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!!! Treatise, Wittgenstein and Cardew {br}{br} {br}---- ---- {html} <TABLE BORDER="0"> <TR> <TD WIDTH="450" VALIGN="top"> <br><br> <hr nosize> <b>VIDEO</b>          <img src="https://jeromejoy.org/files/img/icon_video.gif"><br><hr nosize> <b>Cornelius Cardew, Treatise [excerpt]<br>The QUaX Ensemble, directed by Petr Kotik. Live recording from Prague, 1967.</b><br><br> <iframe width="420" height="236" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9pKMo0XSb-Y?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <br><br> <small>This performance of <i>Treatise</i> was recorded live in Prague in 1967 by the Czech QUaX Ensemble, directed by composer/flutist/conductor Petr Kotik.<br>This historical recording offers a unique perspective to hear <i>Treatise</i> as interpreted by Cardew's contemporaries.<br> Kotik met Cardew in Warsaw in 1962, and they began exchanging scores by mail, including <i>Treatise</i>, which was a work in progress. Upon meeting again in London (1966), Cardew provided Kotik with additional portions of the score and insights.<br> Fresh from this encounter, Kotik started the QUaX Ensemble upon his return to Prague in 1966. The first thing QUaX did was to rehearse <i>Treatise</i>, working through the pages Kotik had: "The piece was very important for getting all of us together, musically speaking, besides having a lot of fun working out individual pages by having all the musicians contribute ideas and suggestions. We worked regularly over a long period of time, ending up with a 2-hour version of the piece ... only performed once, at the concert on October 15, 1967 in Prague." </small> <br><br><br><br><br><br> <hr nosize> <b>VIDEO</b>          <img src="https://jeromejoy.org/files/img/icon_video.gif"><br><hr nosize> <b>Cornelius Cardew, Treatise [excerpt]<br>Formanex + AMM + guests<br>John Tilbury - Eddy Prevost - Keith Rowe - John White - Laurent Dailleau - Anthony Taillard - Christophe Havard - Emmanuel Leduc - Julien Ottavi<br>au festival "Musique Action" à Nancy en juin 2002 à l'occasion du 20ème anniversaire de la mort de Cornelius Cardew, Formanex, AMM et les invités on interprété le "Treatise".</b><br><br> <iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bW7gz0oOhZ4?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> </TD> <TD WIDTH="100">   </TD> <TD> Wittgenstein’s seminal text inspired Cornelius Cardew’s monumental graphic score, <i>Treatise</i> (1963-67) ; Just what did this music-notational epic have to do with the <i>Tractatus</i>?<br><br> In fact, Wittgenstein invoked musical notation in an important passage of the <i>Tractatus</i>:<br> “At first glance the proposition – say as it stands printed on paper – does not seem to be a picture of the reality of which it treats. But nor does the musical score appear at first sight to be a picture of a musical piece; nor does our phonetic spelling (letters) seem to be a picture of our spoken language. And yet these symbolisms prove to be pictures – even in the ordinary sense of what they represent. [...] The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation which holds between language and the world. To all of them the logical structure is common. (Like the two youths, their two horses and their lilies in the story. They are all in a certain sense one.) [...] In the fact that there is a general rule by which the musician is able to read the symphony out of the score, and there is a rule by which one could reconstruct the symphony from the line on a gramophone record and from this again – by means of the first rule – construct the score, herein lies the internal similarity between these things which at first sight seem to be entirely different.” — <small>(Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden, New York 2003 [1922], p. 39-41</small><br> But it would appear that Cardew’s score stands in no clear relation to any sonic content. And yet it was precisely as a self-contained symbolic system that was to be in need of no supplementary clarification that Cardew’s notation was indebted to Wittgenstein’s conception of the logical proposition.<br><br> According to the <i>Tractatus</i>, an adequately notated logical proposition would be internally consistent, self-evident, and, admitting no supplementary “metalanguage”, fundamentally self-contained. But it would not therefore be divorced from the “world”. It would “describe the scaffolding of the world but ‘treat’ of nothing”. In a gloss on this passage, Cardew wrote of his score-in-process: <br>“Reference. ‘What is the reference of the network?’ This is meaningless. Something – things – should be referable to the network”. — <small>(Cardew, Cornelius: Treatise Handbook, including Bun no. 2 – Volo Solo, New York 1971, p. IV.)</small><br> Indeed Cardew took Wittgenstein’s hard-to-imagine concept of logical notation as an ideal. Thus, Treatise was to be a self-contained symbolic system without need of any additional directions. That it does not describe or prescribe any particular sounds – no pitches, no rhythms – is the point, since, according to the <i>Tractatus</i>, logical propositions reflect (and are reflected within) the world not as specific empirical things but as formal (or logical) possibilities.<br><br> For all the apparent attention to graphic elegance, Cardew sharply distinguished between his notational project and what he described as Bussotti’s non-functional “‘aesthetic notations’...[n]otation for its own sake.’” <br> “A musical notation that looks beautiful is not a beautiful notation, because it is not the function of a musical notation to look beautiful (functionalism). Any attempts in this direction (Bussotti) could be called ‘aesthetic notations’. Notation for its own sake, but in a different sense from say, pure mathematics.” — <small>(Cardew, Cornelius: “Nota- tion, Interpretation, Etc.”, in: Tempo 58, Summer 1961, p. 29.)</small><br> Even though the notation in <i>Treatise</i> designates no specific sound or action, the score was not intended as only a vague stimulus for performance. Cardew writes:<br> “The score must govern the music. It must have authority, and not merely be an arbitrary jumping-off point for improvisation, with no internal consistency.” — <small>(Cardew 1971, p. IV.)</small><br> A player might decide, for example, that circular shapes always correspond to harmonics, and would then have to determine some sort of rule that makes sonic sense of the variation in circle size, the position of the circles on the page, and so on. Writing about this kind of interpretive decision, Cardew, in his private notes on <i>Treatise</i>, paraphrases Wittgenstein on the role of arbitrary yet binding rules in games: “And if e.g. you play a game you hold by its rules. And it is an interesting fact that people set up rules for pleasure and then hold by them.” — <small>(Ibid., VII.)</small><br><br> After five years of struggling with <i>Treatise</i> Cardew eventually recognized insurmountable contradictions in his project. But instead of thinking of the score as a failure he began to understand it as a transitional endeavor that led him to a new conception of music. On a 1970 radio broadcast Cardew described a 1966 performance of <i>Treatise</i> that he participated in with the improvisation collective AMM as the “turning point”, and said:<br> “I now regard <i>Treatise</i> as a transition between my early preoccupations with problems of music notation and my present concerns – improvisation and a musical life. <br>However I would have been a great deal loster if it hadn’t been for the performance of January 1966 [...] Joining AMM was the turning point, both in the composition of <i>Treatise</i> and in everything I have thought about music up to now. Before that, Treatise had been an elaborate attempt at graphic notation of music; after that time it became simply graphic music (which I can only define as a graphic score that produces in the reader, without any sound, something analogous to the experience of music), a network of nameless lines and spaces pursuing their own geometry untethered to themes and modulations, 12-note series and their transformations, the rules or laws of musical composition and all the other figments of the musi- cological imagination. / Up to the time of this performance, improvisation had always terrified me; I thought it must be something like composing, but accelerated a million times, a feat of which I knew I was incapable. With the AMM improvisers I discovered that anyone can play, me too, provided, as a Chinese musician of the 16th century put it, ‘the thoughts are serious, the mind peaceful and the will resolute’, and what comes out in such play is vital and direct, rather than a translation or interpretation of intellect, attitude, notation, inspiration or what have you.” — <small>(Cardew 1971, p X-XI.)</small><br> Perhaps the trajectory of Cardew’s thought, from his early concern with self-consistent notational systems to his later dedication to improvisational performance and a “musical life”, recalls Wittgenstein’s own philosophical evolution: Having renounced the metaphysical conception of an autonomous and pure logical language, the philosopher conceived of “language-games” whose rules were indissociable from “use”, and thus comprised a “form of life”.<br><br> There was, in fact, a final turn in Cardew’s philosophical and political development, and once again notation was a source of contention. In 1971, Cardew writes, he found himself “tipped...into the maelstrom of class struggle”. No longer was a “musical life” achieved through experimental modes of improvisation a sufficient goal. To ad- dress real problems in the real world music had to be political, useful, and populist. At the same time, he turned against Treatise and decided that it was in fact no better than Bussotti’s aestheticized scores. Treatise, he concluded, was “a particularly striking outbreak of...a disease of notation, namely the tendency for musical notations to become aesthetic objects in their own right.”<br><br> — <small>(<A HREF="https://www.academia.edu/9224980/Notation_Games_On_Autonomy_and_Play_in_Avant-Garde_Musical_Scores" target="_blank">David Gutkin, "Notation Games: On Autonomy and Play in Avant-Garde Musical Scores", presentation, Wesleyan University</A>)</small> </TD> </TR> </TABLE> {/html} {br}{br} ---- * {small}[Cornelius Cardew, Treatise - score (1971)\|http://mumia.art.pte.hu/mami/tartalom/oktatasi_anyagok/partitura_2014/Cardew_Treatise/Cardew%20-%20Treatise.pdf]{/small} * {small}[Cornelius Cardew, Treatise - handbook (1971)\|http://mumia.art.pte.hu/mami/tartalom/oktatasi_anyagok/partitura_2014/Cardew_Treatise/Cardew%20-%20Treatise%20Handbook.pdf]{/small} * {small}[Cornelius Cardew, Towards an Ethic of Improvisation (1971)\|http://www.ubu.com/papers/cardew_ethics.html]{/small} * {small}[A Young Persons Guide to Treatise (2009) (Seattle Improvisation Meeting)\|http://www.spiralcage.com/improvMeeting/treatise.html]{/small} — {small}[Treatise Recordings (Seattle Improvisation Meeting)\|http://www.spiralcage.com/improvMeeting/Recordings.html]{/small} —{small}[Seattle Improvisation Meeting - Treatise page\|http://www.spiralcage.com/improvMeeting/]{/small} * {small}[Cornelius Cardew, by John Tilbury\|http://www.users.waitrose.com/~chobbs/tilburycardew.html] — (Originally published in Contact no. 26 (Spring 1983), pp. 4-12){/small} * {small}[Virginia Anderson, 'Aspects of British Experimental Music as a Separate Art-Music Culture'\|http://www.academia.edu/9107936/Aspects_of_British_Experimental_Music_as_a_Separate_Art-Music_Culture] — (PhD thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2004){/small} * {small}[David Gutkin, 'Notation Games: On Autonomy and Play in Avant-Garde Musical Scores'\|https://www.academia.edu/9224980/Notation_Games_On_Autonomy_and_Play_in_Avant-Garde_Musical_Scores] — (presentation, Wesleyan University){/small} {br}{br} {br}{br} ---- ----
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