The In(visible) Sound

But even in this score, which is a paradigm of graphic scores, there is a clear ref-
erence to traditional notation. The two empty staves that appear at the bottom
of every page give an immediate, traditional sense of pitch orientation (high
and low). The graphic designs are almost always placed over these staves, and a
few times the designs almost connect with them. Much of the time the designs
are extended or deformed versions of traditional symbols. There are almost no
symbols that seem to come from fields other than music. As such the approach
to imagining sound in Treatise is not so different from that in a classic music
score. Musicians confronted with Treatise will tend to interpret the instructions
and meanings of old symbols in new contexts, proportions, and directions. The
imagined sounds will not be as clear as when presented in a Mozart score, and
this uncertainty will force the performer to take decisions about how to pro-
duce sounds from this abstract proposal. Treatise imposes an openness that
has to be constrained by an interpretative action that will ultimately produce a
sound. The sound can be almost anything and can appear surprising in relation
to what we might have imagined from the score.
Graphic scores cannot be clearly evaluated in such contexts as festivals or
competitions. These scores depend on other media to reveal their character-
istics. Sonic or visual realisations are the media most commonly used to show
what the score represents. But when a piece is not performed a narrative or
conceptual account of the intentions might clarify how to evaluate drawings
that do not represent clear sound results.
The conditioning effect of notation and music scores often defines musi-
cal creativity and the ways we imagine sounds. In this sense Cardew’s remarks
above are about the history of music notation in the western world. The score
gives form to what might sound, and in the frames defined by the score and its
musical tradition we develop and extend our imagination. The score of Treatise
is an extension and deformation of existing musical elements. The history of
notated music shows that increasingly processes, notational limits and aesthetic
choices within these limits forge a framework in which sound loses its original
hierarchical primacy. In conservatory education we are trained in the art of the
sounds of music and not necessarily in the art of sounds themselves. In most
occidental music-education institutions we learn how aesthetic and even eth-
ical choices in orchestration, harmony, and rhythm changed through history.
Ultimately, we learn only certain values about sound, and almost all of them fit
the limits of the score. Then composers develop their music starting from these
limits, just as the score of Treatise develops and transforms older symbols.

sound towards score

To invent music from sound is to begin from physicality, gesture, and percep-
tion. With this approach the limits of the score are not an aesthetic issue and
the score turns out to be more like a tool or a means of communicating an
event. Scores that originate from sound are transcriptions of the afore-men-
tioned physicalities, gestures, and perceived events. In some of these scores
it is common to see traditional notation, perhaps with some extensions and

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