Virginia Anderson

amount of performer creativity; others (especially allusive scores such as Piano

Piece for David Tudor #3) allow a large amount. The performance possibilities
of a piece in alternative notation thus include both what is stated and what is
not stated in the score. Unstated elements in a score are performed accord-
ing to the performers’ cultural contexts. In late experimentalism, especially in
Britain, performers were encouraged not to follow the composer’s intention,
if it did not appear in the score; fanciful, even illogical, interpretations were
valued. Similarly, Austin saw a cultural context in word use: “the particular per-
sons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation
of the particular procedure invoked” (1975, 34). His examples—the inappro-
priate “incapacity” of baptising a baby Alfred instead of Albert, and the “wrong
type or kind” of procedure of naming him (or her) “2704” (1975, 35)—could, in
an experimental baptismal piece, be two types of appropriate invocations. The
baptism in either case could be unhappy only if the composer (the experimen-
tal “bishop”) specifically ruled (in the score) that numbers (or, indeed, other
names beginning with “A”) could not be used. Christopher Hobbs specified,
for instance, that any text could be used to create a performance of Voicepiece
(1967) except for the score instructions themselves, to prevent performers from
taking the lazy option of using what was in front of them, and so opening per-
formances to other texts. Cornelius Cardew specified that performers could
use the text of Paragraph 6 (1969) of The Great Learning (Cardew 1968–71, 23),
because it contained not only instructions but also a setting of the Confucian
text. Hobbs and Cardew thus made their rules appropriate to their materials
and procedures.
The search for loopholes in the rules of the score can exploit indeterminacy
in both syntax and semantics. At a recent meeting of my experimental notation
class at the University of Nottingham, one student, Peter Allott, performed
George Brecht’s Tea Event (1961), from Brecht’s event score collection Water
Yam (1963). The score in its entirety reads: “preparing/empty vessel.” Allott
performed this piece using a real tea bag and mimed activity of pouring water
in and out of a mug. The class, however, was divided as to whether “empty” in
this text was an imperative verb (asking the performer to, for instance, empty a
kettle into the mug, or to empty the mug by drinking the tea), or whether it was
adjectival (the vessel was, itself, “empty” of contents). In the imperative state,
the description as a whole was instructive and performative; in the adjectival
state, the description of the vessel was concrete and constative. In the latter
case, only the first line, “preparing,” is perlocutionary, demanding that the
empty vessel be filled with tea, water, or any other action that would be “happy”
in the circumstance of a piece entitled Tea Event. Allott pointed out that in
some areas of Britain (the Northeast, for instance), “tea” refers not only to the
drink, but also to supper, so that a “happy” performance of Tea Event might see
the preparation of a meal (a soup or stew, perhaps) to fill an empty vessel.14

14 The 2011 Experimental Notation class included Allott, Patrick Burnett, Alice Billau, Laura Clements,
Michael Roberts and Yichen Wu; the previous class, Sonja Ashbury, Lindsey Billinger, Jonathan Herrick,
Alex Jenkins, Jonathan Pether, and Greeta Sagris, were also vital to formulating the present project.

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