Bowerbird is pleased to present the Arcana New Music Ensemble as it revisits Cornelius Cardew’s groundbreaking work Treatise at The Rotunda. In November 2025 the ensemble performed about 20 pages of the 200 page work; this year the ensemble will perform a different set of pages accompanied with projections of the score.
Composed between 1962-1967, Treatise employs an entirely graphic score with symbols that at times looks like a traditional staff and clef and even note heads then morphs into beautiful esoteric shapes, curved lines, and large black dots, among others. Without any instruction for performance and almost 200 pages long, the work requires careful discussion and interpretation by the musicians to realize the work.
ARCANA NEW MUSIC ENSEMBLE
Nicholas Handahl – flute
Noa Even – saxophone
Melinda Rice – violin
Carlos Santiago – violin
Alyssa Almeida – cello
Andy Thierauf – percussion
ABOUT THE COMPOSER
Cardew was born into a family of artists in 1936. He grew up in Cornwall, England where until his admittance, at age 17, to the Royal Academy of Music in London. Trained as a pianist and cellist, Cardew had a great interest in the new ideas that were beginning to bloom around contemporary music at that time. He taught himself guitar so that he could take part in the British premiere of Pierre Boulez’s early complex masterwork Le marteau sans maître. As a young composer, Cornelius immersed himself in the hyper-serialist works of Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, while also exploring the emerging discipline of composition for electronics. This latter interest led to his attendance of the Studio for Electronic Music in Köln where he began his relationship as Stockhausen’s assistant, most notably working with the German on the score to his massive work for four orchestras and choirs: Carré.
After hearing a concert of John Cage and David Tudor in 1958 Cardew turned away from the structure of Boulez and Stockhausen toward the new languages of indeterminate music being explored by Cage, Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, and Earle Brown. It is arguable that Cardew took the graphic score and performer weighted composition of the New York school to a logical conclusion with works like the text based composition The Great Learning and Treatise. These compositions, by withholding interpretation of the signs that make up the scores, removed the expectation in performance to a much greater degree than most of his peers and predecessors.
In 1966, he joined AMM, an experimental improvising group in London with an instrumentation that grew around the central figures of Eddie Prévost, John Tilbury, and Keith Rowe. Even though the group maintained a strict improvisatory ideal, it featured Christian Wolff at one point, as well as Cardew. This relationship seems to have had a hand into leading Cardew further away from traditionally notated composition toward his graphic notation work of the 1960s.
In 1969, as a result of The Great Learning, Cardew formed The Scratch Orchestra with like-minded composers Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton. This group favored a populist approach to performance, featuring a combination of trained and untrained musicians, professed a “reverse seniority” hierarchy (or anti-hierarchy) and relied on graphic rather than traditional notation so that anyone could participate. The group operated until about 1974 at which time the politics of the group were leading to new avenues and a third period of activity and redefinition for Cardew.
Beginning in the early 1970s, Cardew concentrated his musical efforts on the political by creating music whose purpose was simultaneously populist, Marxist, Maoist, and also critical of the excesses of the avant-garde tradition represented by Stockhausen and Cage. Moving from hyper-serialism to the new rigor of graphic notation, Cardew’s music from this last period took English folk music tradition as the delivery system for populist political statements such as We Sing for the Future and Smash the Social Contract. Cardew was a co-founding member of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain starting in 1979 and his political commitment began to overtake his musical output, culminating in controversial text Stockhausen Serves Imperialism. He died on December 13, 1981; the victim of a mysterious hit and run car accident. The driver was never located.
Arcana New Music Ensemble is a group of Philadelphia-based musicians dedicated to presenting interesting, beautiful, and unconventional music in interesting, beautiful, and unconventional places. Founded in 2015, the chamber ensemble is dedicated to contemporary classical music performing works by living composers and to reexamine music from the past, often focusing on composers whose work has been overlooked. A hallmark of Arcana’s programming is its frequent use of portrait concerts, which allow the ensemble to explore a composer’s work in depth. These programs balance music by widely recognized composers with works by those who are less well known or historically underrepresented.
Admission is FREE/pay-what-you-wish