Dilettante Music

Cornelius Cardew's "Treatise" created from 1963 to 1967 is a score filled with graphic notations but comes without any set of instructions of how to interpret the visual forms. Similarly, there are no specifications concerning the number of performers, the types of instruments to be used, durations or any sense of temporal or dimensional measurement. The score may be approached by trained musicians as well as by "musical innocents".

Later, Cardew did publish a set of "Working Notes" which reported past realizations and thus gave some indications for possible approaches to the material. He also published an essay entitled "On the Role of the Instructions in the Interpretation of Indeterminate Music".

Composers have employed graphic notation for many purposes (refer to John Cage's "Notations", La Monte Young's "Anthology", several books on the Fluxus movement, and the book "Scratch Music"). For example, Morton Feldman's notation in boxes of rhythmic icti (pulses) left pitch and event occurrence decisions to the performers but otherwise strictly determined the other parameters; John Cage's "Variations IV" uses movable lines and circles on transparencies which are placed on a map of the performance space, and Karlheinz Stockhausen likewise uses movable transparencies in his "Zyklus for Percussionist"; other graphic notation distorts or incorporates standard musical notation, such as Sylvano Bussoti's "Five Pieces for David Tudor"; and then there are graphed pieces that merely "suggest" a response that forms some correlation with the visual forms - Cardew's "Treatise" is such a "suggestive" graph piece.

In Cardew's terminology "Treatise" contains "special-purpose notation systems ... that demand an improvised interpretation". Cardew formed the Scratch Orchestra in 1969 with non-musicians and musicians who would discuss collective improvisation and would make scores notated as verbal instructions, sketches, children's drawings, and they would take imaginary journeys together, play Beethoven and folk tunes from popular memory on instruments they had never studied, etc. All of this and "Treatise" were in the spirit of removing elitism and habitualism or pre-conditioning from culture. Of course, only certain expressions are possible in collective improvisation - later, Cardew would renounce his early work and produce political songs in simple folksong styles.

The task of realizing the pages involves many decisions which can be made by performers separately and/or together. The score may be read horizontally, left to right, like most music with the empty staves below the graphics used to record the results of a non-linear reading of the visual forms above. Contradictions or impossibilities will arise (the meaning of a circle or a vertical line in a horizontal reading). The circles when read by a percussionist may suggest the literal depiction of a cymbal or tam-tam, for a horn player they may suggest playing with the hand in the bell, for a violinist performing harmonics in a whirling pattern, etc. In a semi-coordinated ensemble, players may choose different sections of the same page and create procedures for interaction, overlapping, morphing of one sound into another, and so on, of the various parts, a "live orchestration". The numbers on the score may determine the density of events to be played, as in an early Morton Feldman score, or ... ? The thick black line that runs through most of the pages may be interpreted as a method of memory, playback of certain events from previous pages, or other methods for establishing continuity and resonance through time.

With some original software program, the pixels of the shapes may be tracked as data streams and trigger stored analog signals or samples, or the piece may be treated as a collective improvisation on the Internet, and so on, possibilities not imaginable in 1967.

~ All Music Guide