NODDING TO CORNELIUS

Cornelius Cardew (7 May 1936 – 13 December 1981) was an English experimental music composer. He studied piano, cello, and composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London from 1953-57, before winning a scholarship to study at the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, where he served as an assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen. He began his 193-page graphic score, Treatise, in 1963. I discovered it only when I began to collaborate with musicians to create graphic scores in 2014. Graphic scores represent music using visual images outside the realm of traditional music scores, Cardew’s Treatise uses beautifully penned circles, straight lines, and curves to convey a sense of movement across each page from left to right. The simplicity of the graphic vocabulary is used by Cardew with such imagination and diversity, his ideas clearly trip over themselves from one page to the next. It has the richness of an artist’s sketchbook and a perfection of execution which belies his work as a graphic designer; he worked for Aldus Books as Assistant Art Editor from 1962.

The prints I’ve made all stem from a limited-edition print made with Glasgow Print Studio. Working with printer, Al Gow, I used laser-cut wooden blocks to print a composition I created by drawing around a nail file and two coins, 10p and 5p. Deceptively precise, it was made quickly, in improvisatory fashion. It is the relationship between structure and improvisation that I’ve learned to explore through my work with musicians and that I can see in Cardew’s Treatise. He uses occasional elements of traditional music notation but gives no instruction for musicians. They can interpret any part of the 193 pages freely, but Cardew wants them to read the image as a structure to follow, nevertheless. It’s a creative balancing act between intuition and discipline.

Once the edition of my print was complete, I have taken the blocks and created other, unique, improvised, images. Each one is very different from the others and from the original print, but the viewer can clearly see the same blocks reappearing in each different composition.

Cornelius Cardew didn’t introduce colour and tone, which are essential to my works, but he was trained as a graphic designer and Treatise is drawn and measured on a grid, the method I have used for many of my abstract works. The sense of movement from left to right is common to Treatise. Repeated shapes provide the repetition of themes often used in music. I’ve used words descriptive of speed as titles for the pieces; Cornelius may think that is too prescriptive of me, but they are suggestions only and this is me just Nodding to Cornelius.

Jo Ganter

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