The Brutalist Tablature: The Raw Sonic Aesthetic in Contemporary Composition

 

Brutalist Tablature: The Raw Sonic Aesthetic in Contemporary Composition

Introduction: The Intersection of Sound and Concrete Form

In the landscape of contemporary composition, Bil Smith has carved out a radical notational paradigm known as Brutalist Tablature. This system, borrowing its conceptual rigor from Brutalist architecture, challenges traditional methods of music notation by emphasizing raw, unfiltered structure, materiality, and function. Much like the exposed concrete and rigid geometries of Brutalism, Smith’s tablature refuses embellishment, prioritizing bold, structural notation over conventional expressive phrasing.

Brutalist Tablature is a visual and conceptual departure from classical staff notation and modern graphical scores. Rather than presenting music as an organic flow of interpretative gestures, it manifests as an architectural framework, dictating sonic behavior in a way that is severe, monolithic, and unapologetically confrontational.

Brutalism in Architecture and Music: Parallel Principles

Brutalist architecture, emerging in the post-war period (1950s-1970s), was characterized by:

1. Material Honesty – Exposed concrete (béton brut), raw textures, and structural integrity.
2. Geometric Rigidity – Harsh lines, unornamented surfaces, and monumental presence.
3. Functionality Over Beauty – Prioritizing use and efficiency over aesthetic appeal.
4. Social Utopianism – Often linked to egalitarian and utilitarian philosophies.
5. Confrontational Presence – Massive, heavy, and almost oppressive visual forms.

Bil Smith’s Brutalist Tablature follows these same tenets but transposes them into sonic architecture:

• Material Honesty in Notation: Uses raw, heavily structured tablature with stark visual density—clusters of directives presented with extreme typographic weight and graphical rigidity.
• Geometric Rigidity: Employs block-like formations of notational elements, creating a near-monolithic interpretation system.
• Functionality Over Beauty: Prioritizes execution and structural intent over interpretative flexibility.
• Social Utopianism: Moves away from elitist score-reading traditions and demands new interpretive strategies.
• Confrontational Presence: Overwhelmingly complex notation, visually imposing and physically demanding for performers.

Deconstructing the Brutalist Tablature Aesthetic

Smith’s tablature is not merely an alternative notation—it is an ideological stance against the expressive romanticism of conventional Western notation. Below are its key aspects:

1. Architectural Massing in Notation

Just as Brutalist buildings use large, block-like structures, Smith’s scores often feature dense clusters of tablature symbols resembling urban fortifications rather than fluid melodic contours. The music, rather than flowing linearly, is stacked and layered, creating a perception of sound as a concrete edifice rather than an ephemeral event.

2. The Notation of Weight and Density

Smith’s tablature employs thick, bold staves and heavy graphic elements, sometimes printed in gray-toned layers, mimicking the tonal weight of raw concrete. Unlike the delicacy of classical notation, which invites precision, Brutalist Tablature is meant to overwhelm and intimidate, reinforcing a sense of sonic mass.

3. Anti-Ornamental Composition

Brutalist architecture often shuns decorative elements—its beauty lies in its functionality. Similarly, Smith’s notation eliminates unnecessary dynamic markings, articulation symbols, or expressive curves that might soften the score’s impact. Instead, directives are presented in rectilinear form, with minimal expressive compromise.

4. Modular Repetition and Brutalist Patterning

Much like modular Brutalist structures (e.g., Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation), Smith’s notation employs repetitive graphic modules that can be reoriented, stacked, or looped. This reflects a non-hierarchical compositional approach, where repetition does not imply development but rather reinforces structure.

5. The Concreteness of Sonic Material

In Brutalist architecture, material is not disguised—concrete is concrete. Similarly, Smith’s notation presents sound as physical material rather than an abstract musical gesture. Performers interact with sound as a raw entity, much like Brutalist architects interacted with concrete without embellishment.

The Performative Challenge: Confronting the Mass

Brutalist Tablature demands a new approach to interpretation, one that often rejects conventional virtuosity in favor of muscular, architectural execution. Performers must navigate:

• Non-linear structural reading, where tablature elements appear in unexpected sequences.
• Visceral physicality, requiring extended techniques that mirror the heavy-handedness of Brutalist materiality.
• Sonic monoliths, where timbral mass takes precedence over harmonic/melodic development.

For instruments like the euphonium, contrabass, or prepared piano, Smith’s notation creates heavy, suffocating sonorities, forming auditory equivalents to Brutalist megastructures.

Brutalist Tablature in Contemporary Music: Implications and Reception

Smith’s approach has been both celebrated and criticized. Advocates see it as:

• A rejection of Western Romanticism, favoring raw materialism.
• A revolutionary alternative to traditional notation, offering new structural clarity.
• A method for large-scale sonic architecture, paralleling avant-garde traditions of Xenakis and Ligeti.

Critics argue:

• It is needlessly dense, obscuring performative nuance.
• It prioritizes visual impact over musical fluidity.
• It alienates performers unfamiliar with graphic music notation.

Yet, much like Brutalist architecture, Brutalist Tablature is not about comfort—it is about presence, force, and uncompromising identity.

Bil Smith’s Brutalist Tablature represents a radical rethinking of musical notation, embodying the same stark, functional, and imposing ethos as its architectural counterpart. It stands as a rejection of excess, a tribute to material honesty, and an exploration of sonic weight.

In an era where musical aesthetics are often softened for accessibility, Brutalist Tablature dares to be difficult, challenging performers and audiences to confront the sheer weight of sonic structure—a Brutalist monument in musical form.

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"Elara Eclipse" For Piccolo Saxophone (Soprillo), Inderbinen Big Bell B Flat Trumpet and Theorbo. Bil Smith Composer

"Elara Eclipse"

For Piccolo Saxophone (Soprillo), Inderbinen Big Bell B Flat Trumpet

and Theorbo

Bil Smith Composer

2023

Published by LNM Editions

A Commission from Munich Re

The composition "Elara Eclipse" for Piccolo Saxophone (Soprillo), Inderbinen Big Bell B Flat Trumpet, and Theorbo employs a paratactic notational system which is based on my theorem of juxtaposing musical elements without connecting them in a linear fashion which creates a sense of fragmentation and non-linearity that is characteristic of the postmodernist era in which we live.

The use of the Paratactic notational system is significant because it challenges the traditional approach to music composition, which has often been characterized by a linear, hierarchical structure. In contrast, the Paratactic notational breaks down these structures and allows for a more fluid and open-ended approach to composition.

One of the central themes of the composition is the idea of identity and its construction through power relations. This is reflected in the use of historically diverse instruments and their interaction with each other, which creates a sense of hierarchy and dominance.

At the same time, however, there is also a sense of resistance and subversion that runs through the composition. The different elements challenge and disrupt each other, creating a sense of instability and ambiguity that reflects the fluid nature of identity and power.

The use of the Inderbinen Big Bell B Flat Trumpet and Theorbo also adds a historical dimension to the composition. Both instruments are associated with different time periods and cultural contexts, and their inclusion in the composition creates a sense of continuity and connection between the past and present.

 

"Perisetta, Barefoot and Dusted with Refinery Ash": A Score for String Quartet

"Perisetta, Barefoot and Dusted with Refinery Ash": A Score for String Quartet

Introduction: Temporal Structures in Sound

The score for Perisetta, Barefoot and Dusted with Refinery Ash for string quartet is a study in systematic repetition, mathematical structuring, and stark formalism, drawing inspiration from the process-driven mark-making of Hanne Darboven and the clinical yet confrontational aesthetic of Thomas Ruff’s portrait photography. In both Darboven’s obsessive recording of time through numerical systems and Ruff’s forensic depiction of the human face, we find a commitment to accumulation, iteration, and a near-bureaucratic confrontation with form.

By translating these visual and conceptual methodologies into sound, the score functions as an auditory transcription of duration, repetition, and erasure, challenging conventional ideas of development in musical structure.

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I. Score as Repetitive Notation: The Darboven Influence

At the heart of this composition lies a notation system built on cumulative repetition, mirroring Darboven’s relentless handwritten numerals and calendar-based sequencing. The score does not unfold in a traditionally teleological manner; instead, it builds in grid-like accumulations of repeated gestures, which function as a sonic equivalent to Darboven’s vast wall installations of copied texts and figures.

Mathematical Structures & Temporal Expansion

• Like Darboven’s installations, the music’s structure maps time itself, with the performers tracing through a field of prescribed gestures rather than progressing towards resolution.

Handwriting as Sound: The Ritual of Mark-Making

• Each instrument enacts a daily inscription of notes, accumulating in layers of slight variation, akin to the way Darboven’s handwriting accumulated into walls of near-identical pages.

• Repeated bowing techniques—sul ponticello scrapes, harmonic glissandi, and shifting microtonal trills—function as the equivalent of pen strokes, obsessively documenting the passage of sonic time.

• The material is fixed but mutable, allowing the players to slightly alter their articulations in a manner akin to handwriting inconsistencies within structured repetition.

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II. The Ruff Influence: Static Portraits in Sound

Where Darboven’s influence is in the rigid structuring of time, Thomas Ruff’s photography provides a model for the score’s cold, enlarged sonic surfaces. Ruff’s portraits are emotionally neutral yet invasive, forcing an intensified scrutiny of texture, imperfection, and presence.

Musical Surface as Photographic Exposure

• The quartet is treated as a single, composite entity, akin to a neutral photographic background upon which subtle variations emerge.

• The score utilizes high-resolution timbral focus, exaggerating overtones, bow pressure, and micro-adjustments in vibrato, much like Ruff’s hyper-detailed depictions of skin texture and tonal gradation.

• By magnifying these subtle shifts, the composition achieves an uncanny stillness, where the sound is both neutral and overwhelming—a confrontation between objectivity and presence.

Lack of Expressive Depth: The Anti-Narrative Approach

• Traditional phrasing, tension-and-release structures, and harmonic motion are largely absent.

• The performers’ role is not to convey emotion but to enact presence—to inhabit the material without interpretation.

• This lack of psychological depth, in contrast to the density of surface-level detail, is a direct challenge to the listener’s expectations of portraiture in sound.

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III. Large-Scale Accumulation & The Aesthetic of Overwhelm

Both Darboven and Ruff use scale as a tool of excess—one through endless pages of numerical inscriptions, the other through gigantic photographic enlargements. Perisetta mirrors this approach in the way it expands static elements into a monumental experience.

Overlapping Layers & The Perception of Stasis

• The score eliminates foreground/background distinctions, allowing for a flat auditory plane, similar to Ruff’s uniform lighting that erases narrative depth.

• The result is both immersive and alienating—a document of time’s passage without traditional markers of progression.

Perisetta, Barefoot and Dusted with Refinery Ash is an attempt to reconcile the materiality of time, surface, and repetition in a string quartet context. By drawing on Darboven’s obsessive numerical structures and Ruff’s detached yet invasive photographic realism, the score resists narrative and emotional depth, offering instead a neutral yet imposing document of sonic presence. It is a work where the act of playing becomes an act of recording, where music does not progress but inscribes itself onto a durational landscape, moment by moment, until nothing remains but the imprint of repetition.

 

"The Jubal Project" - A New Notational Lexicon for Composition and Performance

As I have written in two previous posts, "The Jubal Project" is a radical new music compositional lexicon which redefines the rules of interpretation and performance. Through its use of indexical registrations, symbols of forces in flux, and sensory stimuli, "The Jubal Project" offers performers a truly dynamic set of tools for multiple applications within a broad range of genres and formats.

This dynamic notation system promises to have a profound effect on the way music is both written and performed, while offering unlimited possibilities for creative exploration through a visualization system of over 600 signifying icons.

In developing this system of musical documentation, my inspiration for this unconventional notational system also embraces the work of Enrico Castellani and Morton Feldman's affinity for the irregularities in Persian rugs.  

Castellani surface structures, and Castellani's work in general, can be seen to represent a shift in the way we think about visualization and how we can contextualize this in a compositional (musical) ontology. 

 

By implementing his radical form of repetition and dynamicism (A cognitive composition model that sees cognition as a complex dynamic interaction between the agent and its environment) to explore the complexities of surface-level music composition I have opened up a world of creative possibilities. 

The intent is that this new musical lexicon works as an example of how science, art, and sound can be woven together to create something truly unique. 

In interpreting this new notational vernacular, the performer is charged with adapting patterns to fluctuating desires and contingencies which can be an ongoing process with the performance becoming a method of directing change in the musical interpretation; a way of guiding them through different configurations.

This relies on making and using patterns found within the notation that are more responsive than their modernist predecessors. This form of notation opens the door for a more radical approach to composition.

Composers are now able to create music that has the potential to be emotionally intense, embody expanded notions of structure and draw in complex layers of symbolism.

The score itself can become a fluid document, transforming throughout the music’s evolution and providing an opportunity to break away from traditional form.

My belief is that with the Jubal Project's realization, composition can reach new levels of complexity, beauty and emotion that would have never been possible before.

...more to come.

Excerpts from New Composition for String Quartet A Commission from Swiss Re (Premiere Performance September, 2025)

Excerpts from New Composition for String Quartet

A Commission from Swiss Re

Premiere Performance September, 2025

 

"Pillars Asymmetrica" for Schilke E3L-4 4 Valve E Flat Trumpet (Link to PDF Score)

"Pillars Asymmetrica"

for Schilke E3L-4 4 Valve E Flat Trumpet

Bil Smith Composer

Link to Full Score PDF

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1b-ZAjkduiAD5ZQM8wSf-t8xKK570Uil0/view?usp=sharing

 

"Injectables" for Euphonium. Observations and Analysis by Joan Didion

                      

"Injectables" for Euphonium.

Bil Smith Composer

2019

Published by LNM Editions

Observations and Analysis by Joan Didion

Bil Smith's "Injectables" for Euphonium has carved out an audacious niche. It's a piece that doesn't just challenge the performer with its complexity; it seeks to upend our understanding of the relationship between mathematical abstraction and visceral experience. Smith, in his tacit, almost belligerent refusal to simplify, instead amplifies the abstract into the experiential, wielding exponential growth not as a concept to be merely understood but as a physical force to be felt, endured, and ultimately, interpreted through the medium of sound.

The score is a battleground of ideas, where the notational signs are not merely instructions but provocations. They dare the performer to engage with the piece not just intellectually but physically, to confront the strange, alien symbols on the page and translate them into something that resonates in the gut as much as it does in the mind. These signs, these indicators of Smith's compositional intent, perform a delicate balancing act, embodying both the spontaneity of physical matter and energy and the rigid predictability of mathematical equations. The exponential function becomes a signifier of this duality, a symbol that straddles the physical and the abstract, demanding a response that is at once emotional and analytical.

Bil Smith's approach to composition, and to "Injectables" in particular, mirrors the inextricable from the broader cultural or philosophical context. The score itself, with its reliance on indices and indexicality, underscores this connection. The index, in Smith's hands, becomes a tool for bridging the gap between the immateriality of abstraction and the undeniable materiality of musical performance. It is both a trace of the composer's own physical engagement with the score and a philosophical statement about the nature of representation and meaning in music.

Smith's exploration of rheology and viscosity in the creation of his notational content further deepens this engagement with the material. These are not the esoteric concerns of a composer detached from the physical world; rather, they are the preoccupations of an artist deeply invested in the physicality of sound and the tactile aspects of musical performance. The frictional gestures of the composer, captured in the score, range from the confident to the tremulous, each mark a testament to the physical act of creation.

This work stands as a monolith—a totem not just of musical complexity but of a deep conspiracy between the abstract and the visceral, the mathematical and the musical. Here, in Smith’s world, the exponential is not just a function to be plotted on the cold, indifferent grid of Cartesian coordinates but a wild, bucking bronco of growth and decay, its path charted across the score in a frenzy of notational innovation that dares the performer to ride or be thrown.

Smith, acting as the mastermind in this intricate dance of digits and diaphragms, wields viscosity and surface tension not as mere physical properties but as the very medium of musical expression. The score for “Injectables” becomes a battleground where ratios and relationships aren’t just calculated—they’re felt, in the gut and in the pulsing blood of the performer. Each note, each rest, each dynamic marking is a node in a vast, sprawling network of meaning, a point of convergence for myriad trajectories of thought, theory, and sheer sonic force.

This is music that refuses to be merely played. It demands to be inhabited, explored, as one might navigate a labyrinthine archive stuffed with arcane texts, each page a portal to another dimension of understanding. Smith’s approach to composition here is less about dictating terms than about setting parameters for a kind of controlled chaos, a sandbox of sonic possibilities where the performers are both agents and subjects, enactors and witnesses of the piece’s unfolding drama.

The conceptual rigor of “Injectables” belies a deeper, more delirious level of theorizing, one that extends tendrils into the very essence of what it means to create, to perform, to listen. Smith’s score is a nexus of alignments and nested codes, a system so densely packed with information that to engage with it is to find oneself reflecting on the nature of consciousness itself. What does it mean to understand music? To feel it? To be moved by it? These are the questions that “Injectables” poses, not just to the performer but to the audience, to the composer, to the very air through which its sounds will travel.

And yet, for all its perfectionism, all its meticulous control, “Injectables” is also an exercise in surrender. Smith must relinquish the illusion of absolute command, must acknowledge the fuzzy logic that underpins the relationship between creator, creation, and interpreter. This score is a living system, its rhythms and timbres a kind of biofeedback mechanism that connects composer, performer, and audience in a dynamic cognitive loop. The music that emerges from this process is unpredictable, uncontainable, a manifestation of precise practices that nonetheless open us to the uncharted territories of our own minds.

Smith's approach, deeply rooted in what might be termed "detailed expulsion theory," challenges not only how music is composed but also how it's perceived, experienced, and ultimately, how it reverberates within the human soul.

At he core of Smith's theory lies the concept of expulsion—not in the sense of mere removal or exclusion, but as a dynamic, generative process. Expulsion, in this context, refers to the deliberate distancing of elements within a composition from their conventional roles, expectations, or expressions. This is not a random scattering but a meticulous orchestration of dislocation, where every note, every timbre, and every rhythm is both a departure and a discovery.

Smith employs this theory to push the boundaries of musical notation, transforming it from a mere set of instructions into a map of potentialities. In his scores, traditional symbols coexist with innovative notational experiments, inviting performers to navigate a space where certainty is less important than exploration. The act of performing Smith's music becomes an act of creation in itself, a collaborative venture between composer and musician where the outcome is uncertain and the process is everything.

This expulsion from the traditional not only liberates the elements of music but also redefines the relationship between performer and score. Smith's compositions demand a level of engagement that transcends technical mastery, requiring performers to inhabit a space of heightened sensitivity and awareness. The performer, thus, becomes a medium through which the expelled elements of the composition find new form, new meaning, and new life.

- Joan Didion

Joan Didion was an American author best known for her novels, screenplays, and her literary journalism. In 2009, Didion was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by Harvard University, and another from Yale University in 2011. She also wrote two memoirs of loss, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights

"Find A Pretext For Skylarking" for Tuba

 "Find A Pretext For Skylarking" 

for Tuba

Bil Smith Composer

Published by LNM Editions

Link To Full Score (PDF)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/19DP8YYATJS15KLz1EHl98lRMIbA4c6BH/view?usp=sharing