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.