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.

A Score can become a notch cut or line, an account kept, number of points made, set of twenty, a topic, piece of good fortune, worst in repartee, and much more. And not to forget a Partitura from the Latin Pars indicating both partial, direction and task. It sounds like music but really isn’t.¹⁵

I imagine these musicians meeting not to read scores but to improvise from available scores, as was common in the Renaissance. A recording of the music will become the basis for further improvisation by future musicians. […] The basis for such music making is an original score, a program, a set of rules. But using recordings of recordings of recordings, this score will soon disappear behind the horizon of musicians who are improvising with continually reprogrammed memories.¹⁶

Notation for improvisers calls much entrenched musical vocabulary into question. “Notation” and “improvisation”, as I explain in Chapter 0, are the most obvious cases, but also “compose” (see Ben Patterson’s “new variation” in Variations for Double-Bass), “interpret” (see Cornelius Cardew’s semantic vacuum in Treatise), and “read” and “write” (see Malcolm Goldstein’s Jade Mountain Soundings) are among them. Because these pieces tend to dwell in liminal regions of musical labor, they challenge the way we usually conceptualize and talk about them.

In one way notation for improvisers encourages us to find new terminology that reflects contemporary practice. Perhaps for this reason, composer-improvisers such as Anthony Braxton (1985; 1988), Malcolm Goldstein (1988), Wadada Leo Smith (see Oteri 2014), and Cecil Taylor (1966; see also Bartlett 1995) have made colorful musical wordsmithery an important part of their work.¹⁷ I myself have attempted to develop two new verbal constructs relevant to notation for improvisers in this dissertation. In “Entextualization and Preparation in Ben Patterson’s Variations for Double-Bass“, I borrow the term entextualization from anthropologist Karin Barber (2007). This helps to shed light on how Patterson embeds the contingencies of his own improvised performance practice in the score. In “Invitation to Collaborate – Répondez s’il vous plaît!”, I adopt architect Lawrence Halprin’s concept of valuaction (1969, 2) to explore how realtime self-editing modulates the improviser’s interpretation of notation in performance.

But the music discussed in Tactile Paths can also encourage us to rethink and reinterpret old terminology. Indeed it is an important objective of mine to encourage readers to reconsider, and not simply discard, more familiar musical vocabulary and what it represents. The hope is that practitioners and scholars might thus see different, perhaps more, connections between various practices than are apparent from other discourses around music. Classical musicians, for instance, might recognize improvisational openings in notational elements that otherwise appear fixed and finished, such as articulation and ornamentation; and dyed-in-the-wool free improvisers might warm up to the potential of scores for diverse reasons, such as minimizing clichés in their own music.

With this objective in mind, I dedicate the present chapter to a brief exploration of a word that I have elsewhere used somewhat irresponsibly: score. In the other chapters of the dissertation I use the term almost interchangeably with notation, primarily in an attempt to refrain from numbing the reader with repetition. It is also a result of my embeddedness in the world of practical music-making, where the two words differ very little in meaning. Beyond day-to-day usage, however, there are subtle but important differences between the meanings of these words that lead to deeper issues in the study of notation for improvisers.

Notation is often referred to in its uncountable form, like love or water. To me it has a casual, almost benevolent character; it makes communication possible. We use it to observe or “note” things that happen. We build, or improvise, on existing knowledge by “annotating” texts.

Notation: The methods of writing down music so that it can be performed. (Rutherford-Johnson et al 2012a)

Scores on the other hand are countable, definitive, regulatory. The modern conventional score includes all the parts, or voices, arranged and synchronized in vertical order like soldiers in file. The score marks winners and losers in competitive sports. It defines success or failure in tests. Creditors keep a score of debts and payments. Scores are boundaries, the containers of notation.

Score: A music‐copy that shows in ordered form the parts allotted to the various performers, as distinct from ‘parts’ which show only that of one performer. (Rutherford-Johnson et al 2012b)

The English word “score” most likely has its origins in the cuts with which medieval scribes would rule blank parchment to prepare their manuscripts.¹⁸ In close proximity to the word score are its equivalents Partitur in German, partition in French, and partitura in Italian and Spanish. As Fluxus artist Eric Andersen mentions in his quote at the beginning of this chapter, these words derive from the Latin pars, or part. What Andersen does not mention is that they specifically derive from partitus, past participle of the verb partire, which also means to share. This collective sense of the score contradicts the top-down allotment of parts suggested by Rutherford-Johnson’s definition of the word. Yet another sense of score is suggested by the common score form in jazz: the chord chart, a rough harmonic structure with or without melody that players improvise on. Nominally this term connotes greater freedom for the performer with respect to notation than score, but it also carries a tone of fixity which counterposes itself to the improvisation itself, like the sailing chart here described by anthropologist Tim Ingold:

The marine navigator may plot his course on a chart, using a ruler and pencil, but the ruled line forms no part of the chart and should be rubbed out once the voyage is completed. (Ingold 2007, 85)

So: if notation for improvisers is processual, contingent, and unfixed – as I characterize it throughout this dissertation – what is a score for improvisers? What does it contain? Herewith I would like to improvise on these questions through the lens of composer, electronics improviser, and historian Bob Ostertag’s Say No More project (1993a; 1993b; 1996). Say No More offers ample opportunities to ruminate on these questions, for its score – which consists of both notation and recordings – is at the same time fluid in meaning and rigid in form, rich in suggestions and poor in details. Its notation and language are highly conventional, yet they point to an ensemble dynamic and a sounding music which are anything but.

In the following sections, I will unpack its themes and genealogy through three different notions of the word score: a cut, an index of a game, and a record kept. In doing so, I hope this lexical improvisation will lead us to a broader notion of what, and whether, scores for improvisers bound and contain. I will reflect on what these notions tell us about the potential for the medium of notation at a time in which the practice of writing music is, as Ostertag’s project shows, increasingly obsolete.

1. Cutting and Pasting (back together) the Performer-Instrument Coupling

The Say No More project transpired over four “generations” throughout the 1990s:

1. Studio: Say No More and Tongue-Tied (1993) .
2. “Live”/Live: Say No More and Tongue-Tied (1994) .
3. Studio: Verbatim (1996) .
4. “Live”/Live: Verbatim Flesh & Blood (2000)

The first generation began with unreleased solo recordings by three veteran improvisers: drummer Joey Baron, contrabassist Mark Dresser, and vocalist Phil Minton (also a member of Richard Barrett’s fORCH, an ensemble I discuss in “Invitation to Collaborate – Répondez s’il vous plaît”). Ostertag initially asked each player individually to record a solo improvisation with no prompt as to the type of material, style, or duration to be performed. According to the composer, the only information given to the players – other than a disclosure of the fact that these recordings would be heavily edited and integrated into a tape piece – was to

play! I told them that I wanted them play their music, and that I didn’t want a catalog or an inventory of things they did […] you know, not little samples of this and that. But if they could somehow cover the range of their vocabulary as an improviser, […] that would be what I would want. (Ostertag 2016)

Ostertag received a 30-60 minute recording from each of the performers and edited the material primarily in linear timeline-based audio software (the first version of Pro Tools). The primitive and delicate state of this technology at the time, according to Ostertag, allowed him to chop up and overlay his material, but not to process it. (By “process”, I refer to alterations that cannot be achieved through fragmenting and/or layering the sound file, such as pitch shifting and time stretching.) When this was desired, Ostertag loaded the sound files onto an Ensoniq ASR-10 sampler and recorded himself “playing” the alterations on the sampler back into the Pro Tools session. This technique can be heard at 9:30-13:30 of the Tongue-Tied recording (1b) in the repeated upwards “smear” glissandi in the bass part. As one can hear, the tape collage takes the solo improvisations far out of context. Ostertag often fragments the source material to an atomic degree, rending it from the kinetic totality of its originary performances – the time and physical effort involved in creating it.

Here is the first cut of the Say No More project: Ostertag scores the coupling of the players to their instruments, of material to physical process. As I explore in “Seeing the Full Sounding“, a key aspect of the improviser’s practice is her physical relationship to her instrument. Instruments are not merely a means to the end of producing sound; they are structured environments from which musical materials emerge and through which they are developed. They are a fundamental part of the recursive process of thinking, producing, and perceiving music both in real-time discoveries on stage and in the development of a personal “sound” over longer periods of time.¹⁹ Composer and digital instrument designer Newton Armstrong summarizes this neatly in the language of enactive cognition:

In a sequence of on-going negotiations between performer and instrument, the performer adapts to what is uncovered in the act of playing, continually developing new forms of embodied knowledge and competence. Over a sustained period of time, these negotiations lead to a more fully developed relationship with the instrument, and to a heightened sense of embodiment, or flow. (Armstrong 2006, 6-7)

Whatever “flow” may have been present in the unedited recordings by Baron, Dresser, and Minton is throughly interrupted by Ostertag’s edits. One can observe this even in the first minutes of Say No More, a drum solo followed by a bass and drums duo. Both the solo and the duo include looped fragments of high physical intensity. But they contain no trace of the physical work – the lifting of the arm, the recovery of the bow – required to have produced these sounds. Sectional divisions are hard-edged, with not a semblance of transition between Baron’s positions at the drumkit or Dresser’s changes from pizzicato to arco – all of which require time in the physical world. The relentless intensity of the material and the lack of physical preparation and release give the virtual instrumental parts a superhuman quality that renders them technically unperformable by humans playing physical instruments; this had important consequences for the next generation of the project, in which the players were asked to attempt this impossible feat.

However in addition to decontextualizing these improvisations, Ostertag also creates a new context for the material by combining the performers in a virtual ensemble. Although the original tracks were recorded in isolation from each other, the rhythms, dynamics, and types of material in each part often fit as if they had been performed together. At times, the virtual groove shared by Baron and Dresser is so tight that they sound like a live rhythm section – e.g. Say No More (recording 1a) at 5:15-6:30 and Tongue-Tied (1b) at 4:20-5:00. Paradoxically, this new treatment gives the performers’ original material a kind of stylistic familiarity that it may not have initially had; notwithstanding the fragmentation of the players’ individual tracks, the overall impression is one of a cyborg “studio band”.²⁰

While the technical nature of Ostertag’s cut in (1) may seem exceptional among scores for improvisers, or improvised music more generally, technology scholar Aden Evens reminds us that the

[g]eneration of resistance is essential to creative improvisation; the body must be made to feel awkward in relation to the instrument, the known must be un-known. […] At some point in the musician’s training, the instrument ceases to offer an adequate resistance. The interface between player and instrument becomes too smooth, and familiar patterns are so comfortable as to discourage the invention or investigation of any other possibilities. To escape the trap of their own training, some improvisers alter their instruments, taking them apart, adding pieces on, and in general ensuring that their practiced playing techniques are either untenable or will generate unfamiliar results. (Evens 2005, 154)

In my opinion, Ostertag also aimed to generate resistance to — or cut and reassemble — performer-instrument couplings in the first generation of the project. Rather than altering his performers’ instruments directly, though, he encourages the “invention or investigation of new possibilities” through the means of studio editing. In this first generation of the project the performers themselves were not directly affected by the process. However, in the second generation Ostertag’s cut took on a new meaning when he asked the performers to reproduce the recording in person.

2. Index of a Game

In the next phase of the project, Ostertag brought together a live group to play (1) in person. Say No More In Person illuminates the ludic notion of the word score: the “record or register of points made by both sides during the progress of a game or match; also the number of points made by a side or individual”.²¹ Ostertag’s score indexes, or points to, activity in an ongoing game.

Indexicality distinguishes Ostertag’s notation from many other musical game scores. Pieces such as John Zorn’s Cobra (see Brackett 2010 and Cobussen 2016), Vinko Globokar’s Individuum-Collectivum (1979), Iannis Xenakis’ Duel (1959) and Stratégie (1962), or Robin Hayward’s Borromean Rings (2011), written for my duo with him entitled Reidemeister Move, all make the rules in advance and define fields of play. The score of Say No More, on the other hand, points to (and occasionally mediates) a game with no clearly defined rules or playing field.²² How so? Of what does that game consist?

Some answers can be found in the interim between (1) and (2). After composing the first generation of Say No More, Ostertag invited Baron, Dresser, and Minton to perform a live version of (1) together. But drummer Joey Baron declined the invitation, expressing reluctance to perform the distorted Baron 2.0 that Ostertag had created in the studio. Ostertag frames Baron’s hesitance in terms of the drummer’s perfectionism:

Joey called me up and he said, “I’ve listened to it several times, it’s fantastic, and I love it, but I can’t play it.” I said, “Well I know you can’t play it, but that’s not a problem! The point isn’t to play it note for note – the point is to use this process to generate an ensemble repertoire of music that’s organic to the way you all play. We don’t have to reproduce the recording […] – that’s OK.” Joey just said, “Yeah, but we can’t play it. You’ve made the perfect realization of this, and all we can do is fuck it up.” […] Joey’s a perfectionist you know, he wants to play it right. So that was fine, and at that point he dropped out. (Ostertag 2016)

Baron’s desire to “play it right” would of course have been in conflict with Ostertag’s scoring of performer-instrument couplings in (1), in which the composer wished

to highlight the tense and problematic relation of human and machine. In effect, the players were put in front of a machine-made mirror of themselves. It was not a perfect mirror, but more like the digital equivalent of a funhouse mirror that was curved, with wacky lenses that distorted the image into something superhuman. In the performances the musicians tried to keep up with their digital reflection, a task at which they could only fail. (Ostertag 2009, 138)

Here is the heart of the game: keeping up with one’s digital reflection. What makes it a game, rather than simply a celebration of failure? The Gestalt here is different in kind from authentic celebrations of failure, as for example in early chamber music by Richard Barrett. In Barrett’s music, the spectacle of the performer failing at transparently complex tasks is conceived as an exposition of the absurdity of performance itself, and of the art of composition in the age late capitalism (see Fox 1995). There is no development of failure, there is only “the void” (see Hewett 1994).

By contrast, Ostertag’s score is ultimately a kind of sympathetic dare, a way of catalyzing the second stage of the game, in which collective creativity takes over. As Ostertag reveals in the previous interview fragment, “the point [was] to use this process to generate an ensemble repertoire of music that’s organic to the way you [Baron, Dresser, and Minton, CW] all play” (Ostertag 2016). Instead of the word “organic”, we might also say “hyper-organic”, to highlight the playful tension Ostertag sought to embed in this new repertoire.²³ Ostertag’s sense of the game echoes an important aspect of play brought up by improvisation scholar Marcel Cobussen: the opportunity to stretch one’s competence.

“Baby reaching for a toy, pussy patting a bobbin, a little girl playing ball – all want to achieve something difficult, to succeed, to end a tension” (Huizinga 1970: 29). This element of tension arises from the innate compulsion to expand one’s own skills; any game requires the development of competences, be they physical, mental, or social. (Cobussen 2016)

Such an opportunity must have appealed to Dresser and Minton, as well as drummer Gerry Hemingway, who accepted Ostertag’s invitation to take Baron’s place. This change in personnel brought a new dimension, a new challenge to the project. It added complexity to the task of recreating Baron’s part, as Hemingway would not have had intimate knowledge of the original recording session and the techniques Baron 1.0 used to produce the material given to Ostertag. Hemingway and Dresser also had a long history together. They had been friends and collaborators since at least the early 1980s, as pillars of the by that time well-known community of iconoclastic improvisers in New York’s “downtown” scene (see Lewis 1996 and Brackett 2010). (Ostertag had also been a part of that community before temporarily leaving music and moving to central America for most of the 1980s (Ostertag 2009)). The bass and drums team had also worked together for several years with Braxton’s “classic quartet”, which included pianist Marilyn Crispell (see Lock 1989).

What role did notation play in this game? Relatively little. The two scores of (2) are ostensibly a transcription of the two tape pieces from (1), plus parts for Ostertag on live sampler. But the notation is not a transcription in the usual sense – a preservation, documentation, or reorchestration of an existing piece or performance. Rather, it behaves as a “road map” (Ostertag 2016) to the tape itself:

I don’t really think of it [the performance of (2), CW] as performing transcriptions because really the score is the tape. I don’t think the transcribed score would make much sense if you couldn’t hear the tape. And the idea was to make the transcribed score as minimal as possible […] you want to put a piece of paper in front of them to remind them of what goes where, when you do what, but really they should learn it by listening to the recording. (Ostertag 2016)

To this end, Ostertag’s notation clearly marks sectional divisions (with capital letters); players’ entrances and exits; repeats; general qualities of materials in each section; and, where appropriate, specific pitches and rhythms. None of the “ambiguities, imperfections, contradictions, and so on, which constitute what might be called the ‘poetry’ of notation” (Barrett 2002) are really at play. The medium of notation is accorded no extra meaning that might detract or distract from the musicians’ game of recreating their superhuman/superorganic selves. From this, one can infer that (1) is not only a part of the score, but its most important part. As I will show, this has provocative consequences for (3).

Ironically the first performance of (2) was not on stage in front of a concert audience, as one might expect from a project that thematizes the “tense and problematic relation of human and machine” (Ostertag 2009, 138). Rather, the band first came together to record the pieces “live” in the studio of Austrian National Radio (ORF), whose radio art producer Heidi Grundmann had commissioned Ostertag to produce Say No More In Person for her Kunstradio broadcast. The recording session, and the days of rehearsal leading up to it, were fraught with logistical difficulties and political battles within the radio station, which ultimately led to creative hurdles:

This was in the early days of Kunstradio and the ORF was not supportive of her [Grundmann, the producer of (2), CW]. There were actually people trying to kick her legs out from under her very strongly. So we all arrived in Vienna, and we were supposed to have three or four days of rehearsal and then this recording session, […] and the powers that be at the ORF had given the studio time to somebody else. So then we had to take a train to Innsbruck [a small city in western Austria, CW] to have a place to rehearse. We got to Innsbruck, and the [regional office of the, CW] ORF had also given the studio time [to someone else, CW]. So then we had gone to another town – there was still no place to rehearse – and they said there was this garage that a local rock band played in and we could rehearse in this garage. We went over there at night and dropped our instruments off […] it was the middle of winter, and there was no heat in the garage and the idea that we were supposed to rehearse in this cold place – it was just insane. We came back in the morning and the whole street was full of firetrucks because the garage was on fire [laughs]… Mark’s bass was in the garage, and that was when Mark turned to me and says, “Ostertag – you got my number in your book? Cross it out!” So then we had to go back to Vienna and record with no rehearsal. It’s the first time we’ve [Ostertag, Dresser, and Hemingway, CW] met, we were supposed to have had days of rehearsal and we didn’t have any, and it was all on the fly. They put us in this recording studio – their first digital recording studio […] – and it was recorded to hard disk. But they wouldn’t give her [Grundmann, CW] an engineer; they were really trying to shut her down. The only engineer she could get was a guy would did radio theater, and he’d never miked a drumset, and then they wouldn’t give us the good mics – they said the good mics were only for the musical engineers. […] You know that first piece is particularly tense, particularly for Phil, and Phil said, “Bob, I hope you like the first take, because I can’t do this more than once in a day.” We got four-fifths of the way through it and the whole studio crashed. All the data was lost. [laughs] So that was hardly an optimal situation. That CD was made with no rehearsal, second take, everybody in a grumpy mood, bad microphones, the engineer doesn’t know what he doing. […] If you’re going to make music that’s outside the box, then you have to accept the circumstances that you get. And they’re never optimal. (Ostertag 2016)

I include this story not only for entertainment value, but to show that the game indexed by the score also included Ostertag himself. By inserting himself into the process, rather than simply challenging Dresser, Hemingway, and Minton from the outside, Ostertag accepted the challenge set to his bandmates as a performer, plus the additional challenge of stretching his own competence as a bandleader, much like Zorn did as the conductor of Cobra,²⁴ or Braxton did while on tour with his classic quartet in the 1980s (see Lock 1988).

To bring the human/virtual cycle of (1) and (2) to a temporary conclusion: thinking of scores as containers of rules and regulations, or as boundaries of notational matter(s), limits the view of what may actually be happening between players and their instruments, and between each other – both of which are fundamental to the dynamics of improvisation. Thinking of scores for improvisers as cuts and reassemblies of performer-instrument couplings, or as indexes of games, puts a focus on how they interact with rich performative activity beyond notation’s immediate purview.

3. A Record Kept

Like (1), the third generation of Say No More, entitled Verbatim, was made in the studio from fragments of recordings by Ostertag’s collaborators. Unlike (1), which began with solos recorded in isolation from each other, (3) began with fragments of collective recordings made during the production of (2). The raw material consisted both of tracks taken from Say No More (2a) and Tongue-Tied (2b), as well as a free improvisation recorded in the studios of ORF at the same time:

At that same session [(3)] after we recorded the pieces, we did a free improvisation. My idea was […] for the next go-around, […] instead of fragments from solos, I wanted an ensemble improvisation with the tracks broken up so I could isolate the different components and mix them together in ways that they weren’t played together at the same. (Ostertag 2016)

Even before he had finished (2), then, Ostertag had already conceived of the project in long-range terms, along the lines of Ben Patterson’s Variations for Double-Bass or Richard Barrett’s fOKT. But by the time of composing (3), the project consisted not only of an ensemble-specific repertoire, but also of a concrete constellation of individuals with its own history and methods – a band in the emphatic sense. Ostertag:

By this time now we actually had gigs, we toured, and it was feeling much more like a mature project. Very, very fun band. […] That was my first band – I’d never had a band before. For your first band to have Gerry Hemingway and Mark Dresser – it’s kind of crazy. I would regularly just start laughing on stage. I would be playing and I would think, “Wait a minute – is this my band?” (Ostertag 2016)²⁵

It could be argued that all recordings entextualize, and it is in the negative sense of entextualization – its erasure of a singular, non-repeatable, generative context – that many an improviser has criticized the recorded medium. Guitarist Derek Bailey, for example, has critiqued “the loss during the recording process of the atmosphere of musical activity — the musical environment created by the performance” (1992, 103). Philosopher Gary Peters argues that “[a]s a generalisation, free improvisers show little interest in tape, in the analogical or digital freezing of performative flow […] largely because improvisation’s big idea is the realization of future possibilities in the unreproducible now of the ‘in the moment’ moment” (Peters 2014, 9-10). Both Bailey’s and Peters’ positions are reflected in the following comment by Cornelius Cardew, who gives them a relevant twist by triangulating improvisation, recording, and scores:

[W]ritten compositions are fired off into the future; even if never performed, the writing remains as a point of reference. Improvisation is in the present, its effect may live on in the souls of the participants, both active and passive (i.e. audience), but in its concrete form it is gone forever from the moment that it occurs, nor did it have any previous existence before the moment that it occurred, so neither is there any historical reference available. Documents such as tape recordings of improvisation are essentially empty, as they chiefly preserve the form that something took and give at best an indistinct hint as to the feeling and cannot convey any sense of time and place. […] What a recording produces is a separate phenomenon, something really much stranger than the playing itself, since what you hear on tape or disc is indeed the same playing, but divorced from its natural context. What is the importance of this natural context? The natural context provides a score which the players are unconsciously interpreting in their playing. Not a score that is explicitly articulated in the music and hence of no further interest to the listener as is generally the case in traditional music, but one that co-exists inseparably with the music, standing side by side with it and sustaining it. (Cardew 1971, 126-128)

To distill Cardew’s position: written composition belongs to the future,²⁷ improvisation belongs to the present, and recording belongs to the past. This is a conventional schema which I have deconstructed in various ways throughout Tactile Paths – particularly in the cases of A Treatise Remix, in which I improvise over time in the studio with a collection of historical recordings, or Barrett’s fOKT, which, like Say No More, makes extensive use of sampling. It would therefore appear to bring us no closer to understanding how Verbatim challenges this received wisdom. However, Cardew’s formulation opens up considerably through his attention to the “natural context” of improvisation as a score.

By calling this context “natural”, Cardew initially suggests that it is somehow external to the act of playing, or given in advance. But he adds that the context “co-exists inseparably with the music, standing side by side with it and sustaining it”, revealing a resonance with the ecological view of notation for improvisers that I have advanced throughout this dissertation (see my discussion of architect Lawrence Halprin’s RSVP Cycles in “Invitation to Collaborate — Répondez s’il vous plaît!”). In this view, the “context” of improvised performance – or the “field of musical improvisation” as Cobusssen calls it – is not fixed or determinate. Rather, it co-evolves with the improviser through performance, or, in Bailey’s words, it is “created by the performance” (1992, 103, my italics).

Whereas I claim that scores are but one element of this environment, changing and being changed by other elements through improvisational practice, Cardew claims that the environment is a score – a subtle but intriguing difference. For when we consider the recording of (3) to be a (principal part) of a score, the score to be the environment, and the environment to co-evolve with the improvised performance, we have a feedback loop that in fact describes the Say No More project rather well: performances nested in recordings nested in scores played in performance, the whole of which (re)constitutes the environment in and over time. Rather than a static documentation – “the digital freezing of performative flow” (Peters 2014, 9-10) – the “record kept” here is an intractable knot within a knot, an inherently dynamic performative tool.

4. Final Cut – The Future of (Musical) Writing in the Age of Digital Reproduction?

Verbatim Flesh and Blood, the fourth and final generation of Say No More, reanimated the third generation, Verbatim – as the second generation, Say No More In Person, reanimated the first, Say No More. As I suggested in the previous section, (3) and (4) differ from the project’s earlier incarnations in that the band had established a voice of its own. One can hear this immediately when comparing (4) to (2): there is a much greater fluidity in the interaction between players, and at the same time a greater proximity to (3), particularly with respect to section timings. By this time, the band had learned how to play together, and had mastered the medium of self-impersonation on which the project was founded. The awkwardness of (2) – apparent in Gerry Hemingway’s nervous drum solo at the beginning of (2a) – is gone. In its place, a kind of tortured flow has emerged. The recording of (4) can thus be seen as a “final cut” of the project in the filmic sense: the definitive final product, the ideal image, of a long and complex collaborative process. But is it really? And what does the success I confer on Verbatim Flesh and Blood say about the relationship of scores and/or notation to recording in the Say No More tetralogy as a whole?

In a book chapter entitled “The Future of Writing” (2002, 63-69), philosopher Vilém Flusser discusses the changing historical relationship between images and writing in order to articulate an empowering vision for writing in the techno-imaginative culture of the postmodern era. According to Flusser, “the original purpose of writing was to facilitate the deciphering of images” (64). He conceives of images as “mediations between man and his world, […] tools to overcome human alienation: they are meant to permit action in a world in which man no longer lives immediately but that he faces” (65). In order to make sense of these images as tools, he argues, “one must learn the conventions that give them their meaning […]. For example, the ‘imagination’ that produces road maps is not the same as the ‘imagination’ that produces cave paintings and projections. Explaining images with the help of texts may therefore be useful” (65).

More importantly, he goes on to say, writing helps to break down the “idolatry of images” (65). By this Flusser refers to the power of writing, particularly as “historical consciousness, linear, rational thought” (65), to counteract decontextualized images’ tendency to cover up the terms of their use, to reify into idealized (and/or ideological) objects, thus making man a “tool of his own tools” (65).²⁸

I think Flusser’s dialectic presents an uncannily rich way to view the relationship of notation and recording in Say No More. Ostertag began the project in (1) with a recorded “image” of a superhuman virtual trio, “meant to permit action in a world in which man no longer lives immediately” (65) – the “imaginary” world of recording. He then used notation in (2) to explain the recording to the players and direct them to its potential as a “tool to overcome alienation” (64). Although this notation may seem impoverished or haphazard on paper, in practice it played a fundamental role in indexing the game – inviting the performers to play with superhuman images of themselves, rather than be replaced by them. In other words, notation is not only the technical means by which Ostertag represents salient elements in the recording to be reproduced, but also a device that enables his parodical critique of the myth of recording as an ideal performance. In this sense, he goes a step further than Flusser by questioning the presumed divide between the world of recording and the “live”  world in which man lives “immediately”.

But this is not the end of the story. Flusser acknowledges that “the rise of the new image culture” – exemplified in our times by television, advertising, the internet, and music videos – may be traceable to writing’s own historical failures: “It is against the threatening lunacy of formal rationalism, of a meaningless existence amid speculative, opaque explanations, that the rise of the new image culture must be seen” (66). In this new image culture, texts are no longer used to explain images, but rather to feed and support the image machine:

The easiest way to imagine the future of writing, if the present trend toward a culture of techno-images goes on, is to imagine culture as a gigantic transcoder from text into image. It will be a sort of black box that has texts for input and images for output. All texts will flow into that box (news about events, theoretical comments about them, scientific papers, poetry, philosophical speculations), and they will come out again as images (films, TV programs, photographic pictures): which is to say that history will flow into the box, and that it will come out of it under the form of myth and magic. From the point of view of the texts that will flow into the box, this will be a utopian situation: the box is the “fullness of time,” because it devours linear time and freezes it into images. From the point of view of the images that come out of the box, this will be a situation in which history becomes a pretext for programs. In sum, the future of writing is to write pretexts for programs while believing that one is writing for utopia. (Flusser 2002, 67)

Recording culture has, like image culture as here represented by Flusser, radically changed the nature of musical literacy in our time, as it no longer privileges or even requires written scores. The idolatry of recordings goes unquestioned in an age when one has almost all music at one’s fingertips in one’s phone or through the internet; there is a radical gap between the speed and rhizomatic nature of music consumption in the 21st century, and the slow pace and linear process of producing music with scores. As composer and electronic music scholar Nicolas Collins states,

[m]usic notation as it has been known for several centuries — dots and crochets on five lines — is becoming ever more marginalized as a world language. Most music today is produced, distributed and heard through digital technology — computers, iPods and cell phones. Notes can be picked out on a keyboard and samples grabbed from existing recordings, then corrected, sequenced, layered and orchestrated as easily as words can be processed. We’re living in a Cmd-X/Cmd-V world; it’s no longer essential to know how to read and write music notation in order to function within this new paradigm, unless you’re a member of that ever-dwindling percentage of musicians who play scored compositions on acoustic instruments. (Collins 2011, 6)

So if one is among the dwindling few to acknowledge the continuing value of scores for contemporary music, how does one contend with their seemingly unstoppable obsolescence? As Say No More shows us, notating music in conventional scores is no longer the only option. Composers and performers can use the very medium of recording (or video or software, for that matter — see Collins 2011) to communicate with each other, and using such nonwritten media can open possibilities for different kinds of communication — some of which may “speak” to improvising musicians more directly than conventional notation. A reactionary return to the internal complexities of writing is in any case unnecessary.

At the same time, Say No More shows a possible way forward for written notation: improvise with the context in which it is used. Ostertag exposes contingency and assigns notation a limited but strategic role in a musical environment where people, rather than disembodied sounds, are the subject matter. In so doing, he shows how written notation – and here I explicitly also include “conventional notation” – can be used to interact, play, negotiate, and challenge performers, who may even ignore it if they know the game to which it points. He not only offers an alternative model of the score, but also suggests a path to rethinking the often unfulfilling relationships between scores, recordings, and performances in our time.