Typographie

1963 · rif. 25014 — Buffalo New York: The Gallery Upstairs Press 1963 - 1967. First Edition. Printed glazed white card-stock boards with successive plastic ring binding coil - as issued. Very good / fine; publisher's blind stamp on the title page. . Oblong 4to 2 193 3 pp. Printed on glazed paper; sheet size appx. 173 x 280 mm. Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise was proffered as an overwhelming visual musical score and remarkable example of graphic notation; being a definitive break with traditional musical notation. Written between 1963 and 1967 Treatise comprises 193 pages of lines symbols and various geometric or abstract shapes that exclude accepted conventions of musical notation. The score is not accompanied by any explicit instructions to the performers in how to perform the work or what sound-producing means were to be used. Although the bottom of each page has two five-line musical staves this is apparently not meant to suggest piano or other keyboard instruments only to indicate that the graphic elements are musical and not purely artistic in character. He had been an assistat to Karlheinz Stockhausen for three years in the late '50s. Stockhausen commented: "As a musician he Cardew was outstanding because he was not only a good pianist but also a good improviser and I hired him to become my assistant in the late 50s and he worked with me for over three years. I gave him work to do which I have never given to any other musician which means to work with me on the score I was composing. He was one of the best examples that you can find among musicians because he was well informed about the latest theories of composition as well as being a performer." He trained as a typographer in London College of Printing and then worked as an assistant art editor at Aldus Books. Many important creative individuals worked there including Germano Facetti who would direct the celebrated redesign of Penguin books during the decade. This is where during lunch breaks in the drawing office he began Treatise. He spent the next four years between 1963 to 1967 working on the score recognizing that he could use abstract shapes as a basis for musical notation. He became occupied more and more with abstract visual work and the transformations of the graphic elements that permit the "reading of the score" as an abstract visual work. An important milestone. New Grove III 773-774; see also the important work by Karkoschka Das Schriftbild der Neuen Musik 1966 - published while Treatise was in press and noting Cardew's work. The Gallery Upstairs Press hardcover books