Virginia Anderson

the score.2 Line heights, lengths, and thicknesses do not fix pitch, duration, and
dynamics as well as notes in common-practice notation, but they are accurate
enough that Four Systems performances have a distinct identity.
Pictorial scores do not have a linear relationship between score symbols and
sound; the performer “plays” the score the way a viewer “reads” an artwork.
An untitled event score (one of a category called “Triad”) from Cornelius
Cardew’s experimental opera, Schooltime Compositions (Cardew 1968, [3]), is
purely pictorial, consisting of three scalene triangles, each divided into fur-
ther equilateral, isosceles, and scalene triangles. These triangles are measured
according to size and type; the order of play recommended follows lines in the
triangles as though they were boundary lines in a map.3 In the instructions,
Cardew suggested that the top of the page may be higher in pitch than the
bottom, and that the right may be more dissonant than the left, a plan that
would replace time (left to right in symbolic scores) with dissonance, but this
is a suggestion, not a rule. Another Schooltime Composition score, also untitled,
depicts the mirror image of an outline of two hands, joined at the wrist. The
lower of the two outlines has seven fingers, the upper outline has six (Cardew
1968, [8]; Tilbury 2008, 370). Unlike the triangle scores, this untitled “hand”
score lacks performance instructions; it must be interpreted by its visual cues
alone.4 Having no direct correlation between drawing and sound, this pictorial
score is the graphic equivalent to allusive text scores, which I will explain later.
Text scores are known by different names. The Fluxus group of artists, poets,
dancers, typographers, and composers who flourished in New York in the early
1960s called text scores “Event” or “Action” scores. The Scratch Orchestra of
London (founded in 1969 by Cardew, Howard Skempton, and Michael Parsons)
called them “Verbal” scores. Like graphic scores, text scores can be divided into
two types. Instruction scores resemble recipes or instructions for assembling
flat-pack furniture, in that the performer (or cook or do-it-yourselfer) reads the
instructions and follows them to achieve a performance (or dinner or a book-
case). The “Hokey Cokey” is, essentially, an instruction score for a dance (“put
your left foot in, your left foot out”). Non-musical and musical instructions are
“performed” differently, however, as they have different rationales. A DIYer will
try to overcome any indeterminacy in the instructions—divine the intentions
of its creator—to build the furniture successfully. The performer of an instruc-
tion text piece will exploit the indeterminacy to give an individual perfor-
mance. La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #10 (Young 1963, [111]), which reads
in its entirety “Draw a straight line and follow it,” demands unspecified “lines”
that could be realised as lines of thought in an argument, a carefully surveyed
road line, or any other feasible interpretation. Young published his own real-

2 An archival performance of Four Systems by the dedicatee, David Tudor, can be found, along with a
sample score of Four Systems, on the Earle Brown Music Foundation website <http://www.earle-brown.
org/index.php> (accessed 19 January 2011).
3 An image of this score appears in Tilbury 2008, 369.
4 Tilbury refers to a reported admonition by Karlheinz Stockhausen to Cardew’s first wife, Ruth, to “cul-
tivate her sixth finger” (Tilbury 2008, 370). Stockhausen later gave his dodecaphonic “bird” Mondeva
seven toes and five fingers in Act II, scene I of Donnerstag aus Licht (1984).

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