The work and thoughts of Cornelius Cardew remain some of the most provocative and distinctive in the context of contemporary music in the U.K. Although Cardew later denounced the TREATISE, a challenge remains to realise the hundreds of scores in the collection and to attempt to assemble a sound and method which approaches the ideals which shaped his artistic life.
An extract from UBUWEB , in his own words:
“The great merit of a traditional musical notation, like the traditional speech notation ie writing, is that it enables people to say things that are beyond their own understanding. A 12 year old can read Kant aloud; a gifted child can play late Beethoven. Obviously one can understand a notation without understanding everything that the notation is able to notate. To abandon notation is therefore a sacrifice; it deprives one of any system of formal guidelines leading you on into uncharted regions. On the other hand, the disadvantage of a traditional notation lies in its formality. Current experiments in mixed-media notations are an attempt to evade this empty formality. Over the past 15 years many special-purpose notation-systems have been devised with blurred areas in them that demand an improvised interpretation.
An extreme example of this tendency is my own TREATISE which consists of 193 pages of graphic score with no systematic instructions as to the interpretation and only the barest hints (such as an empty pair of 5line systems below every page) to indicate that the interpretation is to be musical.
The danger in this kind of work is that many readers of the score will simply relate the musical memories they have already acquired to the notation in front of them, and the result will be merely a gulash made up of the various musical backgrounds of the people involved. For such players there will be no intelligible incentive to music or extend themselves beyond the limitations of their education and experience.
Ideally such music should be played by a collection of musical innocents; but in a culture where musical education is so widespread (at least among musicians) and getting more and more so, such innocents are extremely hard to find. Treatise attempts to locate such musical innocents wherever they survive, by posing a notation that does not specifically demand an ability to read music. On the other hand, the score suffers from the fact that it does demand a certain facility in reading graphics, ie a visual education. Now 90% of musicians are visual innocents and ignoramuses, and ironically this exacerbates the situation, since their expression or interpretation of the score is to be audible rather than visible. Mathematicians and graphic artists find the score easier to read than musicians; they get more from it. But of course mathematicians and graphic artists do not generally have sufficient control of sound-media to produce “sublime” musical performances. My most rewarding experiences with Treatise have come through people who by some fluke have (a) acquired a visual education, (b) escaped a musical education and (c) have nevertheless become musicians, ie play music to the full capacity of their beings. Occasionally in jazz one finds a musician who meets all these stringent requirements; but even there it is extremely rare.”
