"My Brutalist Tablatures"

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

Deconstructing the Five-Line Staff: Towards a Concrete Semiotics

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

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

Materiality as Notational Imperative: Density, Compression, Striation

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

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

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

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

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

The Architectonics of Gesture: Performative Agglomeration and Resistance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notation becomes concrete, raw, indelible.

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

---