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On indeterminate notation
John Tilbury celebrates Cornelius Cardew's experimental scores
"Notation is a way of making people move", Cornelius Cardew once wrote. 'Making' was perhaps an inappropriate choice of word; it was, certainly, never in Cardew's philosophy to make people do anything. But in the fifties the relationship between composer and performer had become a coercive one: play this loud, play that louder, do this quickly, wait, stop. Notations had become a sequence of commands constituting the composer's control strategy.
Inspired by the writings and compositions of John Cage, the experimentalists freed the performer from his incarceration by the serialists, restoring the mutuality of the relationship between composer and performer; the American composer Christian Wolff, for example, notates not what to play, but how to play.
Cardew's notations from the sixties - Autumn 60, Solo with Accompaniment, Memories of You, The Great Learning and, in particular, the mammoth Treatise, are always challenging, never prescriptive: like seeds embedded in their environment, they depend on the surrounding soil - the contemporary musical climate, the individual performers - for survival and nourishment.
The composer David Bedford wrote: "Speaking as a performer in many of Cardew's early works, it must be said that the experience was totally rewarding. Our creativity was constantly being challenged, and the empathy of the performers, channelled into producing a coherent piece of music despite sometimes sketchy and sometimes paradoxical instructions, was often remarkable. It should be pointed out that none of Cardew's works ever gave total freedom to the performer. The instructions were a guide which focused each individual's creative instinct on a problem to be solved - how to interpret a particular system of notation using one's own musical background and attitudes."
Experimental music scores are enigmatic, opaque, demanding, irritating, humorous, childlike; the best, like Cardew's Treatise, are also inspiring, giving rise, on occasion, to a music of vitality, intelligence and elegance.