For the improviser, the physicality of producing sound (the hardware) is not a separate activity from the thoughts, emotions and ideas in music (the software). In the act of creation, there is a constant loop between the hierarchy of factors involved in the process. My lungs, lips, fingers, voice box and their working together with the potentials of sound are dialoguing with other levels which I might call mind and perception. The thoughts and decisions are sustained and modified by my physical potentials and visa versa, but as soon as I try to define these separately I run into problems.⁸

Language struggles with depicting physical action, and nowhere is this struggle more evident than in language that tells us what to do. Whoever has tried to assemble a do-it-yourself bookcase following written instructions knows the problem. As one’s temper rises, one realizes how great a gap can exist between instructive language and the body.⁹

The two quotes above, from saxophonist Jim Denley and sociologist Richard Sennett, illustrate one of the fundamental problems and resources for notation for improvisers: negotiating the immediate physicality of improvisation, and the mediate symbolicity of notation. The connection of the improviser to her instrument is kinetic, local, and focused on the in-time, which seems directly at odds with the mediated, portable, coded, and mostly over-time¹⁰ nature of notation.

The interface between these two positions is present throughout the music examined in Tactile Paths and many other notated pieces for improvisers, whether or not explicitly expressed in scores themselves. Building on Denley’s hardware-software metaphor, one can see how Bob Ostertag deliberately repatches the performer-instrument feedback loop through the recording process in his Say No More project (1993a; 1993b; 1996). Ben Patterson embeds a long-term process of exploring the physical qualities of his instrument with preparations in his Variations for Double-Bass (1999). Performers experience types of movement and instrumental technique in the conventionally notated sections of my Apples Are Basic (2008) that inflect or guide improvisation in the graphically notated sections. Richard Barrett refers primarily to the physical properties of material, rather than to quantifiable pitches and rhythms, in his fOKT series (Barrett 2005). Even Cornelius Cardew – who gives no instructions at all to performers of his abstract graphic score Treatise (1970) – grounds their interpretations in embodied experience ipso facto through his very refusal to instruct.

In the present chapter, I would like to foreground the encounter between physicality and notation in a documentary film made with director Zach Kerschberg entitled  Seeing the Full Sounding: Christopher Williams explores two pieces by Malcolm Goldstein. This film traces the dynamic and analytically slippery connections of physical experience, sound, and notation in my performances of  Malcolm Goldstein’s Jade Mountain Soundings (1988, 63-67; henceforth JMS) and  on and on and always slowly nowhere (2011; henceforth OAO). Rather than merely providing examples or support for the present text, the film itself is the primary argumentational vehicle; these words may be taken as an introduction.

In “Expressive Instructions”, a short but powerful chapter in his book The Craftsman (2008), Sennett compares three recipes by chefs Julia Child, Elizabeth David, and his teacher Madame Benshaw for an elaborate French chicken dish called “Poularde à la d’Albufera”. According to Sennett, each of these recipes provides a successful alternative to the traps of “dead denotation”, or the debilitating use of commands that “name acts rather than explain the process of acting […] [that] tell rather than show” (184). Child achieves this through sympathetic illustration; she points out likely pitfalls and “focuses on the human protagonist rather than on the bird” (185). David explains through scene narrative, “impart[ing] technique through evoking the cultural context of this journey” (187) of cooking the chicken. Benshaw’s minimalistic and poetic recipe¹¹ uses metaphors “in order to give each action heavy symbolic weight” (193). In all of these recipes, Sennett shows how “the imaginative trope becomes itself the explanation […] and how unpacked tacit knowledge can become expressive instruction” (184).

In the vein (forgive the pun) of “Poularde à la d’Albufera”,¹² Goldstein’s music offers a choice opportunity to explore the complex relationship between text and body by taking the physicality of string and vocal techniques as its very subject. JMS and OAO create an entire universe from the inner complexity of single sounds, the haptic poetry of a soloist’s movement with bow, instrument, and voice, and the materiality of sound in space. And like Child’s, David’s, and Benshaw’s recipes, Goldstein negotiates the ineluctable slippage between notation and the physicality of improvisation by using an “imaginative trope” – or guiding creative image – that he calls Sounding:

Soundings: plumbing the depths of sounds and in/of me. All sounds. Touch releasing things into motion; gesture realized/resonances of texture becoming song. (Music: the process of living, sound.) Improvisations, my violin playing… an overflowing of myself in space. Sound as a physical reality, touching upon the ears of the body; (“upon the string, within the bow… breathing”)… reverberations within the skull become a changing landscape – a new music… As one sound unfolds, I follow it with my bow, bent thick or thin upon the line; gut and metal unfolding, stretched taut, full length the black wood, a pathway of no stepping stones while fingertips and footholds and swaying, sing a resonance of lush green. (Goldstein, as quoted in Arms 2012, 39).

This poetic cluster, in which the materiality of sound, movement, and subjectivity intersect, leads me to a number of questions. How does Goldstein’s notation articulate the terms of his tacitly developed Soundings to me and other performers? How do the physical qualities of my reading, his writing, and our imaginations interact in and through performance? What role do these interactions play in the experience of listening and viewing?

Instead of responding verbally, I have attempted to answer these questions by showing rather than telling; Seeing the Full Sounding depicts the problems and minute details of reading and performing JMS and OAO directly in their native media of sight, sound, and movement.

An active and poetic approach to the medium of film is crucial here. Rather than using “neutral” surveillance-style video footage as raw data to be taxonomized or formalized (cf. Sennett’s “dead denotation”), Kerschberg and I exploit the subjective movement of cameras onstage. Like the alternation of wide-angle shots and overhead closeups in Child’s television series,¹³ this allows us to trace and focus subtle movements that evade the unaided eye and ear. We also include offstage footage from the residency where the film was shot (“B-roll” in film jargon) as “scene narrative, in which the ‘where’ sets the scene for how’” (Sennett 2008, 188). Shots of me wandering through the Bohemian wheat fields and capering about lumber piles parallel how my sensory awareness is coupled to the space in which I am performing. (Consider in particular my investigation of the insects in the rafters and the creaky door hinges at the beginning of the film.) Most importantly, we superimpose notation on the performance footage in the editing process, so you may experience some analog of the feedback between notation and physicality that I experience while playing. My hope is that these techniques themselves become expressive instructions, revealing corporeal and temporal dynamics that would otherwise remain hidden behind skin, skull, and the “fourth wall” of performance.

The film, however, neither attempts nor succeeds to tell the “whole story” on the topics elaborated above; a few important points are glossed over. First of all, as the reader will gather from my comments in the film (3:02), my relationship to the notation has evolved through direct communication and hands-on work with Goldstein, as well as an immersion in his writings and recordings. I do not approach the scores as self-sufficient entities; nor would I counsel any other prospective performers to do so. Particularly in the case of JMS – which bleeds seamlessly into reflections before and after its appearance in Sounding the Full Circle (1988), a seminal anthology of Goldstein’s writings and scores – the continuity of Goldstein’s notated work with his holistic musical (and life) practice is paramount.

Another issue that might need emphasis is a major difference between me performing JMS and OAO. In JMS, my eyes are coupled to the score, and the physicality of reading recreates the movements of Goldstein’s writing. This conditions the position of my head and body, even the slightest movements of which are audible in the fragile long tones of the piece. In OAO, however, I do not read the score at all during performance; rather, I memorize the simple sectional structure of the piece beforehand and internalize the sonic images that Goldstein creates in his verbal notation. While this over-time aspect of learning the piece is not captured in the film, the physicality of reading OAO is still crucial, as my interpretation of the words on the page is filtered directly through my instrumental imagination.¹⁴

Nevertheless, the film shows how deeply Goldstein’s music entwines the physicality of improvisation and notation. His scores and my performances deconstruct any would-be opposition of notation and improvisation by showing that physicality belongs to both practices, linking over-time and in-time processes in unexpected and fundamental ways. Such links stand to illuminate a dynamism central not only to Goldstein’s music, but to notation for improvisers as a whole.

What is the relevant way of speaking about Treatise? What are the terms? Can one really say anything explicit about it? (Cardew 1971, 102)¹⁶

Introduction

In “The Ground”, I asked myself two questions in response to an invitation to compose for an improvising duo: “Why do they want a notated piece if they are going to improvise? And what can my written intervention offer these perfectly self-sufficient virtuose other than needless complication?” I went on to detail the problems with these questions and the naive oppositional perspective behind them, stating that “the relationship between notation and improvisation was and is not by nature conflictual.” “Moreover,” I continue, “I overlooked a cornerstone of my collaborators’ musical world view: for the improviser, who happily, skillfully, and often makes her own spontaneous music without notation, scores are simply one more artifact in the musical environment.”

While those questions began as a rhetorical springboard, I would like to revisit them here, slightly reformulated, as points for earnest reflection. If, for the improviser, music is fundamentally unscripted – or unscriptable – why would she compose or perform with notation at all? To address this important if somewhat unwieldy question, I turn to Cornelius Cardew’s monumental 193-page graphic score  Treatise (1970, composed 1963-1967). Its long historical shadow, and the variety of ways performers have dealt with its notation, make it uniquely suited for such an inquiry. In examining Treatise‘s performance history from within a creative project, I will attempt to reveal some of the traits that lend it magnetism for so many improvisers, and extrapolate a few principles regarding what can make notation relevant for improvisers in general.

A Reluctant Referent

Treatise is one of the few scores for improvisers that might be considered “standard repertoire” in experimental music. In contrast to most of the pieces included in Tactile Paths, it enjoys a rich and diverse performance history, mainstream publication by C.F. Peters, and substantial critical and scholarly attention. That it may be considered canonical is, however, ironic; the score is deliberately incomplete.

It is a score consisting entirely of lines and shapes. It contains no sounds, no directions to putative performers […] 193 pages of lines and shapes, clustered around a strong, almost continuous central line, which can be imagined as the lifeline of the reader, his center, around which all manner of activity takes place […] (Cardew 1971, 113)

Any number of musicians using any media are free to participate in a “reading” of this score (it is written from left to right and “treats” of its graphic subject matter in exhaustive “arguments”). Each is free to interpret it in his own way. Any rigidity of interpretation is automatically thwarted by the confluence of different personalities. (Cardew 1971, 111)

Whereas semantic vagaries in many scores for improvisers lacking conventional notation¹⁷ or comprehensive written legends can be partially resolved by consulting the composer or performance practice, Treatise makes a feature of, and perhaps depends on, interpretive murk. Not only must a player decide how to interpret the notation at the molecular level; she must, in the context of an ensemble realization, negotiate its implementation with others, either verbally during rehearsal, on the fly during performance, or both. These three levels of interpretation may, and often do, contradict each other.¹⁸ In addition, the various notational elements (save the empty staves at the bottom of every page) enter and exit sections of the piece capriciously. Their visual-semiotic meanings change frequently, as for example when a circle acts as a geometric motif on one page, and becomes a musical note on the next. Sooner or later, any consistency in the interpretation of a given element is therefore undermined.

Through all of this Cardew’s professed hope was “that in playing this piece, each musician will give of his own music. He will give it as his response to my music, which is the score itself” (1971, 113). A noble intention, this communion, but how has it worked in practice, if at all? Even veteran performers have expressed their doubts. Cardew’s biographer and lifelong collaborator John Tilbury writes that his “own long relationship with Treatise evokes a feeling of inadequacy: a failure to do the work justice” (2008, 253). According to Eddie Prévost, “Treatise may have been an exhaustive attempt to map a multitude of possible relationships and possibilities to which a musician could attend. It was ultimately a theoretical exercise” (2011). More pointedly still, Richard Barrett has described it as “something that looks more like a gesture of despair at the impossibility of […] communication between composers and performers” (Wooley 2015c). Cardew’s own estimation of the effectiveness and ultimate worth of this approach waxed and waned over the course of piece’s composition¹⁹ – and finally dwindled to complete rejection in the early 1970s.²⁰

Nonetheless Treatise is alive and well, “sow[ing] ‘wild oats’ […] even more than in similar compositions” (Anderson 2006, 317) of its age and genre, in the words of musicologist Virginia Anderson. In addition to its regular concert appearance and many recordings, it is often taught in university courses and workshops throughout Europe and the US.²¹ Particularly since 1999 – a period in which most of its commercial recordings were released – it has also undergone a critical renaissance²² and appeared in several score exhibitions.²³ It may be surmised that Treatise – despite itself – is a referent in experimental music.

Inspired by this tension between a panoply of paradoxes within the score, and a dazzling legacy without, I began my study of Treatise with the following question: how and why have so many musicians performed the piece? The subject of the present text, a feature-length radio piece entitled  A Treatise Remix, represents an attempt at an answer. It did not resolve the question above once and for all: I cracked no hidden code in the score, nor did I discover any magical thread uniting Treatise‘s performance history. Indeed making A Treatise Remix revealed far more about my own assumptions and methods than about Treatise per se. However as I hope to show, Treatise‘s unique ability to catalyze such self-discovery, a multi-tiered process of improvisation, may be the key to understanding its enduring relevance and appeal.

How – Source Material

“An articulated network” describes what I am working on. Not a discussion of (representing) objects. (Cardew 1971, 102)

A Treatise Remix began with the aim of audibly comparing and contrasting a wide cross-section of Treatise recordings – their styles, self-imposed rules of interpretation, instrumentations, and so on. The format chosen for this comparison was a studio-assembled collage containing multiple recordings of selected pages sounding simultaneously. By layering diverse interpretations in this way, I intended to sketch a picture not only of particular performances’ relationships to the notation, but also of those performances’ relationships to each other. From here, I hypothesized, one might begin to theorize the gaps between notation and performance that Treatise so relentlessly interrogates.

I began by collecting a library of fifteen commercial recordings, six archival and broadcast recordings, and a few dozen more published online.²⁴ (Ultimately a total of twenty recordings were used; they are listed in  Source Material.) The library encompassed a vast stylistic breadth, spanning relatively straightforward chamber music realizations, digital sonifications of the entire score, atmospheric post-rock and noise renderings, and free jazz satire. Given this unruly tangle, my initial strategy to layer them in a meta-interpretative collage was bound to be messy. To keep the mess to a minimum, the collage would be held together by musical events or qualities shared between different recordings; audible interpretive trends would, ostensibly, provide the listener a structural thread throughout the piece.

The second task was then to locate these trends – to comb through the library and identify traits common to multiple recordings. My success was moderate; the findings were diverse. There were score-bound traits (e.g. the use of a particular instrument group such as radios or percussion for circles), and there were others not obviously connected to the notation (e.g. a frequent use of drones and static textures). There were conventional trends (e.g. (repeated) chords for the numbers), and more idiosyncratic ones (e.g. two digital versions’ assignment of A440 to the lifeline).²⁵

Had my goals been of an archival or taxonomical nature, such connections and their systematic scrutiny might have provided the basis for an entire dissertation alone. But my inquiry was artistic rather than scientific, and shortly after beginning this intermediate step, I realized my attention would be far more fruitfully directed toward understanding the differences between recordings. These were richer and greater in number, and, as I will explain, they crippled my initial strategy for the collage. Furthermore, they provided a key to answering my questions about improvisers’ motivations and mechanisms for employing and perfoming notation. Two lines of difference brought this discovery to a fine point.

Degrees of Symbolicity

There is a great difference between: a) doing anything you like and at the same time reading the notations, and b) reading the notations and trying to translate them into action. Of course you can let the score work on previously given material, but you must have it work actively. (Cardew 1971, 107)

Among the source material there is a wide spectrum of fidelity to the notation as symbols for sound production – from the literal to loose, and everything in between. At the literal end we may begin with Shawn Feeney’s digital sonification. Indeed one hesitates to call it an interpretation; rather than assign rules to the score as the basis for performance, Feeney feeds digital image files of the entire score through a computer program that reads the pages as bit maps. As Feeney explains, “Sine waves are generated from the black areas of the score as it scrolls from right to left, with the y-axis corresponding to pitch” (2002-2016). Each page has an equal duration of ca. 5″; the sonic mapping undergoes no changes.

Among human performances, Vocal Constructivists’ (henceforth VC) crisply conducted a cappella interpretation is perhaps the most strictly symbolic. Like Feeney’s computer, the performers interpret the vertical axis of the page registrally, and the horizontal axis temporally; rough proportion in these parameters is maintained throughout. They also assign particular types of sounds (hissing, phonemes, clapping, etc.) to shape classes, and often dynamics to size. These materials and occasional text appear to be precisely and consistently worked out before performance; it is safe to presume that the coordination of twenty-three voices would be otherwise impracticable.

Right of center is the piece’s first complete recording, by a Chicago-based sextet of seasoned improvisers conducted by Art Lange. This interpretation consistently respects the lifeline (which divides the ensemble orchestrationally – cello and clarinet above, piano and electronics below), numbers (which signify repeated tutti chords), circles (performed exclusively by the percussionist), and the rough left-to-right order of the symbols. Unlike VC, whose performers follow a common timeline given by the conductor, Lange’s musicians follow a more flexible timeline in which the exact orderings of most sounds (except the repeated tutti chords) do not correspond literally to the horizontal distribution of symbols on the page. Rather, symbols appear to be preassigned to particular musicians, and the relative durations of events in each player’s part (if not their order) is largely improvised. The sounds assigned to most symbols in the score – presumably also chosen by the players themselves – are less consistent and more context dependent, varying from page to page. These relatively minor variables render global coordination of parts within pages somewhat unpredictable. A palpably interactive discourse results from performers adapting their materials within the spontaneous polyphony.

Versions by the 2:13 ensemble or Cardew’s 1967 BBC sextet, like most interpretations, fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Here not all visual information in the score, apparently, is employed symbolically in performance. But the presence of some symbols remains audible, emerging and receding over time in function of the ongoing improvised musical development. Numbers and dots in both recordings, for example, often (though not always) represent repeated events and percussive punctuations respectively, acting as clear markers in a seemingly looser whole.

Left of center are recordings by FORMANEX and AMM, collectives who have played and recorded the piece on numerous occasions; they employ the score as a prism through which to “view” their freely-evolving improvisation. AMM member Eddie Prévost describes his experience of performing Treatise:

Without having any preconceived ideas about what I will play – except by virtue of the instrumentation I will apply – I immerse myself within the sounds of the music, unfolding, reading the score as if it were a visual representation of the music. I then engage in a dialogue with the other players, using the inspiration of sounds and symbols to add my own voice. These are, of course, simultaneous readings (they always are). (Tilbury 2008, 247)

In contrast to recordings right of center, Prévost deliberately subverts the notion of the score as a collection of symbols to be realized as sound. For him, placing real-time music-making chronologically and ontologically before the symbols is not merely a personal choice; it is an imperative:

[I]nterpretations of Treatise suffer when there is too much emphasis placed upon a reductive appreciation of its various parts. Art enters when the musician synthesizes the material. Gives it life […] the hunter’s mind weaves ideas from old facts and fresh metaphors and the scrambled crazy images of things recently seen. To move forward is to concoct new patterns of thought, which in turn dictate the design of the models and experiments. (Prévost 2011)

While his use of the words “too much” and “parts” raise more questions than they answer, Prévost’s metaphor of the hunt is provocative, and perhaps applicable to a wider swath of Treatise performances than his preface lets on. I shall return to this point.²⁶

Lastly, there is the most liberal end of the spectrum, including interpretations by guitar-and-poetry duo Léo Rathier and Méryl Marchetti, and indie rockers Sonic Youth with percussionist/ producer William Winant. These versions can be described as having an inspirational, atmospheric, or subjective connection to the score, with no apparent deferral to the concrete notated symbols.

The word apparent should be underlined; as ever, it is impossible to say if the disconnection lies in the performance, in this listener’s (lack of) imagination, or both. Indeed from the middle toward the “less symbolic” end of the spectrum, it becomes increasingly difficult to support claims about the relationships between particular recordings and the score. When performances adopt a more consistent, literal approach to interpreting the notation, forensically inferring interpretive principles from the musical results is relatively straightforward. At any given moment in Feeney’s or Lange’s recordings, one can establish concrete relationships between musical events and marks in the score; the artists’ own written comments and page lists aid verification. However when an interpretive approach is more flexible or abstract, comparison can easily become a guessing game, particularly if no page numbers or artist comments are available. What I identify as a free improvisation, because I cannot recognize correspondences between visual symbols and musical events, may not necessarily be so; the rules of interpretation may simply be less obvious. Such cases would include numbers interpreted as seconds of silence instead of repeated chords, or John White’s mischievous interpretation of ascending visual lines as descending gestures in the BBC recording (which, unsurprisingly, I was able to identify only because of Cardew’s verbal anecdotes).²⁷ Likewise, there is the obvious danger of losing one’s place in the score and misconstruing which symbols are or are not being played. This happened to me repeatedly when first listening to fast paced performances of many pages – even to strictly symbolic readings such as VC.

Such methodological problems compounded the differences in symbolicity I initially sought to cut through; they increased the difficulty of carrying out my plan to base A Treatise Remix on interpretive trends. This became especially clear in my first practical experiments with the collage. Even when I was able to identify the beginning and end of a particular page in multiple recordings, substantial links among different interpretations were mostly circumstantial. The fact that two or three versions of a given page shared some interpretive trait X was no guarantee they shared any other qualities that could establish the thread I counted on finding in the fog.

Conversely, qualities irrelevant to Treatise, such as recording artifacts or the simultaneous sounding of a particular instrument in different ensembles, tended to audibly link recordings much more clearly than interpretive content. The recorded material’s ostensible reducibility to symbols and their interpretation was overtaken by the irreducibility of “sound objects” in the musique-concrète sense.

In my “analytical improvisation” then, contingency was already there even before I actively sought it out. This experience shares something with most of my subjects’ performances of Treatise: the principal that regardless of what one thinks might be under control, the musical facts may go their own way. Notation for the improviser is thus no guarantee of stability.

Differences in Time

Remember that space does not correspond literally to time. The distance to the sun does not depend on only one speed; it depends on the route. Perhaps when interpreting it will be possible to select some lines as “time-lines”. Symbols or groups can then be grouped immediately and as a whole and placed in relation to some such time-line. (Cardew 1971, 99)

The second line of difference, in which hardly any two recordings are alike, is time. As one can see in Treatise Handbook, the number of pages selected for any given performance, the durations of individual pages, and the duration of events assigned to particular symbols within each page are staggeringly diverse. Unlike the parameter of symbolicity described above, in which the recordings can be placed along a generalizable continuum, it is difficult to extrapolate any meta-patterns at all from the performers’ temporal approaches. A few examples should suffice to show this problem:

• Ellsworth Snyder’s solo piano interpretation – whose liner notes make no reference to page numbers, and which I was completely unable to align to the notation – contains two “parts” on separate tracks. Part One lasts 23″, and Part Two 19:40. Why Snyder released these takes as such is a mystery, but the mere fact that a single player in a single recording session chose to make such a distinction is indicative of Treatise’s temporal malleability.
• Shawn Feeney’s digital sonification of all 193 score images with MetaSynth software lasts just over 15:00; each page has an identical length of ca. 5″. Lange’s chamber realization of the same pages occupies a full 2-CD set at 1:41:19, with varying page durations.
• Three chamber realizations of p. 1 – Cardew directing the American premiere, QuaX Ensemble, and Art Lange – last respectively 4:30, 3:30, and 2:00. The number 34 at the beginning of p. 1, interpreted in all three versions as sustained chords, lasts in each version 3:50 (17 iterations x 17″), 17″ (one iteration), and 50″ (7 iterations x ca. 7″).

Although it is difficult to categorize these approaches, time is by no means an arbitrary or independent parameter in individual performances. As I suggested in the previous section, the tempi of many recordings (defined by the duration of pages, rather than by pulse) are closely connected to the audible presence of their symbolicity.

Extreme tempi, such as Feeney’s sonification of the entire score at 5″ per page or Mat Hannafin’s 16′ solo performance of a single page, tend to obscure the notation. Feeney’s reading moves too quickly and uniformly to make figurative details, subtle variations on shape classes, or scalar differences perceptible, even though they are represented literally. Hannafin’s 16-minute recording of p. 3 has the same blurring effect, but for the opposite reason. Due to the slow tempo, the physicality of his sustained circular rubbing movements on drum heads overshadows the correlation of symbols and events as such. Hannafin dwells within the circles on the page so long that the circle-ness of the page becomes a constant and recedes into the background.

“Moderate” tempi are problematic to define since the score provides no tempo markings in the first place. However, in the Lange and the BBC recordings, symbols are easier to identify as gestures or discrete events within the musical discourse. One hears repeated events, percussive outbursts, and glissandi corresponding proportionally to symbols on the page. These tempi can therefore be considered to be moderate. Both the positive and negative effects of moderate tempi became clear to me when listening to Sonic Youth’s recording of p. 183. This performance is remarkable for its seemingly blasé non-engagement with the score, but entirely average in its duration of 3:27. Although I was unable to find any direct correspondences between the score and the interpretive content other than a short Luftpause toward the end, I continued to sense that what I was hearing could or should correspond because the pacing of the music was comparable with the density of visual information in the score: dynamics increase and the texture becomes thicker in the middle, with the aforementioned Luftpause before the coda. Evidence of the performance’s symbolicity was inflated by the moderate tempo, so to speak.

All these shades of temporal complexity created second-order disjunctions – both between the recordings and between the collage and the score – in the process of layering recordings in my collage. Like the differences in symbolicity I mentioned in the previous section, these disjunctions posed a challenge to the original plans for A Treatise Remix. To understand how, consider the following test scenario.

Three versions of p. 111 lasting 5″, 3:00, and 11:00 each contain a percussive attack corresponding to the dot at the beginning of the page. I wish to line up the three tracks so these attacks happen more or less at the same time, thus encouraging the listener to associate the interpretive commonality. This would render the following sequence: 5″ with all three layers at the beginning, 2:55 with two layers, and 8:00 of one version solo. The 11:00 version would thus arbitrarily become the focal point; moreover the resulting form would explicitly contradict the graphic qualities of p. 111, which grows in density halfway through the page. To compensate, should pp. 112-113 of the 3:00 version overlap a single page of the 11:00 version? Should the 11:00 version be left intact, edited, or not used because it creates too many complications? Should new versions of p. 111 lacking traits in common with the other three be introduced to reflect the parallel lines?

Why – Self-evaluation

Such questions reveal how the exercise of comparing Treatise recordings pointed directly back at my own assumptions and methods, rather than revealing the nature of Treatise itself. My own subjectivity in the observational process was so great that analysis could only be a prelude, rather than a basis, for my own realization of the score. The remainder of this text will thus concern itself principally with the realization of A Treatise Remix as a creative rather than comparative enterprise.

But before leaving the survey behind, I would like to turn briefly to its broader impact on the remix; after all, my source material was not merely grist for the mill. Getting to know Treatise’s performance history was a formative process, from which I took away crucial lessons that laid the bedrock for A Treatise Remix. Perhaps in addition to shedding light on my own piece, these lemmas will also be useful for others who realize Treatise.

Lesson 1: Do It Yourself

All scores for improvisers are permeable; they let contingency in and leave aspects of their internal structure to the performer. But whereas pieces such as Malcolm Goldstein’s Jade Mountain Soundings or my Apples Are Basic offer the erstwhile performer at least a trace of the “spirit” in which a performance might proceed, even the most basic, general conditions for a performance of Treatise are enacted by the players. And as we have seen, there is no cohesive performance practice to supplement that radical contingency. Furthermore, aspects of particular interpretations such as symbolicity and time are difficult if not impossible to apply to other interpretations, as they are bound to each other within the situation and personnel of a given performance. Performances of Treatise are best undertaken and assessed on their own terms; grafting strategies or values from one interpretation to another is unlikely to bear fruit.

With respect to my theoretical ambitions, the foregoing might be rightly called an admission of failure. Nonetheless, at the level of practice it offered me vindication and a clear foundational principle: do not defer to “tried and true” ideas or strategies – do it yourself.

Corollary to Lesson 1: Any Interpretative Approach Is Valid, but…

Affirming the relativism of Treatise in this way implies that any interpretative approach, any path through the piece, is in itself valid. I stand by this claim. But the same cannot be said of each realization; not all performances are equally convincing. A brief comparison of recordings by VC and solo pianist James Ede suggests why.

With respect to symbolicity and time, both performances are similar. They take a comparably literal approach, reading the page from left to right and translating the vertical dimension of the page registrally. Both share a tempo of roughly three pages per minute and proceed along unified timelines (VC with the help of a conductor, and Ede alone). But the impacts of the two performances are strikingly different.

On the one hand, VC take their approach to its logical extreme. By that I do not mean that they are fundamentalists; they frequently adjust the meaning of the symbols in context, e.g. by alternating between literal sonic mappings of visual lines à la Feeney, affective gestures, and texts derived from associations with visual figures. However they adhere to codes of translation long enough for the erratic nature of the visual material to render a consistent interpretation awkward or problematic. Such situations offer the performers an opportunity to stretch their interpretation and discover music beyond what the symbols suggest at face value. An example of this can be found in pp. 111-131, in which the translation of black and white circles (“Fa” and “wa”), vertical lines (claps), thin horizontal lines (nasal vowels), thicker ascending and descending lines (round glissandi), and other subtly differentiated symbols form a nonsensical, yet intriguingly virtuosic texture in constant variation. Had the interpretation focused only on the novel features of particular pages, this continuity, and consequently the surreal dramaturgy that carries the performance, would have been lost.

Ede on the other hand seems to stop at first impressions. His left-to-right reading is consistent, yet the distribution of symbols on the page does not manifest in temporal proportions. Shapes are not differentiated except in crude melodic figuration. The sonic quality of Ede’s electronic keyboard remains unchanged throughout. Musical references in the notation are emphasized to a grotesque degree, but many nonmusical idiosyncrasies are apparently ignored (e.g. numbers) or smoothed over. Indeed, the expressive poverty in Ede’s performance falls precisely into the trap that Cardew warned against in stating that

many readers of the score will simply relate the musical memories they have already acquired to the musical notation in front of them, and the result will be merely a goulash made up of the various musical backgrounds of the people involved. For such players there will be no intelligible incentive to invent music or extend themselves beyond the limitations of their education and experience. (Cardew 1971, 129-130)

To be clear, it is not the degree of rigor in dealing with the notation that separates VC’s and Ede’s performances; other performances in the middle or at the liberal end of the symbolicity spectrum can be subjected to similar evaluations. Rather, I would argue that the performers’ degree of rigor with their own choices and actions is what distinguishes VC and Ede. VC work on their approach within the performance; it gives the music a tension and richness that eclipse the aesthetic surface. Ede designs his strategy haphazardly at the outset and does not accept the challenges of his own making. He floats above the score; the resulting music is facile and obvious.²⁸

Indeed the importance of maintaining rigor with one’s own decisions might be considered fundamental not only to the interpretation of Treatise, but to the performance of any notation for improvisers in which the meaning of the score is distributed among multiple parties. Taking responsibility for one’s own actions provides an antidote to the threat of a double-bind in which performers may hand over responsibility to the composer, whereas the composer has already assigned this responsibility to the performers. In such situations nobody is taking responsibility, and the result is unsatisfactory to everyone involved.

Lesson 2: Be Consequent and (Therefore) Improvise

Hence Lesson 2: whatever path you choose, be consequent; carry your strategy as far as possible and play at its margins. This resonates strongly with Cardew’s comments on “Integrity”, the second of his “Virtues that a musician can develop”, a section of the final text in Treatise Handbook entitled “Towards an Ethic of Improvisation”:

2. Integrity. What we do in the actual event is important – not only what we have in mind. Often what we do is what tells us what we have in mind. The difference between making the sound and being the sound. (Cardew 1971, 132)

Ironically Cardew makes no explicit reference to Treatise or notation in “Virtues”; he speaks of improvisation in general, and of his experiences with the improvisation collective AMM in particular. However as we just saw, this excerpt can also help us understand the dynamics of Treatise performances, even fairly codified ones such as the VC and Ede recordings. The fact that he includes these comments in Treatise Handbook at all is suggestive. Is improvisation always a factor in realizing Treatise with integrity?

I would argue that when one is consequent – when a performance takes its interpretive terms to their limits – performers are bound to find themselves enmeshed in unforeseeable relationships to the score, to other musicians, to their own habits: “the scrambled crazy images of things recently seen” (Prévost 2011). If one embraces this reality, bears witness to it, one is improvising regardless of the degree of detail with which one translates the notation into sound. These are opportunities for transformation – we do Treatise in order to relearn “what we have in mind” and so change it through a dynamic connection with our environment.

The Hunt

In order to frame how that transformation occurred in A Treatise Remix, I will use Prévost’s image of the hunt once more:

Without having any preconceived ideas about what I will play – except by virtue of the instrumentation I will apply – I immerse myself within the sounds of the music, unfolding, reading the score as if it were a visual representation of the music. I then engage in a dialogue with the other players, using the inspiration of sounds and symbols to add my own voice. These are, of course, simultaneous readings (they always are). (Tilbury 2008, 247)

[I]nterpretations of Treatise suffer when there is too much emphasis placed upon a reductive appreciation of its various parts. Art enters when the musician synthesizes the material. [He] [g]ives it life. […] [T]he hunter’s mind weaves ideas from old facts and fresh metaphors and the scrambled crazy images of things recently seen. To move forward is to concoct new patterns of thought, which in turn dictate the design of the models and experiments. (Prévost 2011)

Taken together, these comments suggest that performances at the literal end of the symbolicity spectrum – those which emphasize the score’s “various parts” – do not engage in the kind of radical transformation Prévost and I value. For him, “moving forward” depends on a lack of preconceptions, on the spontaneity of real-time performance in which the models and experiments for interpretation are discovered. Symbolic preparation, by extension, constitutes an old pattern of thought that hinders this discovery.

On the whole I share Prévost’s problem with “reductive”, or uncritical, approaches to the notation (e.g. Ede, or at the other end of the spectrum, Sonic Youth). However I take issue with the notion that a high degree of symbolicity is necessarily reductive, and thus precludes moving forward in the hunt. As in the case of VC, even a literal reading with little overt improvisation can produce a music of integrity that reinvents itself through notation in performance. The fact of examining and translating notation before performance does not diminish its urgency or speculative qualities. To be sure, Treatise allows for VC’s approach as well as Prévost’s; herein lies its unique potential. Likewise it admits Ede’s and Sonic Youth’s approaches; therein lies a possible vulnerability. In any case, it becomes hard to make formal judgements, as these will mostly be based on aesthetic preferences.

The similarity of my own analytical work to Prévost’s experience of playing Treatise further breaks down this dichotomy of the symbolic and the real-time. Just as if I had been playing with a band, I immersed myself in the material, used the notation to engage with the sounds and players around me, and “mov[ed] forward […] to concoct new patterns of thought, which in turn dictate[d] the design of the models and experiments” (2011). Granted, that process took place over a longer period of time than a single performance, and my collaborators were not physically present (at least at this stage). But spontaneity is not all there is to improvising in Treatise; as Prévost himself acknowledges, “the hunter’s mind weaves ideas from old facts and fresh metaphors and the scrambled crazy images of things recently seen” (Prévost 2011, my italics). In a consequent performance, improvisation takes place at multiple levels, not only onstage.

How did I weave among them in A Treatise Remix?

The Lifeline and the Circles

I began with the score. Following Lesson 1, I resolved to commit to my own “reading” of the notation rather than defer to historical precedents or their structural commonalities. While the goal of the project required me to give the notation a certain protagonism, the nature of the collage format was incompatible with a strictly symbolic approach. Assigning symbols systematically to particular recordings or sound events would have been excessively formalistic, jeopardizing the all-important identities of and links between the different recordings.

My solution was to zoom out, not focusing systematically on symbols and rules but rather on a story embedded in the progression of the notation from beginning to end. The “characters” in this “narrative” were the lifeline and the circles.

The score seems not representational. No rules of representation. Except the central line represents perhaps the performer or a single line of thought. (Cardew 1971, 102)

A line or dot is certainly an immediate orientation as much as a thread in the fog. For immediately it stands in relation to the thick central stave line, which would correspond in some way to the track made by the man walking. This “subject line” is essential. (Cardew 1971, 101)

In a perpetually shifting graphic environment, the lifeline running constantly through the middle of nearly every page of the piece is one of Treatise’s only visual anchors. (The other anchor is the musical staves at the bottom of each page, which are identical, except for occasional minor cosmetic variations). It is impossible to ignore, and indeed has been a touchstone for several interpretations of Treatise in various forms, e.g. as a timeline (in nearly all recordings) and/or orchestrational division (e.g. recordings by VC or Lange). Frederic Rzewski is even reported to have played the lifeline exclusively in an early performance.²⁹

A Treatise Remix treats it metaphorically, as a protagonist on a journey of self-discovery. This reading stems both from Cardew’s comment that “Treatise is a long continuous drawing – in form rather similar to a novel” (1971, 117) and from personal observation. Flipping through the score from beginning to end, I see the path of a narrator drifting through relationships with shapes, figures, and numbers who come and go; traveling through natural, industrial, and psychological landscapes of all sorts; and, despite obstacles and momentary destruction, moving on. The straightness of this path is deceptive. If the journey were narrated from the outside, in third person, we would see twists and turns that the page could not contain. However in first-person, on the ground, there is only one direction: forward.

Obviously a circle need not have the duration of its diameter. It may refer to something quite outside the flow of music or sound. (Cardew 1971, 101)

Circles represent the Other, the counterpoint in this narrative. Whereas the lifeline travels across the page from left to right, the circles seem to stamp the page’s surface from above. Whereas the line is in a state of continuous transformation, the circles suggest single self-contained objects. Not only are the circles different from the line – they often antagonize it. Their crowding, interrupting, and blistering begins in the second half of p. 1 and reaches a climax in pp. 114-141, where enormous black circles attempt to obliterate the lifeline altogether.

This line-circle dialectic underlies A Treatise Remix‘s realization of pages in which the line is compromised or transformed, circles play an important role, or both. Section I (pp. 1-6; 0:00-12:12) offers an exposition. On p. 1 the line emerges and is interrupted by piano-shaped figure and a bubble cluster. It resumes in p. 2, where it meets and merges with a single circle. On p. 3 the line attempts to work around and is subsequently stymied by an expanded version of the cluster. In the middle of one of the cluster bubbles sits a musical note, whose staff line extends diagonally to the center of the adjacent bubble, then curves upward and continues in a thicker pen-width as the lifeline. This episode continues through p. 6 and ends at the emergence of a set of parallel staff-like lines, the beginning of a new episode not included in A Treatise Remix.

Live Ensemble and Texts

Another manifestation of the commitment to develop my own reading was to play the score with other musicians. Given my aforementioned view that examining Treatise’s evolution from the outside was also a kind of performance, it seemed only logical to insert myself into the performative work more literally. In order to bridge the experiences of Treatise from the inside and the outside, I decided to interweave historical recordings of select pages with original interpretations.

The hand-picked ensemble consisted of four Berlin-based musicians: Christian Kesten (voice, objects), Andrea Neumann (inside piano), Robyn Schulkowsky (voice, percussion), and myself (voice, contrabass). We had varying degrees of experience with Treatise. Kesten, despite being a veteran composer and performer of experimental scores, was unfamiliar with the piece. Neumann had played it a few times (including one intensively rehearsed concert with Keith Rowe). Schulkowsky had played and continues to play it regularly (often in the company of Treatise veteran Christian Wolff). I, the director of the project, knew the piece well from the outside but had never played it. We had all worked together in some capacity beforehand, but never in this particular quartet constellation; thus, a certain balance of compatibility and uncertainty was promised, both internally and with respect to the score.

 In addition to playing, I also resolved to integrate my own text. Although it had been my intention from the beginning of the project to use fragments of Treatise Handbook and other of Cardew’s texts on notation (1961; 1974), it became clear from my initial experiments with the collage that commenting vicariously on the discourse of the piece through the layering and temporal placement of Cardew’s words alone would not suffice. One solution was to splice original radio feature-style informative material with Cardew’s introductory text from a 1966 BBC radio broadcast of Treatise, such as you hear throughout the first twelve minutes. Another, which emerged as a proposal in post-production from producer Marcus Gammel, was to include informal descriptions of the visual appearance of the score. Translator and vocalist Kesten also recites such descriptions.

Dynamic Temporal Structure

Work with your hands on the material (the netting); don’t try and set up grammatical rules which you will only ignore in the next page. (Cardew 1971, 102)

As I briefly outlined in my description of Section I, the lifeline-circle narrative provided a cohesive way of selecting which pages of the score to realize.  It was also applied to the more detailed organization of source material, live ensemble, and texts. In Section II of A Treatise Remix (pp. 111-141; 17:12-41:40), for example, symbols define which layers of material are present and when.

• If a circle is present on a given page, then the live ensemble plays.
• If circles are absent, then a fragment from Treatise Handbook is recited by Schulkowsky (English) and/or Kesten (German).
• If the lifeline is intact on a given page, then the tape collage³⁰ sounds continuously.
• If the lifeline is broken or transformed, then “slices” (isolated and/or audibly edited fragments) of the tape collage are used.
• If the lifeline is absent, then no tape sounds.

These rules result in a contrapuntal ebb and flow between the layers. Hence on p. 111-113 (17:11-21:26) a continuous tape collage is heard, with text on p. 111 (17:17-17:38) and p. 112 (19:15-19:49). On p. 113 while the tape collage is sounding, the live ensemble plays. On p. 114, there is only text, and on p. 115-116 only live ensemble.

Crucially, this mapping did not define sounding results, but rather boundaries for situations in which I or the ensemble made context-dependent decisions. In this sense the ordering, density, and durations of source material in the continuous tape collage on p. 111-113 began as a completely open question. Because there were several recordings of these pages, three of which (FORMANEX, WhoThroughThen, Cardew BBC) were individually dense, I chose to leave time for different recordings to emerge without overcrowding one another, using the graphical elements to suggest rough changes of overall density and volume. Within this thick texture, the live ensemble was indicated to play p. 113; so as not to immediately lose our identity within the tape collage, we collectively decided to perform only the circles. Since there was no tape present on p. 113, it seemed wise to play all the symbols on that page, each performer choosing which ones to play and in which order – except the circles, which we played together on cue. An “improvised” secondary rule thus grew spontaneously out of a performative contingency: if a circle is present and the lifeline is intact on a given page, the live ensemble plays only the circles.

The meaning of the notation grew in constant feedback with the individual elements to which it referred in a variety of ways. The temporal structure (like Treatise itself) was not simply an a priori container to be filled with inert material – it was a dynamic, ad hoc creature that both emerged from and transformed the process of mixing the collage and working with musicians.

Another simple but significant case of this feedback was the inclusion of particular pages in Section II. They were chosen not only according to the line-circle dialectic, but also according to which pages were played in available recordings and those recordings’ mutual compatibility. Following my criterion to include only pages in which the line is compromised or transformed, circles play an important role, or both, Section II would have technically started at p. 113. However three of the five recordings that included material from these pages happened to begin on p. 111; they also contained vocal material, a useful way to bind the identity of the section. Thus I included pp. 111-112, despite the fact that they did not fit the original plan. For reasons of density described above, this section lasts for 4:15, an unexpectedly substantial part of Section II.

Before and after Section II, the form contains two intermezzi and four solos. The nature of these sections emerged quite late in the process of assembling A Treatise Remix; rather than forming part of a centralized plan, the sections themselves were also a consequence of negotiating material, form, and performer choice – a long-term improvisation also implicit in the page selection.

The intermezzi (I –12:13-15:37; II – 41:41-43:46) are played exclusively by the live ensemble, with no text or tape collage. Our interpretation of the notation in the intermezzi was more uniform and tightly choreographed than in Sections I and II, which are characterized by greater flexibility and individual timelines; each performer chose and prepared specific symbols à la VC. This precise interpretive strategy was arrived at collectively during rehearsals. Although the content is less “improvised” in the moment of performance than Sections I and II, the emergence of the approach, as well as the specific distribution of tasks on each page, represent a kind of organizational improvisation somewhere between my improvisation with the tape collage, and the ensemble’s performance in the studio.

In addition to playing our instruments, we play back samples of Treatise recordings whose pages fall outside the line-circle narrative, sounded through instruments of each player’s choice. Kesten used a CD player amplified through a tin bottle, Neumann used a digital recorder amplified by pickups on her self-designed inside-piano instrument, Schulkowsky used a noisy, semi-functional cassette recorder, and I used a hand-held radio tuned to a mini-FM transmitter. These instruments were selected completely ad hoc, and techniques for playback had to be learned during the rehearsal process. Our tenuous fumbling around for buttons combined with the thin, silly sounds of the playback come to define the intermezzi over and above our interpretation per se; the situation speaks louder than the structure.

For the four solos, each performer was invited to realize any page, completely independently of the master plan, according to any chosen interpretational strategy. These solos were later treated in the mixing process as wild cards, elements that could be dropped into the master plan where I wished. Kesten chose p. 140 (39:26-40:55), Neumann p. 158 (30:29-31:42, mixed among pp. 126-128 of the tape collage and live ensemble), Schulkowsky p. 73 (15:24-17:10), and I p. 141 (40:56-41:41). My page and interpretive approach were not selected until the end of the second day of the recording session, after the others had recorded theirs and the ensemble material was mostly finished. The choice was largely impulsive – I felt the need to play some “normal” notes on the bass to offset the predominantly quiet, noisy material of the previous pages. Playing an instrument and reciting text in a single take also seemed an appropriate way to offset the use of overdubbing throughout Section II. Ironically, this off-the-cuff response to conditions accumulated over the course of many months of research and tape collage assembly, a week of rehearsal with the ensemble, and two long days in the studio brought forth a light-hearted but fundamental insight:

Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve come to the heart of the piece. It’s called 141 … aaaaaaaaand there’s no lines or circles or anything like that. It’s … empty …

Conclusion

A musical score is a logical construct inserted into the mess of potential sounds that permeate this planet and its atmosphere. That puts Beethoven and the rest in perspective! (Cardew 1971, 108)

With this comment, we come full circle: in the end, does the arbitrary prevail? Is Treatise ultimately … empty? Had I limited my study to extant recordings and the discourse around the piece, I would have most certainly answered in the negative. So many provocative, and occasionally beautiful, recordings and discussions have arisen from the score that one can hardly deny its power, at the very least, to inspire. But I also experienced Treatise from the inside, and the fact is that my defining comment on this journey appeared to support the skepticism of Tilbury, Prévost, and Barrett which I questioned in the introduction. Frankly, hearing myself call an empty page the heart of the piece surprised me. What to make of this?

One can take my surprise itself as a measure of the score’s success. It serves as a prime example of Treatise’s ability to induce and test the performer’s commitment to reworking her methods and assumptions through the empirical contingencies of performance. I recall here Cardew’s point 2 from “Towards an Ethic of Improvisation”: “What we do in the actual event is important – not only what we have in mind. Often what we do is what tells us what we have in mind” (Cardew 1971, 132). In the process of realizing A Treatise Remix I not only learned the score of Treatise – I also relearned and perhaps even de-learned myself. In this vein, my use of the word “empty” should be retroactively qualified; Treatise’s semantic and material emptiness is insurmountable, but at the same time dynamic. Its internal richness sets us performers on a hunt, and its absence of ideological or sonic content routes that hunt right back to us. If we bring the content, rather than finding it along the way (the way being not only real-time performance, but all the preparatory and reflective labor with which it is continuous), the hunt ends before we reach ourselves. If however we accept the challenge to “give of [our] own music in response to [Cardew’s] music, which is the score itself” (Cardew 1971, 113) – as Tilbury, Prévost, and Barrett have done time and again in spite of their skepticism – performing has the potential to become “a voyage of ‘self-invention’” (Tilbury 2008, 236).

Gary Peters, in contradistinction to many improvisation scholars, has argued for the importance of the work in (free) improvised performance, and against assigning (inter)subjectivity undue weight: “The care for the work, one that overrides the more trivial concerns of intersubjectivity, is a care for the work’s beginning, not its end; as such, it will be ever ready to destroy the work in an attempt to preserve what Heidegger describes as the openness of that beginning” (2009, 51). In Treatise, the distinction is turned on its head; a voyage of self-discovery is neither incidental nor a telos in itself, but rather an ineluctable consequence of performing the piece with integrity, whatever that may mean for each performer. This may be the reason both for Treatise’s popularity and perpetual freshness, and for its emblematic status among notation for improvisers as a whole.

Notation is an invitation to collaborate.²¹

In the planning of communities a score visible to all the people allows each one of us to respond, to find our own input, to influence before decisions are made. Scoring makes the process visible.²²

Collectivity is almost universally recognized, and celebrated, as a cornerstone of improvised music. Group interaction onstage is itself a crucial feature for listeners; how materials and events emerge from socially situated actions and reactions between performers is often viewed as at least as important as the sounds and sound-forms that they produce (Monson 1996; Fischlin and Heble 2004; Haenisch 2011). The values that underlie and evolve through these interactions (MacDonald and Wilson 2005) can anchor communities that form around improvised music; the notion of improvisation as a “practice of conversing as equals” (Nicholls 2012, 114), in which difference is both interrogated and respected, has often been cited as an instantiation of and a model for self-determination and social change (Fischlin and Heble 2004; Lewis 2008; Prévost 2009; Born 2017).

Notation need not be a part of these models of collectivity per se. As anthropologist and former musician Georgina Born has argued,

there is perhaps something singular about improvisation in that improvised performances are marked by degrees of openness, mutuality and collaboration that are heightened and intensified when compared with the interpretation of scored works, and that necessitate participants’ real time co-creation and negotiation of social-and-musical relationships. From one perspective, then, such performances may become sites for empractising ways of ‘being differently in the world’ based on a ‘recognition that alternatives to orthodox practices are available’ (Fischlin and Heble, The Other Side of Nowhere 11). (Born 2017, 50)

Some scholars who emphasize the political dimension of improvisation, such as philosopher Tracey Nicholls, even suggest that notation is incompatible with true collectivity:

I want to highlight two ways in which improvisatory practices and principles of improvisation can be put into practice in a political context: we can affirm that we always have available to us the option of rejecting the preconceived instructions of a score or script; and we can commit ourselves to the practice of conversing as equals. Whatever its other limitations, improvisation is necessarily and integrally resistant to the perceived authority we attach to planning and tradition and this serves as a model for countering hegemony in all forms. In departing from composed scores, it stresses the principle that there is no one right way to do things. For this reason, improvisation can be a liberatory political model at least to the extent of showing that scores (understood here as performance instructions from those who hold power) need not be followed to their bitter end, that creative community-building strategies may be substituted in place of a (partially) determining text. (Nicholls 2012, 114)

Yet music by a number of improvisers who use notation does in fact privilege and make an essential feature of collectivity. All of the artists included in Tactile Paths, as well as others such as Anthony Braxton, Chris Burns, Barry Guy, George E. Lewis, Misha Mengelberg, Pauline Oliveros, Polwechsel, Wadada Leo Smith, and John Zorn, are among them. In this music, both the non-hierarchical interaction of the group and the practice of scoring enable musical experiences that are unthinkable through only one method or the other. Furthermore, some of these artists owe the development of their work in large part to their participation in formal collectives and tightly knit musical communities: Braxton, Lewis, and Smith are lifelong members of the Chicago-based AACM (see Lewis 2008); Cardew was a member of the seminal ensemble AMM and a founder of the Scratch Orchestra (see Cardew 1969); and Zorn remains an emblematic figure of the “downtown” NY scene which blossomed in the early 1980s (see Lewis 1996 and Brackett 2010). Empirically speaking, notation and the “liberatory political model” of improvisation do not seem fundamentally opposed to each other after all.

But the above statements by Born and Nicholls do raise important questions. What is the value of notation for collective improvisation, exactly? How does notation construct, destruct, deconstruct, or reconstruct improvisers’ relationships to each other? What does notation for improvisers say about collective improvisation in the world, about “the individual as a part of global humanity” (Lewis 1996, 110)?

I would like to offer a tentative, speculative response here based on the work of two artists and thinkers who have made the collective and political aspects of notation for improvisers a primary feature of their work: visionary American landscape architect Lawrence Halprin (1916-2009) and British composer-improviser Richard Barrett (1959). Putting together their statements at the heading of this chapter, along with others which I will address throughout this chapter, we have a simple but provocative hypothesis:

Score + Response = Collaboration = Liberation.

In the following text I will explore the particulars of this proposal in the context of their own work and see how it holds up.

Lawrence Halprin – RSVP Cycles

The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment (Halprin 1969) is somewhere between a theory, a manifesto, and a metascore for score-based collaboration by Lawrence Halprin. Though not listed as an author, his wife and collaborator Anna Halprin, reluctant godmother of the postmodern movement in dance, was also deeply involved in the publication – and remains, at age 96, an exponent of its principles (Worth and Poyner 2004). Due largely to the confluence of the Halprins’ backgrounds, the book is explicitly interdisciplinary in nature. As Liana Gergely has argued in her 2013 study of Anna Halprin’s historic dance piece Ceremony of Us (1969), the cycles’ processual nature makes them ostensibly applicable to any field. This is reflected in the diversity of its abundant exemplary material; this “outrageous and seductive scrapbook of cherished images” (Kupper 1971) contains “scores” ranging from Hopi petroglyphs and player piano rolls to American football plays and vegetation maps.

Here I would like to explore the model’s creative and theoretical relevance to notation for improvisers. My primary motivation for doing so is Lawrence Halprin’s focus on the collective element, which, as I claim above, is a basic facet of musical improvisation. But over and above this general connection, Halprin’s book resonates with Tactile Paths in not aiming to circumscribe notation from the outside; rather, in the vein of Patterson’s Variations for Double-Bass, it stimulates speculative reflection to be acted upon. As Halprin states, the “RSVP Cycles and the point of scoring are not meant to categorize or organize, but to free the creative process by making the process visible” (1969, 3). In my following exposition of the RSVP cycle, I will concentrate on those aspects of the model that bear out Halprin’s claim, with an eye on its applicability to a series of pieces by Richard Barrett entitled fOKT (2005).

Structure and Examples

According to Halprin, The RSVP Cycles²³ began “as an exploration of scores and the interrelationships between scoring in the various fields of art” (Halprin 1969, 1). However, reconsidering the importance of preparation and context for score production led Halprin ultimately to examine “nothing less than the creative process – what energizes it – how it functions – and how its universal aspects can have implications for all our fields” (2). The RSVP Cycles therefore do not model the practice of scoring per se, but rather the collaborative production and use of scores.

The model is based on four elements: Resources (R), Scores (S), Valuaction (V), and Performance (P):

Resources which are what you have to work with. These include human and physical resources and their motivation and aims.

Scores which describe the process leading to performance.

Valuaction which analyzes the results of action and possible selectivity and actions. The term “valuaction” is coined to suggest the action-oriented as well as the decision-oriented aspects of V in the cycle.

Performance which is the resultant of scores and is the “style of the process”.

Together I feel that these describe all the procedures inherent in the creative process. […] Together they form what I have called the RSVP Cycles. (Halprin 1969, 2)

The cycles in which the elements relate is represented by a circular diagram, which

operates in any direction and by overlapping. The cycle can start at any point and move in any direction. The sequence is completely variable depending on the situation, the scorer, and the intention. (Halprin 1969, 2)

Halprin offers a simple example by way of basic universal human needs. As most of his examples, they are not without problems (see my discussion of Bach and Amirkhanian below); nevertheless this particular example does serve my purpose of fleshing out the cycles’ atomic principles:

(R) Need for food → (P). Hunting. No score no art process.

(R) Need for food → (S) → (P). Hunting Ritual. Ritualize i.e., score (art process).

(R) Need for shelter → (P) House. No score no art process.

(R) Need for shelter → (S) → (P). House as architecture. (Halprin 1969, 193)

As one can see, what Halprin calls “scores” comprises a bewildering variety of texts. This can be confusing, but in fact there is a tie that binds. As architecture critic Kathleen John-Alder points out,

[a]ccording to Halprin, scores conveyed information that guided and controlled “the interactions between elements such as space, time, rhythm, sequence, people and their activities”. As such, they illustrated how to make or act at a particular moment or place. (John-Alder 2014, 58)

Differences between particular scores and their attendant creative processes are distinguished according to various factors: what elements of the cycle are present; the degree of overlap among them; where a given process begins; and its route through the diagram. Through these factors, the model makes visible what scores do – their effects on the whole creative process. For Halprin, an important consequence of visualizing scores’ behavior is the ability to identify whether scores “energize” processes, or “describe or control” them (191). He designates four common mapping types that reveal differences along these lines:

There are many interrelationships and weightings of the cycle but the major configurations are as follows: these describe the relationship during performance (P), not during the scoring itself or what has led up to the score.

Relationships during Performance

1. (S)→ (VPR): Closed score for complete control – score as vehicle – as precise as possible to accomplish a mission.
2. (S) → (R): No control during performance – score energizes
3. (PRS): Some control, very little feedback or selectivity during performance.
4. (R) ↔ (V) / (S) ↔ (P): Some: control, selectivity, feedback, change, growth (Halprin 1969, 192)

For artists and scholars working with notation for improvisers, these “major configurations” are extremely promising in themselves. They offer a gradated view of prescription and preservation, as well as a view of what lies beyond the work. Unfortunately, however, Halprin’s musical applications of this typology – and the cycle as a whole – are extremely problematic, if not to say glib. Halprin’s concept of scoring is highly sophisticated, but he seems to be out of his depth when it comes to practice. This becomes clear in his discussion of Paul Klee’s graphic interpretation of an uncited passage by J.S. Bach:

The Bach notation is as precise and controlling as he could make it, what was left for the performer was a matter of technique and interpretation. […] Bach reaches out over the centuries to our time and prefigures what should happen with intricate precision. Basically no interaction is possible – the performer plays what is there with a greater or lesser degree of talent – he is a technician rather than an artist, a medium rather than a contributor. (Halprin 1969, 12)

It hardly seems necessary to point out the holes in this assessment, but let me a list a few for the sake of argument. First, Halprin ignores the role of history; neither changes to the score through centuries of editing (particularly Klee’s own renotation) nor the improvisatory aspects of baroque performance practice such as ornamentation are taken into account. Second, he imposes a modern work-based view of the score (i.e. as a transparent representation of the composer’s intentions) onto a practice which existed over a hundred years before this model even appeared (see Goehr 1992). Third, he erases the agency of the performer entirely, comparing her to the mechanism of a player piano: “The ultimate development of this kind of controlling musical score in which the performer is a medium, is the punched rolls used in player pianos” (13). In fact, he maps both the Bach and player piano examples identically as (S) → (VPR): “controlling”. How can Halprin’s reading account for the fact that Bach’s music was partly copied by his wife, Anna Magdalena Bach? Or for wide differences between performances of the Bach cello suites by – as just an example – Pablo Casals, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Anner Bylsma? Needless to say, this is not a fair representation of Bach’s score or its performance.

His discussion of Serenade II Janice Wentworth (Halprin 1969, 14-15), a series of graphic scores for indeterminate performer (musical or otherwise) by composer Charles Amirkhanian, is only slightly less problematic. “The scores indicate,” according to Halprin, “how the new music has influenced the scoring technique, and the score itself has responded to the requirements of the music as an open environmental event” (14). This description is justified by Amirkhanian’s subsequent list of possible interpretations by a percussionist, a painter, or a theatrical director; all performers use the score’s unexplained symbols as stimuli to unprescribed actions within the framework of their respective tools and skill sets. Halprin contrasts this “openness” to Bach, but rather incongruously maps Serenade as (S) → (P): “energizing”. Energize it does, but where is the (V) of the performers’ fundamental decisions regarding the score’s indeterminate aspects? Valuaction seems to be the crux of his distinction between the two musical examples, but it is not articulated.

In both of these cases, Halprin sells his cycle short. He only considers what the score itself denotes – from an underinformed point of view, at that – and not the life of the score in the world that his own model makes visible. For example, his application of the same mapping type to Bach and Labanotation (a choreographic scoring system used in ballet and modern dance, 40) obscures the fact that the latter is used to record pieces after they are composed and performed, whereas the former is a medium of communication with the performer before performance. One objectively transcribes, the other subjectively inscribes. Halprin’s own diagram has the potential to show this difference: he would simply need to trace a longer trajectory through the circle such as (R) → (P) ↔ (V) → (S) for the first performance of a choreography and its transcription into Labanotation, then (S) → (V) → (P) for subsequent performances. In the case of Bach, he might have included feedback between (V) and (R) to show that the performer is also in dialogue with the resources of performance practice, instrumental technique, and the perpetually evolving identities of the works that the score (partially) represents.

In a similar way, the reductive examples of the Bach and Amirkhanian scores forego opportunities to highlight surprising similarities between them. Going past the first iteration of the cycle – a single hypothetical performance – might show, for instance, that repeated performances of Bach (P) constitute a personal history with the piece (R) that a performer may consciously vary or improve (V) over time. Such change would reflect an opening in the process of interpretation, which Amirkhanian’s score shares. This oversight is all the more surprising given Halprin’s repeated emphasis on the temporal process: “The element of time,” he says, “is always present in scores. Scores are not static; they extend over time” (190).

Halprin’s (non)mapping of improvisation also begs for revision. Many of the scores he discusses involve improvisation overtly in some capacity (e.g. an Allan Kaprow Happening (30) or Anna Halprin’s dance piece Ceremony of Us (200)). However, Halprin seems not to identify them as improvisatory, reducing improvising to a monad, (P):

[I]t is important for anyone working with the cycle to understand where he is concentrating and which parts are operating. If, for instance, you jump immediately to Performance (P), you are improvising. There are times when improvisation, for example, or spontaneous responses are vital to the release of creative energies which might remain locked up otherwise. But these energies can often fruitfully lead back into the rest of the cycle or remain isolated for their own sake. (Halprin 1969, 3)

Here again he occludes the potential of the cycle by not examining his object in critical detail; he defaults to a romantic notion of improvisation rooted in an aesthetics of spontaneity and inwardness (see Sancho-Velásquez 1999, 32-35). Nowhere does he mention how improvisation might arise from negotiating (R), (S), (V), or from feedback among them. More strangely, given the collaborative foundation for the whole RSVP model, he locates improvisation at the level of the individual rather than the group. His portrayal bears an uncanny resemblance to a view of improvisation criticized elsewhere in detail by Bruno Nettl:

Specifically or implicitly accepted in all the general discussions [of improvisation] is the suddenness of the creative impulse. The improviser makes unpremeditated, spur-of-the-moment decisions, and because they are not thought out, their individual importance, if not of their collective significance, is sometimes denied. (Nettl 1974, 3)

In sum, Halprin’s analyses of music – and of others’ work in general – tend not to do justice to his model. But all is not lost.

The Sea Ranch

One gets a much richer sense of the potential of the cycles from the documentation of Halprin’s own collaborative projects, in which the entire R-S-V-P sequence is consciously deployed as a creative method. An excellent example is The Sea Ranch (Halprin 1969, 122-155), an ecological planned community in northern California, whose masterplan Halprin oversaw in the early 1960s. Although Halprin does not map the project’s evolution explicitly onto the RSVP Cycle, his annotated photos, scores, and allusions to the cycle in particular stages make it possible, with the help of secondary literature on the project, for others to infer its workings.

I will now unpack this robust example of the cycle in order to offer the reader a more charitable view of the dynamics of Halprin’s model. In addition to illuminating the structure of the model, I hope my explanation supports Halprin’s claim that the book itself is a score (Halprin 1969, “Acknowledgements”), and “[f]or a score to function the participants in a score must exhibit a commitment to the idea of scoring and be willing to ‘go with’ the specific score” (190). In other words, rather than apply the model as a finished, self-contained system, I will improvise with it in an attempt at a temporally distributed theoretical collaboration.

For purposes of structural clarity, I will proceed in outline form rather than in narrative prose.

1. Resources

• Commission by owners and developers: “Oceanic Properties, a subsidiary of the Hawaiian developer Castle & Cook, selected Halprin to oversee the master plan for a second-home community” (John-Alder 2014, 55).
• Team included cultural geographer Richard Reynolds (John-Alder 2014, 55); San Francisco Bay Area-based architect Joseph Esherick; Berkeley-based architecture firm Moore Lyndon Turnbull Whitaker (Canty 2004, 23); and “a then unprecedented wide range of disciplines: foresters, grasslands advisors, engineers, attorneys, hydrologists, climatologists, geologists, geographers, and public relations and marketing people” (Canty 2004, 23).
• Natural conditions of the site: undeveloped coastal land 120 miles north of San Francisco near the San Andreas fault; cool, damp, windy climate; active ocean; rolling meadows; patches of redwood forest.
• Historical conditions of the site: “The specific character of the landscape Oceanic purchased was the result not only of geological forces, […] but of decades of farming, ranching, and lumbering. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there had been selective clearing for timber, hedgerows had been planted to protect livestock from the wind, and the meandering State Highway 1 was constructed stretching along the base of the range.” (Lyndon and Alinder 2004, 19)
• Inspiration by local architecture, especially “timber framing of local barns” along the Coast Highway (Lyndon 2009, 84).
• Explicit wish to work with ecological scoring (Halprin 1969, 117).
• Explicit wish to create “‘an opportunity for people to form a community.’ His thinking about The Sea Ranch was influenced by his experience in a Kibbutz.” (Canty 2004, 25)
• A “feeling that this area could be a prototype of how man could plan development with nature rather than ignore her” (Halprin 1969, 117).

2. Performance

• Site study: “A year of careful ecological studies revealed a great deal about the land that was not apparent from the start” (Halprin 1969, 117-118).
• Reynolds measured wind and other meteorological conditions of area (John-Alder 2014, 55).
• “Up in the woods forestry practice was studied at length” (Halprin 1969, 118).

3. Scores

• Representations of (P) such as:
• Vegetation and soil (Halprin 1969, 125).
• Topography and drainage (126).
• Wind deflection (127).
• Bioclimactic needs (128).
• Radiation impact (128).
• “A careful logging program” and “a carefully organized program of controlled burns” to rehabilitate the nearby redwood forests (118).

4. Valuaction → Resources

• Discussion of discoveries in (S) – that which was “not apparent from the start” (Halprin 1969, 117-118). This led to
• “Resource analysis” (Halprin 1969, 124) – reevaluation of (R) before proceeding with development planning.
• Example: “the cool, damp climate was outside the human comfort zone. The data also indicated that wind was the most easily controlled climate variable” (John-Alder 2014, 56).

5. Scores (↔ Resources) → Valuaction

• “Thematic early scores” (Halprin 1969, 130): development sketches (130-131).
• Visual descriptions of architectural principles to cope with wind and dampness: slanted roofs, placing buildings adjacent to hedgerows (135).
• Visual descriptions of urban planning principles to foster community living: condominiums and clustered housing (141).
• Primary purpose NOT to prescribe unilateral action (as blueprint) and preserve instrumental data about the environment for construction.
• RATHER to provide points for discussion among collaborators about how to integrate the development with the environment as a whole: “Taking particular elements and scoring alternatives as test runs to disclose options and allow for valuaction and selectivity to operate” (124).
• Contains questions regarding (R): “Stable of archt’s? – no review of aesthetics – archt’s to do their own ‘thing’. Materials?” (130)
• John-Alder:

Scores, defined as a “system of symbols”, energized the process. […] Halprin also used scores to investigate alternative design scenarios. In other words, he was again directing his colleagues to look at processes of formation for design inspiration. But unlike his earlier natural history directives, with their emphasis upon the physical mechanics of geology and physiology, this time Halprin promoted a set of generative parameters that intermingled people, their actions, and their chance encounters with natural processes, their actions, and their chance events. (John-Alder 2014, 58)

6. Valuaction ↔ Scores

• “Concept Alternatives” (Halprin 1969, 132): a grid mapping the aesthetic, social, and structural aspects of various building options, for discussion.
• “Followed hard on the heels of thematic scores and made selections between various alternatives based on values and congruence with motivations. Feedback between V and scores was continuous during this period” (124).
• Not only filtered scores for implementation in performance, but also catalyzed new scores.

7a. Scores → Valuaction

• “Location score” (Halprin 1969, 132), featuring urban policy proposals, “establishes major ‘lines of action’ for performers to follow” (138). Would later, after subsequent iterations of (V), be used as the basis for actual construction plans submitted to the property owners (141).
• Same time phase as 7b.

7b. Scores → Resources

• Drafts for  ecoscore (Halprin 1969, 122-123):

The procedure began with sketches that established geologic time as the baseline metric for change. This was paired with a chart that catalogued human interaction with the land. Information included the ethnographic observations and bioclimatic analyses done by Reynolds, the development of these observations into built form, and the economic imperatives driving second home development and real-estate sales (figure 16). The next drawing organized this information into a series of parallel chronologies, or subsystems that tracked changes in geology, vegetation, and land use activity (figure 17). The final iteration, which is the ecoscore in The RSVP Cycles, transformed the parallel trajectories into a single, multi-dimensional spiral consisting of temporally distinct, but spatially overlapping rhythms. In this hypothetical landscape, layers of time and process fold back around and become a recursive feedback loop that links land use to its environmental impact. (John-Alder 2014, 28)

• Did not lead to (P), i.e. construction, but rather looped back to (R):

The ecoscore is a description of processes leading to the inventory items (R) analyzed as the basis for planning. It should of course be clear that an ecoscore does not stop at a particular point in time, but is continuously evolving. (Halprin 1969, 124)

• Reflective tool for future consideration.

8. Performance

• “Ground was broken in 1964 for three demonstration projects: a ten-unit condominium by MLTW, who prepared a plan for eleven more to be strung along the south shore of the site; a set of six ‘Hedgerow Houses’ by Esherick in a meadow; and a store near the condominium, also by Esherick.” (Canty 2004, 25)
• Construction of first phase of development.

9. Resources ↔ Valuaction

• Construction (P) led to salable product (R).
• Unexpectedly high demand: “The place took on a special cachet. Oceanic had helped to sell one hundred lots the first year but met its goal in just over eight months.” (Canty 2004, 29).
• Tension between Halprin’s scores and owners’ commercial goals:

In some respects, the growing pains of success proved a challenge. The original planning principles proved surprisingly fragile. After just five years of construction, Halprin complained that houses going up in 1969 were being “scattered” on the meadows rather than clustered along the hedgerows. Moreover, houses were being built in the front rows of shore front and forest, areas where they were forbidden by the plan. […] In part, such departures from the plan resulted from a virtual revolt by the real estate agents of Castle & Cook. They objected to not being able to market the most desirable home sites and claimed that condominium units and cluster housing were difficult to sell. (Canty 2004, 29)

10. Performance ↔ Valuaction

• “Oceanic dismissed Halprin and the original architects in the late 1960s.” (Canty 2004, 29)
• Corporate allies also left:

Boeke [vice-president of Oceanic] himself left at year’s end 1969, and one of Oceanic’s real estate agents took his place. […] Few were left in the company who cared about The Sea Ranch, and an agent was sent over to arrange Oceanic’s phased withdrawal from the project. (Canty 2004, 29)

• Subsequent developments did not reflect principles of Halprin, his collaborators, and their scores.
• Halprin reflects on demise:

Unfortunately, later performance has lost track of the intent of the score and many performers have not “gone with” the agreed upon score. […] It is significant to analyze why the score was violated as a guide to future work in scoring. I have been told that the score was too open and should have been more closed an therefore controlling. I do not agree. I do not feel that any score is too open. I feel that I overlooked several characteristics of scoring, principally:

1. The score was not visible enough to everyone involved.

2. Some of the score was kept secret because it was not completely agreed upon by management. For example, public access to beaches and the idea of varied income. This did not really turn out to be a balanced community in terms of income levels, which is what it was intended to be.

3. All the principles of the score were not understood thoroughly. For example, the notion of tight-housing clusters of various configurations was not really visualized by the sales force.

4. Early sales management groups were disbanded, and the second wave had not been involved in the score and subsequently did not really understand it.

5. Short-range economic goals were allowed to override long-term goals. (Halprin 1969, 146)

Explanatory Potential for Notation for Improvisers

What can we learn about scores and collective improvisation from the example of The Sea Ranch? What does it tell us about the relevance of the RSVP cycles to notation for improvisers?

First and foremost, scores are but a single factor in collective environments; Halprin’s model is ecological. By this I do not mean (only) that it concerns itself with the natural environment. Rather, I mean that the cycle situates its four elements in a non-hierarchical environment where their unpredictable mutual influence is made visible. Following improvisation scholars David Borgo (n.d.) and Marcel Cobussen (2016), I believe the ecological perspective to be fruitful for the study of improvised music in general because of the way in which it foregrounds the simultaneous action and perception of musicians with instruments, each other, physical and social spaces, and many other “actors, factors, and vectors” (Cobussen, Frisk, and Weijland 2010). Borgo:

When viewed ecologically, cognition is best understood as a process co-constituted by the cognizing agent, the environment in which cognition occurs, and the activity in which the agent is participating: action, perception, and world are dynamically coupled. In this light, improvisation may be seen as a cyclical and dynamic process, with no non-arbitrary start, finish, or discrete steps (i.e., it is not a token of a compositional megatype). The improviser and the environment co-evolve; they are non-linearly coupled and together they constitute a non decomposable system. (Borgo n.d., 10)

An ecological approach is suited to scores for improvisers because it shows their participation within this co-evolution, rather than their prescription or preservation of it from the outside. We must not begin at (S) and proceed directly to (P) – with an optional path through (V), interpretation and rehearsal – as would be suggested by some linear models of notation and performance (Boulez 1990, 87; Nattiez 1990, 17). The cycle may start anywhere and move in any direction; thus it accommodates how notation emerges and feeds back on ongoing improvisational practices (see “Entextualization and Preparation in Patterson’s Variations for Double-Bass“); how it changes and is changed through use (see “A Treatise Remix Handbook”); and its growth over longer periods of time – what precedes and follows an initial inscription and single performances (see the Bach example above).

A second related point is that scores and collectives are mutually influential, but ultimately independent of one another. On a positive note, the collaborative aspect of work is present in the model even when the participants, such as a composer of written texts and an instrumental performer, do not work together personally. The cycle can be shared and distributed among many parties over time and space, and the continuity and contingency of the work-as-verb is still manifest – whether this occurs between J.S. Bach, Anna Magdalena Bach, and Pablo Casals; or between Halprin, Barrett, and me. However this point reveals a potentially problematic side to notation for collective improvisation. As we see in point (10) of my mapping of The Sea Ranch project, collectives and scores tend to evolve on their own terms, and neither one can sustain the other. Group personnel, performance practices, and interest in particular scores inevitably drift; scores may only make sense in a particular constellation, or lose value after having been played only once. If a given project is inherently temporary – as in the case of Richard Barrett’s fOKT series – this may not be a problem, and even an asset. But as in the case of The Sea Ranch, the sustainability of ambitious long-term projects may be compromised or crippled by the very contingency that animates them.

A third relevant aspect of Halprin’s model is the (V) element, valuaction, “which analyzes the results of action and possible selectivity and actions. The term ‘valuaction’ is coined to suggest the action-oriented as well as the decision-oriented aspects of V in the cycle” (Halprin 1969, 2). It “incorporates change based on feedback and selectivity, including decisions” (191).

What might valuaction mean in the context of notation for improvisers? On the one hand, it may surface in processes of criticism, revision, and verbal negotiation among collaborators as we see in The Sea Ranch project. Ideas are inventoried; a score is produced; it is discussed and edited (V); fundamental assumptions and materials are reconsidered; the score is revised; the project is performed; the results are discussed again (V); and perhaps they lead to subsequent scores and performances. This is very much the case in A Treatise Remix: I studied the score of Treatise and its performance history; collected recordings and edited them into a collage; presented my collage and ideas about the score to my collaborators; discussed, rehearsed, and revised my plans with them (V); performed with them in the studio; made adjustments to the plan in the studio according to the input of my producer and sound engineer (V); assembled the live recordings with the collage in sometimes unpredictable ways; added unplanned material and erased planned material; and then returned to the studio for the final mix. This sense of valuaction is, in fact, nothing special; it inheres to virtually any workflow that admits even a modicum of change and diversity.

But valuaction can also take the form of nonverbal reflection in practice, experimentation, and rehearsal. In this context it has a strong affinity to guitarist and artistic researcher Stefan Östersjö’s notion of “thinking-through-practice” (Östersjö 2008, 77), which he develops as an alternative to the notion of performative interpretation:

It involves the physical interaction between a performer and his or her instrument and the inner listening of the composer; both of which are modes of thinking that do not require verbal ‘translation’. Instead they function through the ecological system of auditory perception. […] thinking-through-practice is an interpretative process that makes up an important part of the preparatory work leading up to a performance. And it is a process of validation that goes on also in the performance itself. (Östersjö 2008, 77-78)

Östersjö’s last point – that thinking-through-performance, or nonverbal valuaction, can continue into the performance itself – is especially significant to improvisation, where evaluation-and-action during the course of performance are not only possible, but mandatory to the performance’s very continuation. The musician hears as she plays as she hears, but this is not an unmediated flow; she might make mistakes, she interacts with one sound or player and not another, she feels ambivalence about when to end or not. These are all instances of evaluations that lead to action, and they are inherent to the activity of the improviser during performance. That Halprin’s model gives (V) the same hypothetical importance as all the other elements in the cycle underlines its proximity to the practice of improvised music.

Fourth, the model is based on activity and artifacts rather than on the functions of particular actors; identities shift with and/or emerge from the process. This is useful in the context of notation for improvisers because categorical distinctions between composers, improvisers, and interpreters are bypassed. As we see throughout Tactile Paths, such traditional divisions of labor can be difficult to establish in this music because composition, improvisation, and interpretation are often carried out by one and the same person or people (see Ben Patterson’s Variations for Double-Bass or Bob Ostertag’s Say No More). Even when these activities are carried out by separate subjects – as for example in Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise (1967) or my Apples Are Basic (2008), where the composer notates and others play – the actual work of composing and performing overlaps considerably; the practice of improvisation occupies a space between them. As I show throughout the dissertation, following experimental musician and scholar George E. Lewis,

[c]reating compositions for improvisers (again, rather than a work which “incorporates” improvisation) is part of many an improviser’s personal direction. The work of Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, and Misha Mengelberg provide examples of work that retains formal coherence while allowing aspects of the composition to interact with the extended interpretation that improvisers must do – thus reaffirming a role for the personality of the improviser-performers within the work. (Lewis 1996, 113)

The cycle thus allows us to focus on workflows unique to particular projects or performances. It not only generically frees us from problematic conceptual binaries, but also provides a view of what specifically emerges in its place on a case by case basis.

This aspect of Halprin’s model may have had its roots in the social structure of his profession. As a landscape architect, Halprin would never – indeed could never – have operated as solitary author, or considered his collaborators as executants. He was constantly required to negotiate with other architects, investors, politicians, urban planners, climatologists, geographers, engineers, contractors, and (sometimes) even ordinary citizens, and his work changed drastically in the process. We remember that, for better or worse, the RSVP cycle bound him with The Sea Ranch architects, engineers, planners, et al in a dynamic process together.

Indeed this brings us to the political heart of the model. By making visible the creative process itself, rather than a chain of command, Halprin proposed to subvert the top-down decision making behind product-oriented thinking, which consolidates power and dehumanizes end users – in his case, communities who inhabit planned urban environments:

If the scorer develops a closed, completely precise score, he then assumes complete responsibility. In the newer “open” scoring, members of the audience as well as performers often participate in performances. As a result, they need to recognize that in these instances responsibility is shared by them. The new scoring needs to be as visible as possible so as to scatter power, destroy secrecy, and involve everyone in the process of evolving their own communities. […]

A community has the right to make scoring decisions itself, based on its own understanding of the implications of action. The implication of this method of approaching planning through multivariable scoring systems is not to abrogate authority or decision-making in deference to chaos, or to avoid responsibility by making everyone responsible. What it proposes is a scoring process related to parts of the “systems approach” in operational research where all the parts and participants, in the search for solutions to particular problems, have equal validity and strength in arriving at decisions. It is on this approach rather than a hierarchical structure of planning that the new scoring technique bases itself. (Halprin 1969, 175)

Ironically, Halprin’s very faith in the transformative power of “the newer ‘open’ scoring” (175) – particularly that of his own model – reveals its Achilles’ heel. While the RSVP cycle privileges collective dynamics over a top-down chain of command, it also fails to represent the fact that not all participants necessarily have an equal say in the process. Halprin’s dismissal from The Sea Ranch project by managers at Oceanic brings this point home bitterly.²⁴ The owners’ unilateral abandonment of the development’s founding ecological principles reminds us that nominal collectivity in notation is no guarantee of symmetrical power relationships or real collaboration.²⁵ Even if the score had been more visible to Oceanic, as Halprin wished in his last valuaction (1969, 146), it is unlikely that The Sea Ranch’s corporate owners would have held the score’s principles in higher esteem than their own bottom line.

Though The Sea Ranch was in many ways a successful and artistically groundbreaking project, Halprin’s liberatory model of notation, and my proposal at the beginning of this chapter seems in this case to have failed.²⁶ Returning to the proposal with which I began this chapter,

Score + Response = Collaboration ≠ Liberation.

As ever, one must look beyond notation to the contingent particulars of its use. Apropos, let us now turn to the music of Richard Barrett, and explore his concrete use of notation for improvisers in the framework of the RSVP cycles.

Richard Barrett

A brief introduction to Barrett’s unique artistic trajectory will help us situate his work. In contrast to many artists working with notation for improvisers, Barrett has been active at the extremes of “straight” new music and experimental improvised music for most of his career. His catalog of through-composed chamber, orchestral, and electronic music includes over 120 pieces; they have been played by some of the most prestigious soloists and ensembles in the field. Since the mid-1980s, he has also frequently performed as an improviser on electronics. Of particular importance in this vein have been his long-term collaboration with Paul Obermayer in the duo FURT and his work with the Evan Parker Electroacoustic Ensemble. Recent performances and recordings in trio with violinist Jon Rose and contrabassist Meinrad Kneer, and in the Belgrade-based collective Studio6, round out the picture.

His work in both areas shares many aesthetic traits: rhythmic irregularity and hyperactivity; dense, intricate textures; constant shifts of pacing and perspective; and precise, jagged formal architectures. However, until the late 1990s his public activities as a “composer” and as an “improviser”²⁷ were surprisingly discontinuous, if not to say mutually exclusive. On the one hand, his through-composed music from this time employs elaborate conventional notation, noteworthy for its rhythmic and timbral complexity and technical virtuosity. The scores’ high information content indexes Barrett’s use of post-serial mathematical and scientific models that often affect every parameter of musical expression. Superimposed indications relating to timbre, articulation, dynamics, rhythm, and gesture sometimes contradict each other, producing “ambiguities, imperfections, contradictions, and so on, which constitute what might be called the ‘poetry’ of notation” (Barrett 2002b). One may surmise that notation is essential to the creative process in these pieces both for the structural precision it enables at the compositional level and for its unpredictable effects on performance.

On the other hand, his trajectory as an improviser through the end of the 1990s seems to have been marked by a commitment to the radical contingencies of that medium: the situatedness of the moment, for which no additional notation or articulated plan is necessary. Barrett:

I would characterise what has become called ‘free improvisation’, or ‘non-idiomatic improvisation’ (to use Derek Bailey’s formulation), as a method of musical creation in which the framework itself is brought into being at the time of performance, rather than existing in advance of it. […] The possibility of improvising the structural-expressive framework of a piece of music comes into being, I think, as a direct consequence of the realisation that any sound may be combined with any other sound in a musical context. After this point, there is no further need to create or inherit the framework in advance of making the music – although of course there may be a desire to do so, for many possible reasons. (Barrett 2014, 2)

Barrett hastens to note that in his view the spontaneous emergence and re-working of improvised music’s structural-expressive framework in performance does not “just happen” (2002b). As do most contemporary improvisation scholars, he qualifies this immediacy by stating that it “depends to a crucial extent on external and internal conditions” such as tradition (Barrett 2002b). Although Barrett, pace guitarist Derek Bailey (1993, 83), distinguishes free improvisation from improvisation within “fixed and/or pre-existent framework[s]” (2014, 62) such as baroque music or jazz, in fact Barrett’s improvisational trajectory has centered on a rich microtradition of its own in FURT. Over the course of several years of working together, the duo has evolved not only a “group sound” in the general sense, but also a tightly coupled way of working reflected in shared tools²⁸ and sample libraries. Barrett and Obermayer:

We tend to think of FURT as one person rather than two; while our musical preferences and activities outside the duo don’t coincide precisely (though almost), in a FURT context they do, so that for the most part disagreements don’t occur. One of its most important aspects is that it encourages both of us to think in terms of more extreme ideas, or solutions to musical issues, than we would do individually or in playing with others. […] We mix our performances from the stage, and fiddle around with each other’s output levels without bothering to ask. Synchronisation is one of those things which takes its course; both of us deciding simultaneously to do something, or to change something, or to stop something, can be taken for granted as an outgrowth of the general symbiotic situation which obtains in a FURT performance. (Barrett and Obermayer 2000)²⁹

Thus, one may gather that, in the era before he worked with notation for improvisers, Barrett’s moment-centered view of the structural-expressive framework of improvisation included collaborative relationships developed over time.

Barrett’s Notation for Improvisers

With transmission IV (1999), the fourth of six movements for solo stereo electric guitar and electronics, these two strands of Barrett’s musical life began to intertwine on the page. The score looks much like its through-composed antecedents, with one major exception: between the densely notated fragments, the guitarist may improvise.

The lacunae may be occupied by silence and/or improvisation. Improvisations may or may not be extrapolated from the notated material (or the notated or improvisational playing of the other performer, or even material from outside the work, though the latter option should be approached with the utmost care and sensitivity), and are completely free with respect to timbre, dynamic and so forth. (Barrett 1999, introductory notes)

In an essay on CONSTRUCTION (2011), a cycle of pieces that contain strategies similar to those explored in transmission IV,³⁰ Barrett locates the origins of his engagement with notation for improvisers in a profound experience of performing Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning (1972). Cardew’s mammoth verbally notated work, based on texts by Confucius, was written for the Scratch Orchestra,

an experiment in collective musical creativity of which Cardew was a founder member and whose aesthetic identity was to a great extent defined by The Great Learning. This work consists of seven paragraphs corresponding to the division of the original text, and the longest of these is Paragraph 5 […]. The second half of Paragraph 5 is a free improvisation […].

Something that stuck in my mind about this experience was the way that this improvisation, despite being in many different senses “anarchic”, was somehow informed and imbued with particular qualities by the actions which preceded it, and by their disciplined nature, without Cardew having had to say anything in the score about how the performers should approach it. […] This seemed to me, as it no doubt seemed to Cornelius Cardew, to be trying to say something about how a society in balance with itself might become self-organised, so that the idea had resonances far beyond addressing the relationship between improvisation and preparation in narrowly musical terms. (Barrett 2011)

Barrett’s turn to notation for improvisers was thus motivated not only by technical or aesthetic concerns, but also by political ones. The social relationships within collective music making – what Born calls the “microsociality” of performance (2016, 52) – were the crux of that turn. Barrett aimed for contingent performer choice not merely to shape the musical structure, but to co-constitute it:

a composition will have clarity without being defined in advance to the point of giving instructions to performers, instead providing the performer with a precisely imagined common point of departure and thereafter leaving them to use their imagination and responsibility. (Barrett 2011, 1)

Regarding this point, we see a number of clear connections to Halprin’s motivation for developing the RSVP cycles. Both Barrett and Halprin take pains to distinguish their views from chaos and anarchy; both emphasize the responsibility of participants; and both caution against the destructive potential of determining results in advance of the process. In many ways, their ideas on the nature and power of notation in collective creativity fit hand in glove.

Nevertheless, their deliveries differ. The RSVP Cycles is saturated in the idealism of 1960s San Francisco counterculture, and the communalism that Halprin sought to bring to The Sea Ranch from his experience on a Kibbutz. A close parallel can be found in the work of designer, systems theorist, and fellow “hippie modernist” (Castillo 2015) Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983). By contrast, Barrett’s edgier approach bespeaks his coming of age in – and overt resistance to – the repressive conservatism of what Derek Bailey has called the “Thatcher Winter” (Bailey 1987), during which many of the UK’s public services and cultural funds were systematically dismantled.³¹ Such connections are hard to miss in Barrett’s head-on critiques of the musical culture in which the microsociality of his music is embedded. The following conclusion of an essay on Blattwerk (2002a) is, for its frankness on this subject, worth citing in its entirety:

Finally I would like to return to my reasons for wanting to explore regions beyond the purview of the 20th century composer/performer relationship. My reasoning could be summarised as follows:

(1) My personal experience of listening to contemporary music is that, with few exceptions, the art of composition, as it is “understood” by the institutions which purportedly exist to promote and nurture it, is moribund in comparison with what is being achieved and developed in the context of improvisation.

(2) I believe this exhaustion in the world of composition has straightforwardly political roots in the way that the accepted social model of this art mirrors the structure of the society which generates it, that is to say, it is characterised by dehumanising economic/power relations. It is therefore no wonder that composers (to name only these) seem to have only two choices before them: to capitulate to commercial interests and become small-business entrepreneurs in the music industry, or to turn inwards, towards a “group-solipsism” where they and their peers can convince each other that their creative impoverishment is actually something vital and significant. I feel it is necessary to reject both of these standpoints as different forms of fin-de-siècle pessimism, neither of which can produce a visionary art worthy of the potential of human imagination and intelligence.

(3) Nevertheless, there is nowhere else to go; and, as I hope to have made clear, I believe that the art of composition in the widest sense is not exhausted. Most of the work I have done in recent years has had as a fundamental motivation a search for ways to “make it work”, in the context of various collaborative and collective musical activities. This isn’t the place to enumerate these activities, nor is it yet the time, at least for me, to assess them. For the present I would merely like to suggest that Blattwerk is intended to take its place in this process, or at least in defining some potential directions it might take. Every musical score embodies a question, to be answered by its performer(s). (Most composers seem only interested in receiving the answer YES.) What I am trying to do here is put that question in the musical foreground, in the hope that when the performer makes his/her music in response to it, some opening-out of the imagination comes into being which might not have occurred in other circumstances, and in the hope that this process communicates itself to activate the imagination of the listener. This may seem like a tall order; but in the words of Edward Bond, “clutching at straws is the only realistic thing to do.” (Barrett 2002b)

Despite the overall acrimony of this text, Barrett presents a ray of hope in point (3) that brings us back to the proposal I outlined in the introduction to this chapter: “a question, to be answered by its performer(s)” – an invitation to collaborate on something in particular. By conditioning the open-ended processes in his notation for improvisers with a “precisely imagined common point of departure” (Barrett 2011, 1), or “seeding” them (see Barrett 2014), he goes a step further than clutching at straws. He takes responsibility for his authorship – making his own position visible – and addresses what I consider to be the major problem with the RSVP cycles: its failure to represent power relationships.

On that note, we now turn to a case study for a new proposal:

Invitation + Question + Response = Collaboration = Liberation (?)

FURT, fORCH, fOKT

1. (R)

The first three installments of  fOKT (2005) were written for a bespoke ensemble of eight improvisers entitled fORCH.³² The genealogical origin of the project can be traced to FURT, Barrett’s electronics duo with Obermayer:

fORCH was initially formed, at the invitation of Reinhard Kager,³³ for the 2005 New Jazz Meeting of the SWR (South West German Radio), which consisted of a week of intensive rehearsing and recording followed by four concerts. […] Expanding FURT into a new kind of “orchestra” (hence the name fORCH) had been an objective for many years, and the SWR project created an opportunity to establish such an ensemble, in which the electronic duo was combined with vocalists and instrumentalists, all leading players in the world of improvised and experimental music who have developed their own unprecedented sounds and techniques. (Barrett and Obermayer 2009)

The players chosen for the SWR event – which included four concerts in Baden-Baden, Karlsruhe, Basel, and Stuttgart – were John Butcher (saxophones), Rhodri Davies (harps), Wolfgang Mitterer (prepared piano), Paul Lovens (percussion), Phil Minton (voice), Ute Wassermann (voice), Richard Barrett (electronics), and Paul Obermayer (electronics). As Barrett and Obermayer note, all of these musicians were experienced improvisers; two of them, Lovens and Minton, had rarely worked with notation.³⁴

The ongoing practice of FURT; Barrett’s wish to expand its principles to fORCH; the rehearsal phase and concert tour made possible through the SWR New Jazz Meeting; and the ensemble members’ backgrounds all form the initial (R) of the project. It is important to note that they do not behave as discrete items on a list. Rather they form an integral situation from which subsequent steps in the cycle emerge. Just as the personnel, landscape, creative wishes, and history of The Sea Ranch were dynamically linked, so do the components of (R) in fOKT condition the next step in the cycle together. Some of those conditions:

• A long, intensive rehearsal period meant the score would not need to be comprehensive; there would be plenty of time for personal communication and experimentation.
• The score(s) would need to be written in a way that Minton and Lovens would respond to – i.e. not in conventional notation – if they were expected to pay it any heed.
• The players would all bring their diverse, idiosyncratic methods and sound worlds to the piece. The ensemble would therefore not only passively extend FURT’s history and identity, but also actively transform and potentially confront it.

2. (S) – Entextualization

The first three scores for fORCH, fOKT I-III (2005), were prepared by Barrett before the week of rehearsal in Baden-Baden. Though each was meant to be performed on a separate concerts of the tour – they comprise a unified bundle. Each score makes use of a similar notational format and refers to the same legend, instructional modules, and musicians. According to Barrett, “the first set of fORCH scores served to short-circuit a process whereby FURT’s aims and methods would infuse the whole group” (Barrett, personal email to the author, 5 August 2016). The scores of fOKT I-III can thus be considered an entextualization of FURT’s improvised praxis.

In my chapter on Ben Patterson’s Variations Double-Bass, I introduce the term entextualization as “the ‘process of rendering a given instance of discourse as text, detachable from its local context'” (Barber 2007, 30). In fOKT, as in Variations, improvised discourse precedes the written score; it is therefore important to consider how the score reflects and mediates rather than defines it.

What aspects of this praxis are entextualized, and how? To begin with, we may note some superficial traces. One of these is the predominance of vocal material. As Barrett and Obermayer note,

A constant strand in our output has been the appearance of diverse vocally‐derived materials, using our own or sampled voices, which seem primarily to be engaged in the (often desperate) attempt to articulate a message whose import remains out of reach. (Barrett and Obermayer 2000)

Ute Wassermann and Phil Minton are, of course, no ordinary singers. Their extraordinary command of noisy and extreme vocal techniques is a fundamental part of their work as improvisers, which both complements and extends FURT’s virtual manipulations of vocal samples.

Another immediately recognizable mark of FURT on fOKT’s notation is the fact that Barrett and Obermayer nearly always play together; I recall their comments on synchronicity (2000) when remarking how much more often their modules coordinate in comparison with the parts of the other musicians.

Barrett’s use of physical gestures to cue other players is a third entextualized element. Barrett and Obermayer:

Extra‐musical communicating in performance generally involves one of us reminding the other that something important ought to be about to happen. We did have a repertoire of signals, which were eventually discarded because they were never used. (Barrett and Obermayer 2000)

Although these signals may never have entered FURT’s microtradition, the group’s “attempt to articulate a message whose import remains out of reach” (2000) seems to be embodied in Barrett’s highly kinetic presence on stage.³⁵ This is extended into fOKT not only through hand signals at the beginning or end of larger sections, but also in “coordinated modules” (see below) where Barrett and other members of the ensemble gesture to musicians spontaneously to trigger textural changes.

FURT’s aims and methods are most deeply and dynamically reflected in fOKT‘s timeline-based score, with “tracks” that correspond to each player. The track notation shares in common with conventional notation a vertical distribution of parts that correspond to particular voices; players read their tracks from left to right. But unlike in conventional notation, material consists not of pitches, rhythms, and specified sound events, but rather of modules that refer to eight event types within which the players improvise for a rough duration.

Event types include (1) Textures, which “describe a point of arrival or departure for a process” detailed on a case by case basis; (2) Duos, which link specific players as a subgroup within the ensemble playing one of two loosely defined material types; and (3) Coordinated Events, in which Barrett’s “unambiguous hand signal[s]” cue different types of designated behavior from “explosive bursts” to guided solos that suddenly change character. Event types (5-8) refer to microsocial relationships of a given player or subgroup to others in the ensemble. This category includes (4) Solos, (5) Accompaniments, (6) Perturbation, and (7) Transitions. Free improvisation is also included, represented by an infinity symbol (∞). (1-3) are often combined with (5-7).

Specific modules refer to sound objects (T4: Points – “almost exclusively short sound with longer silences between”, or D3b: “breathy and consonantal sounds”); individual processes (Transitions – “gradual or stepwise transformations within or between any of the other types of activity”); and socially distributed processes (A: “as it were the opposite of Solo […] affected by everything else which is going on at that point relating”). These are often combined in a single module such as C3:

C3: Ute/John/Phil: begin sustained, interwoven sound at first cue (like T3 “submerged” material but generally louder); everyone changes sound (in timbre, pitch etc.) instantaneously at each cue as if switching between radio stations or CD tracks.” (Barrett 2005, “Coordinated Events”)

That the modules’ material, subjective, and intersubjective modalities overlap is a distinguishing feature of fOKT’s notation. Timeline-based notations in general are common in notation for improvisers (see Bob Ostertag’s Say No More, Werner Dafeldecker’s Small Worlds (2004), or John Butcher’s somethingtobesaid (2008)). Asking performers to “do what you want here! And stop around here!” with loose guidance, as Minton suggests (see fn. 14), is indeed a practical and transparent way to compose for and/or with musicians who may not work, or wish to work, regularly with notation. But whereas Ostertag’s, Dafeldecker’s, and Butcher’s timeline notations simply describe who should play with whom and/or roughly what kind of material should be employed at a given point, Barrett’s case is more complex than Minton suggests.³⁶ The majority of Barrett’s modules ask each performer to be aware of several levels at once (much as his through composed music does), and often multiple modules occupy the ensemble simultaneously. This results in a meshwork of cross-referenced sounds and contingent processes, potentially tethering the players in subtle and unpredictable ways.

The multidimensional aspect of the modules reflects and extends FURT’s unique approach to sampling, in which multiple layers of sound objects are processed in real time, often beyond recognition. Barrett and Obermayer explain their first discovery of samplers in 1986:

Sampling was obviously the way to go ‐ but, crucially, with the purpose of extending (as far as our imaginations would stretch) the accessible sonic repertoire of the duo without dragging around a truckload of instruments and growing several extra arms each, rather than buying into a postmodern world of undigested quotation. That was clear from the start, and has become ever more clear; once a sampled sound has found its way into a FURT performance we seldom have any idea ourselves as to its origin. Sometimes we sit around at home listening to a CD and are shocked by the surprise appearance of a FURT sound in somewhat unfamiliar (ie original) form. (Barrett and Obermayer 2000)

In fOKT the modules act as conceptual “samples”, assigned to the performers who “process” the material according to their own radically different methods and sound worlds. When multiple modules are played at once, and begin and end at different times, their individual identities are positioned for scrambling in the dynamic polyphony of the whole. The kaleidoscopic mashup that is likely to ensue – a FURT trademark – is different in kind from the effects of notation and sampling in Say No More, for example. Despite all the ways in which Ostertag distorts and recontextualizes material through processing and transcription, he maintains the identities of the four instrumental voices consistently. Furthermore, he reinforces their integrity through a vocalist/rhythm section dynamic – something rather unthinkable in fOKT, where individual identities are perpetually refracted.

3. (R) = (R₀ → V₀ → P₀ ↺) – Remapping

Considering the particular process that the score entextualizes, it is somewhat misleading to map fOKT‘s first steps on the cycle simply as (R) → (S). A richer and more exact mapping nests aspects of FURT’s ongoing practice in (R) directly. FURT’s practice constitutes its own ur-cycle, which does not use written scores: (R) → (V) → (P):

• (R): sample library, jointly chosen instruments and software, synchronicity and duo history
• (V): preparation and experimentation with samples, individual live processing and decision making process during performance
• (P): collective improvisation in concert

Adding subscript 0 to designate that the ur-cycle is prior to fOKT, and a sign to denote that the cycle is repeated (↺), we have (R₀ → (V₀) → P₀ ↺). If we nest this ur-cycle back in (R) and combine it with (S), its entextualization, we obtain the following new mapping:

What this operation makes visible is that the feedback of FURT’s microtradition remains in movement, and the score emerges from it: an invitation to collaborate on a concrete question. This is a far cry from modeling the first stages of fOKT‘s inscription as the linear process (R) → (S), which suggests that (R) becomes frozen or absent during (S). Neither of these is the case, as FURT’s work grew from within the process of composing and performing fOKT; indeed one may infer from Barrett and Obermayer’s comments that this was precisely the point of the project.

4. (V) – Rehearsal

In my discussion of the explanatory potential of The RSVP Cycles above, I claim that in order to understand the social dynamics of a score for improvisers, one must look beyond notation to the contingent particulars of its use. In the case of fOKT‘s rehearsal process, (V), this is a difficult standard to uphold. I was not myself a performer or composer of fOKT (as I am in most pieces included in Tactile Paths), nor did I perform ethnographic research in Baden-Baden in the week prior to the premiere. Furthermore, there is no extant documentation of this phase to work with (as there is for The Sea Ranch). I shall thus offer a few brief speculations on what (V) might have entailed, working forward from the structure of the notation and backward from subsequent steps that I can observe in recordings.

The performers, we can assume, began the project with the score. This can be inferred from the fact that Barrett had prepared the score in advance, and that the project as a whole had no previous history or “shared language” to build upon. (Most of the players, however, had worked together in different constellations before, so a certain degree of mutual familiarity would have been in play.) Since the recordings of  fOKT II and  fOKT III correspond fairly closely to the structure specified in the score, we can also assume that the players worked with the notation in good faith.³⁷

The notation is sufficiently complex that it would have required the performers to study the score, both in order to memorize the nomenclature, and to understand how their own modules linked to other players. But the pace of change between the modules in individual parts is not so fast that it would have required substantial, if any, individual practice. Barrett was of course also present during rehearsals as a performer, so other performers might have shortened the learning curve by clarifying doubts with him personally. Indeed, it seems clear that the notation is geared toward group learning, and (V) would have occurred mostly in the context of playing together.

5. (P) = ((S → R) → (V → P → R ↺) ↺) – Recontextualization

Here I would like to address how ensemble performance of fOKT traverses the RSVP cycle in both rehearsal and concert performance. In the same way that I nested FURT’s ongoing microhistory, or ur-cycle, in (R), it seems appropriate to nest another feedback loop in (P). We assume again the performers start with (S).

In a conventionally notated score whose material is given, performers generally proceed to (V) (in dialogue with (R)) on the way to (P), as I explain in my expansion of Halprin’s Bach example. Even though Amirkhanian’s graphic score Serenade II does not prescribe materials, it shares the same path, for according to him and Halprin its indeterminate symbols are in any case semantically “interpreted” directly as sound and action. While the bandwidth of possible interpretations is perhaps wider in Serenade II than in the Bach example, movement on the RSVP cycle is the same in both cases.

fOKT is different because of the multivalent nature of its modules, in which players choose the material themselves. The path therefore first passes back through (R). (R) here consists not only of the inventory of conditions that I mention above, and FURT’s ongoing practice, but also the resources of the ensemble. What do these include?

First and most obviously, they include the individual performers’ resources: the unique embodied sound worlds and methods for which they were invited to participate in the project in the first place. Even where material is given in the score – and sometimes, as with pure³⁸ event types (4-7), it is not – it is so loosely defined that it acts more as a suggestion or filter on the performers’ own material, rather than as a prescription per se.

Second, if the performer does not begin the piece with a solo (as Davies does in fOKT II), unpredictable activity in the rest of ensemble will also constitute an element of (R). To be sure, group interaction is usually present in any collective improvisation, but its centrality is unavoidable here when the score couples players to cues, specific subgroups, and group textures.

A third aspect of (R) within (P) is the evolving performance practice of fORCH itself, or what percussionist and composer Burkhard Beins’ calls “collective spaces of possibility”:

Collective spaces of possibility already begin to establish themselves when the same group constellation meets for a second time after having formed some initial common experiences. Through continuous collaboration and by being repeatedly revisited […] their shape and content become ever more clearly defined and increasingly differentiated. This phenomenon appears to take place whether those who are involved are actively aware of it or whether they tend towards appreciating or rejecting such developments. (Beins 2011, 171)

Without my having been present with the musicians in 2005, it is difficult to assess how the microtradition of fORCH emerged (or how it was fORGED so to speak), and “whether they tend[ed] towards appreciating or rejecting such developments” (Beins 2011, 171).³⁹ However it seems fair to assume that the intensive rehearsal period and concert tour would have fostered a collective space of possibility that was at least recognizable. It is telling and poetic in this sense that Barrett and Obermayer begin the performance fOKT III with samples of what sounds like a fORCH performance from the previous days.⁴⁰

From (R), performers proceed to (V) on the way to (P). As I mentioned earlier, valuaction for an improviser can take place in real time as she mediates what she hears as she plays. In fOKT, (V) serves this function as well as managing the implementation of processes that pass through (R). That is, the performer simultaneously evaluates and acts on both the contingent and empirical aspects of (R) I mention above, and the indications of the score that condition them. This dual function of (V) may manifest in simple tasks, such as checking in with the timeline in the middle of an ongoing module. Due to the internal multivalency of the indications themselves, it may also manifest in more complex tasks, such as negotiating when to make a given transition, or how to “ignore” another performer who is instructed to “interrupt” (see Wassermann’s and Minton’s first modules in fOKT I).

(P) itself may be thought of as a complex intersection and recontextualization of all the paths I have just described: the concrete materialization and interaction of individual (R)s and (V)s. The richness of this step in the cycle, the musical “now” so to speak, again challenges Halprin’s own characterization of his model, in which he defines performance as “the resultant of scores and […] the ‘style of the process'” (Halprin 1969, 2). His definition suggests a linearity and fixity which, in my opinion, is fundamentally at odds with the dynamic structure of both the cycle and performance. After all, if one conceives of performance as the end of the cycle or a mere “style of the process”, the RSVP cycle might as well be an RSVP line segment.

In fOKT, and indeed in all improvisations, what comes out of the process goes back in. Every sound and action produced in performance becomes a new resource for the group, to be valuacted upon by others. As a performance goes on, and as performers become more familiar with the mechanism of the score in repeated rehearsals and performances, the notation is likely to recede. For as in any written piece of music, the cumulative process of internalizing rules and relationships represented by (or in this case entextualized in) the notation renders the representation itself increasingly redundant. The score gradually becomes a satellite, a possible resource for ongoing improvisation:

6. (R) = (R → V → P ↺) → (S?) – fOKT IV-VI (2007-2009) and spukhafte Fernwirkung (2012)

The central feedback loop that occurs in (P), (V → P → R ↺), has also occurred over the life of fORCH; the ensemble’s “collective spaces of possibility” (Beins 2011) – its microtradition – has outgrown both the overt influence of FURT and the use of elaborate notation. As one may see, the scores of  fOKT VI and spukhafte Fernwirkung (co-composed, it should be noted, with Obermayer) are so bare as to be hardly necessary; like Barrett’s codex VII, they serve more as mnemonic devices than as genuine interfaces. Minton’s recollection of spukhafte Fernwirkung is revealing: “From what I can remember of richard and pauls [sic] piece it was like above [“do what you want here! And stop around here!”] and all the cues where [sic] audio” (Minton, personal email to the author, 2 August 2016). The role of notation in these projects was so minor, in fact, that Barrett was unable to fulfill my recent request for a copy of fOKT V because he had lost them! Nonetheless Barrett and Obermayer have remained members of the ensemble, and fORCH, in theory, lives on.

Conclusion – Valuaction

What lessons about notation, improvisation, and collectivity can we draw from the examples of fOKT and The Sea Ranch? In both cases, scores “energize” the collective creative process (Halprin 1969, 191); they stimulate and condition group interaction. However the nature and degree of the notation’s impact on the process changes over time. At the beginning of the process, scores tend to have a more active role, directly mediating interaction between individual participants, or between the participants and other contingent elements of their performative environments. As the process evolves over time, however, activity energized by the score takes unpredictable turns and follows its own trajectories. That unpredictability stems not only from microsocial dynamics within the group, but also from factors not represented in the score – particularly the higher order socialities in which the creative process is embedded. Local feedback between participants becomes enmeshed with larger-scale environmental feedback, generating situational structure that diminishes the importance of the notation. Nevertheless, participants still use scores to agitate and reflect on the process in later stages.

The consequences of these principles, with respect to the political issues touched upon in this chapter, were very different for fOKT and The Sea Ranch. On the one hand, Halprin was forcibly removed from the creative process he set in motion by a participant whose power was not represented in the entextualization of that process; the motivation for his removal was greed. The main resource produced through the performance of the process – The Sea Ranch itself – was thus severed from Halprin’s ecological principles and lost much of what made it a humanistic endeavor and profoundly original work of art. The Sea Ranch lives on, but its legacy is ambivalent. In a 2013 reflection on their work together, Halprin’s fellow The Sea Ranch architect Donlyn Lyndon asks,

What should our position be now? Pay attention widely to what’s been built and to how it has affected individuals and community. Architecture should be considered as a form of thought, as well as a path of action. Examine how existing building patterns can be experienced and understood in place, to be criticized, advanced, countered, but not simply disregarded. The fruitful interchange between architecture that is thought differently and architecture that has familiar resonances can bring spirit to a place most effectively when it connects to what nature and culture have already invested there. (Lyndon 2009, 88)

In fOKT, Barrett articulated his position of power in the creative process by entextualizing FURT’s performance practice. He then removed himself from it by setting up and taking part in a process of collective recontextualization. As a consequence, the resources produced through the performance of the process – multiple concert performances and recordings of fOKT – were severed from Barrett’s authorship and gained a life of their own. fORCH lives on, and in addition to having stimulated FURT, its legacy is a testament to the socially constructive power of scoring. What could the position on notation for improvisers in collective settings be now?

• Pay attention to what performers already play and how it has affected individuals and community.
• Notation should be considered as a path of action, as well as a form of thought; in Cobussen’s words, an “invitation to make music together” (2016).
• Examine how existing microsocial patterns can be experienced and understood in new contexts, to be criticized, advanced, countered, but not simply disregarded.
• The fruitful interchange between theory that is thought differently and theory that has familiar resonances can bring spirit to music most effectively when it connects to what musicians have already invested there.

Invitation + Question + Response = Collaboration = Liberation. Q.E.D.