 

Taryn Simon and the Post Scriptual Event: A Continental Reflection on Notation, Apparitions, and the Theological Trace

To consider Taryn Simon within the field of new music notation is to enter a zone where aesthetic form becomes indistinguishable from epistemic force. Her images and installations do not describe the world. They summon it. They summon it in fragments, in controlled exposures, in architectural containers that resemble vaults or sanctuaries devoted to a peculiar ritual of unveiling. Simon’s practice positions the viewer before a paradox. Everything appears to be revealed, yet revelation is never complete. The visible object announces its own insufficiency, as if the logic of disclosure were always haunted by what remains concealed.

This paradox aligns closely with the current displacement of classical musical notation. The script that once promised clarity begins to tremble. The composer no longer entrusts meaning entirely to symbol. A different mode of inscription emerges, one that draws on the density of matter, the opacity of photographic fields, the architectural distribution of space, and the speculative force of conceptual constraint. Simon becomes a figure whose methods illuminate this shift.

Appearance and Withdrawal

In continental thought, appearance is never stable. Phenomena arrive accompanied by a residue of nonappearance, a shadow that conditions the very possibility of presence. Simon’s work stages this relation with precision. A document is shown, but the chain of reference that gives it consequence remains hidden. A ritual object is photographed, but the breath that sustains the ritual slips away. A classified file is presented through its physical form, yet its content remains sealed behind juridical power.

Taryn Simon

New music notation can be understood through the same dialectic. The notational object appears before the performer, yet what it asks remains partially withdrawn. The score becomes an apparition. It arises as a presence that gestures toward something beyond itself. The performer reads not only what is presented but also the unpresentable horizon that surrounds it. This is a theological condition in the broad phenomenological sense. Revelation occurs only in the interplay of presence and retreat.

The Archive as Ontological Machine

Simon’s installations often mimic an archive. The archive is not merely a storage system. It is an ontological machine that creates the conditions under which entities may appear as legible or illegible. Continental inquiry has long recognized the archive as a structure that decides what counts as real or historical.

When notation adopts archival forms, it inherits this ontological power. The score becomes a mechanism that produces the reality of its own content. A sculptural tablet or a photographic score does not simply contain music. It forms the field in which musicality can arise at all. The archive, in this sense, is a theological construct. It generates the order of possible worlds.

Simon reveals that every archive is both a promise and a threat. It promises knowledge yet withholds the totality that would complete its system. In parallel, a post scriptual score suggests musical meaning yet withholds structural certainty. The performer is delivered into a world that is only partially disclosed. Interpretation becomes a negotiation with an archive that exceeds the reader.

Ritual, Gesture, and the Performative Threshold

Many continental thinkers treat ritual not as a religious leftover but as a fundamental mode through which communities produce meaning. Ritual is a threshold. It separates ordinary time from a time that has been intensified through concentrated attention.

Simon’s work often depicts rituals that govern political, biological, and familial existence. These rituals possess a strange double character. They seem both fragile and absolute. They expose the arbitrariness of institutions while also showing the deep dependency humans have on forms of ceremonial order.

For new music notation, ritual becomes an instructive model. Notation is no longer a neutral command. It becomes a performative threshold that organizes the body of the performer. A photographic score with spatial distortions or a material tablet with shifting planes invites a ritualized handling. The score asks to be approached in a particular manner. It creates a new temporality in which reading becomes a contemplative act.

In this sense, notation approaches theology. Not theology as doctrine, but theology as the study of how revelation emerges through acts of attention directed toward material signs.

The Fiction of Evidence and the Divine Remainder

Simon frequently constructs scenes that resemble evidence. They resemble it so convincingly that the viewer is compelled to treat them as forensic truth. Yet each scene is a fiction that exposes the instability of evidentiary authority. The work teaches the viewer to inhabit the gap between authoritative surfaces and the fragile constructions that produce them.

New music notation has begun to explore this gap as well. Scores that assume the forms of maps, pharmaceutical sheets, bureaucratic records, or scientific diagrams use the aesthetic of evidence to provoke a heightened intensity of reading. Yet the performer recognizes that the authority of the form is artificial. The score becomes a fiction of power that turns back on itself.

This fiction opens a theological question. If evidence is always incomplete, what remainder continues to condition meaning from beyond the visible structure The divine is not invoked as a supernatural figure. It is invoked as the name for the pressure exerted by what cannot be shown yet continues to determine the significance of what is shown.

Toward a Material Theology of the Score

Simon’s influence permits a new conception of the notational object. The score becomes a theological artifact in the sense that it gathers matter, image, and concept into a configuration that seeks to reveal more than it contains. It becomes a physical concentration of the invisible. A tilt shift photograph that shapes a performer’s perception, or a sculptural form that must be traced rather than read, carries a theological charge. The score becomes a site where the invisible forces of interpretation press into material form.

This does not imply that the work promotes religious belief. It invites reflection on the conditions under which meaning transcends representation. It asks how matter becomes luminous with intention. It asks how sound arises from objects that resist complete comprehension.

Conclusion: The Score as Event

Simon’s practice, interpreted through a continental lens, suggests that the score is not a text. It is an event. It arrives, confronts, withdraws, and leaves a residue that shapes the performer long after the reading has ended. It becomes a threshold where documentation and invention meet. It becomes an archive that cannot be closed. It becomes a ritual object that summons a new temporality. It becomes a theological inquiry into how the visible world holds within itself a trace of the ungraspable.

In this sense, Simon offers more than influence. She provides a way to think about notation as an apparition that carries both matter and mystery. The score becomes an instrument that binds revelation to material form and in doing so redefines the conditions of musical creation.

Clarion #44 - for C Trumpet

Clarion: The Theory Has Escaped the Notes

This page from Clarion may look like an unusually severe case of notational overpopulation, but its real subject is music theory itself. Not theory as explanation, but theory promoted to the status of sounding material.

The notes almost become the least interesting objects on the page. Around them accumulates a second composition: ratios rising and falling from individual events, numerical stratifications, counting grids, cumulative sums, isolated symbols, interruptions, black apertures and fragments that seem to belong to some alien analytical apparatus. The score behaves as though someone has taken the invisible machinery normally used to explain a composition and forced it back inside the composition.

That suggests a slightly perverse proposition: what if analysis could precede the music it supposedly analyzes?

Traditionally, theory arrives afterward. A piece exists; theory dissects it. Here that sequence seems reversed. The theoretical apparatus appears to have generated the conditions under which a note is permitted to exist. Ratios such as 7:5, 11:8, 17:5 and 13:8 cease to function simply as subdivisions. They become coordinates. A note is no longer merely when something happens. It is the temporary intersection of several numerical systems.

The result might be called polytheoretical counterpoint.

Instead of independent melodic voices, imagine independent analytical systems operating simultaneously. One layer measures proportional time. Another counts events. Another accumulates quantities. Another governs pitch displacement. Another seems to classify or annotate the residue left by the others. The performer encounters not one musical syntax but several incompatible theories of the same instant.

This produces the strangest possibility in Clarion: the score may contain more temporal information than time itself can accommodate.

A 7:5 relationship can be perfectly intelligible mathematically while becoming perceptually unstable when embedded within another proportional field, which is itself interrupted by yet another numerical operation. Continue the process and rhythm stops behaving like rhythm. It becomes something closer to number theory projected onto duration.

The performer therefore does not simply “execute” these relationships. Execution in the conventional sense may be the wrong model. The task is to preserve their differences. Seven against five must retain the idea of seven against five even when the surrounding temporal environment makes its exact perceptual identity nearly impossible to recover.

And this is where the page becomes atypical even for Clarion. Complexity is not being used merely to produce difficult music. Difficulty becomes epistemological. The notation asks how many mutually valid descriptions of a musical event can coexist before the event itself disappears beneath them.

The little black notehead remains.

But surrounding it is an enormous theoretical bureaucracy explaining why it has been allowed to occur.

Perhaps that is the joke buried inside the page. Music theory has finally achieved its ancient ambition: it has conquered the music.

Unfortunately, the music appears to be fighting back.

 

“I don’t like it, therefore AI.” AI: The New Alibi for Incomprehension

“I don’t like it, therefore AI.”

Don’t understand the image? AI.
Don’t like the music? AI.
The writing sounds too polished? AI.
Too strange? AI.
Too complicated? AI.
Too clean? AI.
Too unlike what you would have done? Definitely AI.

It is becoming the cultural equivalent of pointing at the sky and shouting “weather.”

The irony is that many of the people using “AI” as an accusation seem to have only the vaguest idea what AI can actually do, what it cannot do, and how much human direction, selection, revision, judgment, failure, and outright labor can sit behind a finished work.

AI can generate possibilities.

It cannot retroactively explain everything you dislike.

It cannot magically supply an artist with taste, intent, a point of view, a body of work, or years of accumulated decisions. It cannot turn confusion into plagiarism simply because the viewer would prefer an easier explanation.

And no, “it looks AI” is not analysis. Neither is “it sounds AI,” unless you can explain what specifically you mean beyond the fact that something made you suspicious.

There are perfectly legitimate arguments to have about authorship, originality, labor, training data, attribution, and the role of generative systems in creative work.

Those are interesting arguments.

But using AI as a synonym for “thing I don’t understand” is not one of them.

Sometimes a strange image is just a strange image.

Sometimes an unfamiliar score is simply unfamiliar.

Sometimes a complicated idea was made by a person who likes complicated ideas.

And sometimes the artificial intelligence in the room is not the problem.

It is the natural intelligence refusing to do any work.

Clarion #40 for C Trumpet: The Life Table for a Trumpet

 

The Life Table for a Trumpet

A life table tracks how a population dies. Demographers use l_x for the number still alive at a given age, d_x for how many die within the interval, q_x for the probability of death given survival this far. It is bureaucratic notation, built for insurance actuaries and public health departments, about as far from expressive as notation gets. Someone has taken that exact apparatus, the column headers and all, and run it across the top of a trumpet score titled Spectral Scordatura, Harmonic Series Ratios.

The joke, if it is a joke, is not subtle once you see it. A harmonic series is itself a kind of mortality table. Each partial is a survivor of the fundamental, present in diminishing strength the higher you climb, and a scordatura tuning is a decision about which of those survivors you let speak clearly and which you let die off into noise and beating. Whether the composer meant the pun or arrived at it sideways, borrowing actuarial notation simply because nobody else had claimed it yet, the effect holds either way. The table at the top of the page is doing real accounting on the pitches below it. It is not decoration wearing the costume of data.

Below that table the staff itself does something genuinely strange. It does not sit flat and take orders from the numbers above it. It rises, an arc of accidentals climbing note by note toward a single point near the center of the page, sharps and flats piling up until the line reads almost solid black, and at the peak of that climb a fan of thin rays shoots outward from one note as if the note had become a light source rather than a pitch. The word METAPRAXIS sits just beneath it. Jani Christou used that word for something specific, an action that exceeds ordinary musical instruction, a gesture notation can point toward without ever fully holding. Whoever wrote this either knows Christou's vocabulary directly or reinvented the same idea from a different direction, which would be its own small interesting fact, because the placement lands exactly right. That is the one spot on the page where the notation visibly runs out of room for what it is asking the player to do.

Four rounded, ringed forms sit in the corners, each labeled Archipel and a number. Up close they read like cross sections, agate or a cut tree stump, concentric bands wrapping a cluster of cylindrical rods that look pulled from a lab rather than a workshop, glass or steel tubing lodged in the rings as though the growth pattern simply absorbed them as foreign matter. Each carries its own small fraction and a scatter of arrows pointing away from the mass. Four satellite structures, similar in logic, different in scale, each internally consistent and each disconnected from its neighbors except by implication. It is hard not to read them as alternate entry points into the piece, four places a performer might plausibly begin. Nothing on the page confirms that, and nothing rules it out.

The lower third gives up the staff entirely for bare graph paper, and what survives there stops resembling notation in any conventional sense. Arrows, circled crosses, small hooked flags, numbers stacked as if they were exponents. Extended technique markings tend to accumulate into a private vocabulary over the course of a career, a composer's own shorthand for a sound they keep needing and keep failing to pin down with the standard symbol set. This grid reads like somebody's accumulated private vocabulary, set down without a key. That is either a demand that the performer already share the composer's history, or an admission that no shared history exists yet and one will have to be built in rehearsal, argument by argument, gesture by gesture.

Then there is the second version. Same score, same numbers, same four archipelagos, but now it sits under a wash of pale pink with a ghost layer of repeated text tiled across the entire image, faint enough to read as texture at first glance, then impossible to unsee once you notice it. Words surface and dissolve inside the pattern. A phrase near the top left, half hidden behind the mining headframe icon and its coral bar, reads like the opening words of a title treatment for something being sold rather than something being performed.

That is the part worth sitting with. The first version is a score, dense, specific, clearly built to instruct or at least to be read closely by somebody holding a trumpet. The second version is the identical object wearing the visual grammar of an album cover, or a poster, or merchandise, complete with a branding pass and a color choice suited to shelf appeal rather than legibility at a music stand. Nothing in the notation itself changed. Only the frame around it did. Which raises an uncomfortable question for anyone who has argued that a score like this already functions as visual art in its own right, not simply as instructions wearing a costume. If the notation absorbs a marketing overlay this cleanly, without a single symbol needing to shift position, was the claim about its status as art ever really about the notation, or was it always about how the notation could be framed once someone decided to frame it?

I do not think that question resolves cleanly, and I am not sure it should. But the overlay does not damage the score underneath it. It sits on top the way the four archipelagos sit at the corners of the original, present, legible if you go looking, structurally unnecessary to the notation itself, and somehow not quite separable from it either.

"A Rolled Tabloid In His Back Pocket".

"A Rolled Tabloid In His Back Pocket"

For Clarinet, Electronics and Fractal Controller

Bil Smith Composer

A Commission from Guidant

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByXT8veODB_TbXdaNHVrRDl2aWM/view?usp=sharing