Cardew

Notation as Spatial Resistance

When notation becomes spatial, it becomes political.

Not because a new symbol set suddenly carries an overt message, but because the conditions of reading... of time, attention, labor, and bodies in space are reconfigured. The linear staff presumes a single horizon of time; the spatial score collapses that horizon, thickens it, makes it topological. What had been a conveyor belt becomes a site. In that shift, the score resists extraction, resists quick consumption, resists the fantasy that music can be frictionlessly converted into product.

Against the Hegemony of the Line

Classical notation maps sound onto a left-to-right timeline: meter regularizes, the barline segments, and performance becomes a logistics problem attemoting to deliver events on schedule. That linearity, perfected across centuries of printing and pedagogy, is also an ideology of standardization. It presumes interchangeability of parts (pages, players, rehearsals), favors excerptability (movements, arias, highlights), and greases the mechanisms of repertoire, publishing, and recording. The score’s success is measured by how efficiently it disappears into performance.

Spatial notation interrupts this regime. It treats the page as field rather than railway.  It evolves as a map to be navigated, a relief to be explored, a diagram whose meaning emerges only through positional decisions. Time is inferred from distance, density, or proximity; attention must swivel, backtrack, zoom. The page no longer disappears in the act of playing. It insists on being seen.

From Instruction to Object

Spatial scores transform notation from a set of imperatives (“do this, then this”) into an object of engagement.  They are stubborn, coded, noncompliant. Their politics lies in the demands they make:

• Unpredictability: the refusal of a single, pre-optimized path.

• Excess: more information than can be performed at once; layers that force choice.

• Unreadability: not as incompetence, but as opacity—a shield against instant capture, summary, or excerpt.

These are not scores that “serve” performance; they coerce it into negotiation. Reading becomes rehearsal; rehearsal becomes research. The performer is no longer a relay in a supply chain but an archaeologist excavating a site of meaning.

Art-Historical Lineages

Ruscha

Spatial notation does not arise ex nihilo; it sits within a broader art history in which the document, the book, and the instruction are reimagined as art objects.

• Artist’s book as sculpture: Think of Ed Ruscha’s slim volumes.  Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Every Building on the Sunset Strip.  These “neutral” catalogues are, in fact, sculptural manipulations of sequence and format. Dieter Roth’s book-objects and Anselm Kiefer’s lead books literalize weight and materiality. The book refuses to be merely a carrier; it is the work.

• Score as document/trace/instruction: Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, George Brecht’s event scores, and Sol LeWitt’s wall-drawing instructions shift emphasis from execution to propositional form. The instruction is not subordinate to the performance; it endures as the primary art-object, spawning plural realizations.

• Performance as archaeology: Contemporary practice often treats performance less as execution and more as excavation. The performer digs through coded artifactsto activate a latent work. This aligns with what Hal Foster termed the “archival impulse”: art that constructs meaning through the assembly and re-reading of documents.

Within music, this lineage passes through Earle Brown’s December 1952, Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise, John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra, Iannis Xenakis’s architectonic diagrams, Wadada Leo Smith’s Ankhrasmation language, and the dense topographies associated with the New Complexity (e.g., Brian Ferneyhough). Each, in different registers, subordinates linear command to spatial proposition.

“Thick Channel Black Bourbon” for Solo Voice

Curatorial Stakes: How to Exhibit a Score

Exhibitions frequently neutralize scores by treating them as illustrations for performances that “really matter.” Spatial notation resists this instrumentalization. To curate such works responsibly is to adopt three positions:

1. Objecthood without fetish: Acknowledge the material presence.  The graphite pressure, the bleed of ink, the palimpsest of erasures without freezing the score as a relic. Display should enable legibility of use: fold-outs, layered pages, overhead views that reveal structure.

2. Activation without subordination: Performances derived from the score are not footnotes; they are parallel artifacts. Present recordings, rehearsals, reader’s annotations, and failed attempts as equally valuable outcomes of the score’s provocative difficulty.

3. Context as discourse: Situate spatial scores alongside artist’s books, conceptual instructions, and archival practices to articulate the cross-media politics at stake. Place LeWitt near Cardew; Ruscha beside Xenakis. Let visitors trace the migration of instruction into object, object into event.

Tactics of Spatial Resistance

Spatial notation deploys a set of tactics that function as resistance within contemporary economies of attention:

• Non-excerptability: Forms that cannot be cleanly sliced into “greatest hits.” This resists playlist culture and the extractive tendencies of programming and streaming.

• Distributed authorship: By leaving pathways open, the score shares power with performers. The composer becomes framer rather than dictator; interpretation becomes a site of collective authorship.

• Temporal thickening: Spatial scores consume rehearsal time, demand collective decision-making, and institutional support. In a gig economy that prizes instant legibility, this insistence on slowness is a political refusal.

• Illegibility as ethics: Where surveillance capitalism thrives on legibility and frictionless parsing, the score’s opacity becomes an ethical stance.  It exists as a defense against reductive capture (by OCR, by MIDI quantization, by the “explain it in 30 seconds” mandate).

Reading as Embodied Cartography

Spatial scores reallocate cognitive load from counting to wayfinding. Players triangulate position through landmarks (clusters, textures, color), agreeing on cues more like orienteers than metronomes. This produces a politics of mutual dependence: the ensemble must listen and look to stay together; hierarchy (conductor vs. section) is less prescriptive, more conversational. The room matters because the score exists at scale, not as an abstract stream of tokens.

The Archaeology of Performance

To perform a spatial score is to handle an archive: marginalia, legends, failed drafts, overlays, alternative routes. Each realization leaves residue which, in turn, become part of the next reading. The work accretes as a stratigraphy rather than a definitive text. Performance becomes archaeology not only metaphorically but operationally: a careful process of brush, brush, reveal.

Risk, Responsibility, Repair

Because spatial notation withdraws guarantees, it exposes performers and institutions to risk: of misunderstanding, of “getting it wrong,” of spending more rehearsal than a budget allows. But this risk has a politics: it creates a space where responsibility (to the page, to one another, to the audience) is renegotiated. The work’s difficulty is not punitive; it is repairing.  It presents as an antidote to the culture of instant adequacy. It teaches how to read slowly, together.

Toward a Curatorial Lexicon

For curators, educators, and performers working with spatial scores, a practical lexicon helps sustain the politics of the form:

• Field (not line): Describe pages as terrains with gradients and borders.

• Legend (not key): Allow the notation’s symbols to remain locally defined, historically contingent.

• Route (not part): Prepare versions as navigational proposals rather than fixed parts.

• Residue (not documentation): Treat recordings and annotations as layers that thicken the work.

• Commons (not property): Encourage shared mark-ups, communal copies, open ateliers where reading is social.

Conclusion: The Demand of the Page

Spatial notation is not a stylistic novelty; it is an infrastructure for different kinds of relations...to time, to institutions, to audiences, to each other. By dislodging the score from linear service and reinstating it as object, field, and site, artists reclaim the terms of musical encounter. The result is not a rejection of sound but a reorganization of attention: away from efficient delivery toward committed reading; away from commodity toward commons; away from the invisible score toward a page that looks back and says, simply, engage.