MG3250 Performs Cornelis Cardew's "Treatise"
(Tray 1: Pages 1-94)
MTMN001

Performed by a Canon PIXMA MG3250
Recorded by David Pocknee
Huddersfield 2015-10-18

Cornelis Cardew's "Treatise" is an immense graphic score.  
It is 192 pages long and comes with no instructions on how to read it.
It fluidly moves between abstract shapes and conventional musical notation,
forcing the performer to question their received notions about both, 
as they try to make sense of the score.

"Treatise" was designed for humans.  
Its raison d'etre is playing in the middle-ground between what is and is not represented.
Cardew wrote the work with his improvising ensemble AMM in mind.
So, 
is this recording a valid realization of the work?

This is a recording of a printer performing a piece of music.
Perhaps a better audience for it might even be other printers,
rather than humans.
It is a non-anthropocentric performance,
in that it refuses human taste in favour of that of a non-human.

Sure, 
we have music made by machines already,
but they are always designed to make music that suits humans.

There's no trickery here, 
it's not like those internet videos where someone gets computer hard drives to play Radiohead's "Nude",
this recording is just the sound of an inkjet printer printing a pdf of Cardew's "Treatise" until it runs out of paper.
There's no special programming, 
and no attempt to get the printer to "play" the work in a way other than the way that naturally happens when you press "Print".

There is something about an inkjet printer that seems to suit a realization of "Treatise" so well.
Human interpretations of "Treatise",
as with most interpretations of graphic scores,
tend to highlight the inability of humans to imagine anything interesting or surprising,
even with a beautiful image in front of them for inspiration.
So it is refreshing to hear a performance which doesn't even try.
In fact, 
although it lacks conventional,
human "imagination",
its repeated,
yet irregular and slowly changing,
swoops over the page show more creativity than the usual "x=time/y=pitch" mappings of the work.
In this interpretation, 
every line is rendered.
And more importantly,
each rendering directly generates a sonic outcome.

Perhaps this interpretation is a bit too showy for my tastes,
we can hear the printer audibly casting the paper onto the floor after finishing each page, 
like a petulant pianist, 
an act which strikes me as slightly too theatrical for a performance so restrained.

But I guess I have to forgive it, 
and like much of this recording,
just submit to the creativity of a machine performing an action that was never designed to be sonically aestheticized.
Submit myself to a non-anthropocentric aesthetic.

With a recording so uninterested in a human response to it, 
a logical question is:
what am I,
as a listener,
meant to get from it?
In answer, 
I submit that old joke about a music obsessive and record collector, 
who is asked whether he likes Captain Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica",
a copy of which he has just been given,
and an album which is widely regarded as one of the best rock albums ever made.
Their answer:
"Not yet."

...

This is the first release by "Much Too Much Noise", 
an entity dedicated to publishing conceptual things in various media.
In many ways, 
this first release embodies the "Much Too Much Noise" ethos:
a work which follows a concept almost to the exclusion of aesthetic good taste and which, 
through its sheer bloody-mindedness, 
brutally imposes its own idea upon the world, 
forcing the listener to catch up and reconfigure the world around it.

...

This recording consists of a single take - the third of the day.
In order that there be as little human involvement as possible in the performance itself,
the paper tray was filled to its maximum and the printer was set printing.
The recording finishes when the paper supply is exhausted.
Hence the subtitle "Tray 1".
For the recording,
the factory default settings on the printer were used.
A second "Tray",
of the remaining pages,
may be produced in the future, 
perhaps with different printer settings.


David Pocknee - 2015-10-18