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Treatise - An enigmatic challenge
Stephen Chase reports on COMA Yorkshire's Treatise workshop and performance
As the package thunked to the floor from the letterbox, slight feelings of trepidation began to register, only partly alleviated upon examining the intriguing contents within. Cornelius Cardew's Treatise might be likened to the mysterious monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey daring you to take up its enigmatic challenge. Its sheer scale (193 pages, with no instructions) is daunting, yet every page seems to entice you in with its visual detail.
Our mission (which we chose to accept) was to spend two Saturdays holed up in the resonant space of Holy Trinity Church in Leeds, preparing for a performance of this work to spring upon an unsuspecting public.
Eight of us gathered for this trek into the unknown, a motley crew including flutes, clarinets, saxophone, viola, cello, piano, organ and guitar. Our expert guide in this venture was John Tilbury. He encouraged our total involvement in negotiating and navigating a way through, never letting his close involvement with the history of this piece get in the way of the group's ideas, suggesting instead possible routes rather than predetermined highways. There is a definite skill to allowing this kind of democratic approach to work, which a piece such as Treatise seems to call for - and from which many other musical and worldly endeavours would surely benefit.
The first session began with discussions as to how we might go about making our version of the piece, speculating as to what particular images within the score might infer. With no hard and fast rules there were as many different and conflicting ideas as there were members of the group. How do you musically interpret a square, a circle, or an object which looks like a bubble car? And just what is that black line which runs through the centre of the score on almost every page supposed to signify?
With such a proliferation of ideas in the score we decided to focus our attention on particular pages and sections. Many different approaches were taken to interpretation, including assigning particular signs to particular players (but not determining how they might be realised), agreeing upon points of reference for the ensemble to come together, and simultaneous individual versions. It became clear that no sign could be given a fixed meaning as each new context demanded it to be rethought. Rather than being an inconvenience, I think (and I'm sure the rest of the group would agree) that this was a liberating factor - especially in sections such as page 150, when the abstractions of the score suddenly take on a feline character.
For the concert a design for our version of Treatise was settled upon which combined solos, duets, quartets and ensemble passages, yet still retained an improvisational edge which kept it from solidifying into anything as dull and definitive as a 'properly written' score.
I found the whole experience to be exhilarating, life affirming, and one of the most significant events in my musical life so far. In an age when the term 'experimental' is disparaged as meaning 'not fully worked out', 'inaccessible', or 'part of the excess of the 1960s', Treatise appears as contemporary as ever in its challenge to received ways of thinking about and making music, with its inclusive, non-proscriptive, yet thoughtful design.