The Scratch Orchestra was an experimental musical ensemble founded in the spring of 1969 by Cornelius Cardew, Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton.
The Orchestra reflected Cardew’s musical philosophy at that time. This meant that anyone could join, graphic scores were used (rather than traditional sheet music), and there was an emphasis on improvisation.
Scratch Orchestra Draft Constitution
Treatise is a graphic musical score by British composer Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981) comprising 193 pages of lines, symbols, and various geometric or abstract shapes that eschew conventional musical notation. The score neither contains nor is accompanied by any explicit instruction to the performers in how to perform the work. Cardew worked on the composition from 1963 to 1967.
Cardew had previously suggested that performers devise in advance their own rules and methods for interpreting and performing the work.
Prepare and then interpret a few pages of the graphical score however you see fit. Conceive of a consistent logic for the symbols and perform 2-10 pages of the score for the class.
Later Cardew became very critical of Treatise and wrote about the “diseases of notation, cases where the notation seems to have become a malignant growth usurping an absolutely unjustifiable preeminence over the music. I feel obliged to study these diseases on my own body, in my own work, rather than as they are evident elsewhere in the avant garde.”