Cardrew On Wittgenstein

Cornelius Cardrew: Towards An Ethic of Improvisation

In his later writing Wittgenstein has abandoned theory, and all the glory that theory can bring on a philosopher (or musician), in favour of an illustrative technique. The following is one of his analogies:

"Do not be troubled by the fact that languages a. and b. consist only of orders. If you want to say that this shews [sic] them to be incomplete, ask yourself whether our language is complete;-whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notations of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses."

"A city analogy can also be used to illustrate the interpreter's relationship to the music he is playing. I once wrote: "Entering a city for the first time you view it at a particular time of day and year, under particular weather and light conditions. You see its surface and can form only theoretical ideas of how this surface was moulded. As you stay there over the years you see the light change in a million ways, you see the insides of houses-and having seen the inside of a house the outside will never look the same again. You get to know the inhabitants, maybe you marry one of them, eventually you are inhabitant- a native yourself. You have become part of the city. If the city is attacked, you go to defend it; if it is under siege, you feel hunger - you are the city. When you play music, you are the music."


{Extracted from: http://www.ubu.com/papers/cardew_ethics.html}