Arcana New Music Ensemble is excited to be performing Cornelius Cardew’s groundbreaking work Treatise at The Rotunda.

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 is thrilled to be part of Pure Lucia – Night 2: Duende Otherness, the second night of a two-part program celebrating the work of composer Lucia Dlugoszewski presented by Bowerbird and FringeArts. This program traces Dlugoszewski’s artistic trajectory from her mid-career works, composed after firmly establishing her collaboration with choreographer Erick Hawkins, to the culminating masterworks of her later years. Featuring chamber music, solo works, and choreography, the evening highlights Dlugoszewski’s radical approach to sound, her inventive instrumentation, and her lifelong pursuit of new sonic possibilities. Performers include Either/Or Ensemble, trumpeter Peter Evans, Arcana New Music Ensemble, pianist Agnese Toniutti, the Daedalus Quartet, and the Erick Hawkins Dance Company.

Lucia Dlugoszewski’s name is pronounced LOO-sha dwoo-goh-SHEF-skee.

CONCERT PROGRAM

All music by LUCIA DLUGOSZEWSKI (1925 – 2000)

Lords of Persia (1965)
Either/Or
– Christa Van Alstine, clarinets
– Tiago Linck, trumpet
– Matt Melore, bass trombone
– Lauren Cauley, violin
– Russell Greenberg, percussion
– Chris McIntyre, conductor

Space is a Diamond (1970)
Peter Evans, trumpet

Excerpts from Black Lake (1969)
Arcana New Music Ensemble
– Jonathan Leeds, clarinet
– Molly Germer, violin
– Ju-Ping Song, timbre piano
– Andy Thierauf, percussion

INTERMISSION

Exacerbated Subtlety Concert (Why Does a Woman Love a Man?) (1997/2000)
Agnese Toniutti, timbre piano

Disparate Stairway Radical Other (1995)
For string quartet with five dancers; choreography *Elusive Pierce* by Katherine Duke

Daedalus Quartet
– Min-Young Kim, violin
– Matilda Kaul, violin
– Jessica Thompson, viola
– Thomas Kraines, cello

Erick Hawkins Dance Company
– Jason Hortin
– Hayley Meier
– JR Gooseberry
– Halie Landers
– Rylee Lucero

This event is part of PURE LUCIA, a retrospective of the life and work of Lucia Dlugoszewski. View the program for the previous night: Pure Lucia – Night 1: Quidditas Suchness

PROGRAM NOTES

The program opens with Lords of Persia (1965), performed by the New York-based Either/Or Ensemble. Written for a dance by Hawkins, the piece reflects Dlugoszewski’s deep interest in the Japanese concept of Nageire, which she described as a process of “flinging in” musical materials with a sense of reckless asymmetry.

Space is a Diamond (1970), performed by trumpeter Peter Evans, is one of Dlugoszewski’s most celebrated works. Composed for Gerard Schwarz, an early champion of her music, it remains one of the few pieces she published commercially and one of the most widely recognized in her catalog. The work demands extraordinary virtuosity, employing extended trumpet techniques, including extreme registers, rapid mute changes, and sweeping glissandi. Through these innovations, Dlugoszewski transformed the trumpet’s sonic identity, expanding its expressive range in ways that were groundbreaking for the time.

Philadelphia’s Arcana New Music Ensemble presents excerpts from Black Lake (1969), another work composed for a Hawkins dance. Dlugoszewski’s compositional style often reflected a fusion of Eastern and Western philosophical ideas, and Black Lake is no exception. Structured as a series of short movements, the work incorporates forms such as the fugue and chaconne alongside concepts drawn from Eastern aesthetics, including sabin, wabi, and p’o—ideas that emphasize imperfection, transience, and the expressive qualities of restraint. The piece also showcases some of Dlugoszewski’s most distinctive invented percussion instruments, including Ladder Harps, Tangent Rattles, and Square Drums, which lend the music an unmistakably original timbral palette.

Following intermission, pianist Agnese Toniutti performs Exacerbated Subtlety Concert (Why Does a Woman Love a Man?) (1997/2000), one of Dlugoszewski’s final completed works. This composition represents the culmination of nearly five decades of exploration and refinement in her approach to the timbre piano, a radical reimagining of the instrument that she developed through extended techniques and unconventional playing methods.

The evening concludes with Disparate Stairway Radical Other (1995), a work of rhythmic intensity and vivid textures for string quartet and five dancers, performed by the Daedalus Quartet and the Erick Hawkins Dance Company. Originally composed for Hawkins’s dance *Journey of a Poet*, this performance features new choreography by Katherine Duke, current artistic director of the Erick Hawkins Dance Company and a direct artistic descendant of both Hawkins and Dlugoszewski. A defining work in Dlugoszewski’s late career, the music brims with energy, constantly shifting between bold instrumental colors and striking timbral contrasts.

Duende, a concept famously explored by Federico García Lorca, speaks to an almost mystical force in artistic expression—an intensity that arises from deep emotional, physical, and even existential struggle. It is not simply passion or virtuosity but something raw, primal, and unpredictable, emerging from the tension between beauty and darkness, control and surrender. Otherness, in contrast, suggests a state of being outside the familiar, an estrangement from conventional frameworks that allows for new modes of perception and experience.

The program title Duende Otherness reflects Lucia Dlugoszewski’s pursuit of music that resists the expected and embraces the unknown. Duende evokes the visceral, almost physical energy of sound as a living force, while Otherness signals her commitment to breaking away from inherited traditions, whether through new instrumental techniques, unconventional structures, or her rejection of narrative in favor of pure sensory immediacy. In her work, sound does not represent or signify—it becomes, vibrating at the edge of the unfamiliar, inviting the listener into an experience beyond certainty.