Cornelius Cardew

Cornelius Cardew (1936-81) was a musician of genius for whom life and art were as one. He was a radical, both artistically and politically, becoming a tireless activist and uncompromising Marxist-Leninist. Passion and imagination governed all he did: his boldness and humanity continue to intrigue and inspire. The author, whose close friendship with Cardew dates from their first concert together, in January 1960, has worked for many years on this biography, and brings his subject vividly to life. In doing this, he has drawn extensively from Cardew's journals and letters, and obtained first-hand accounts from friends and colleagues. The handling of this material is thoughtful and meticulous. Tilbury is a master story-teller and this particular story is of epic scale and character. We begin in 1932, appropriately on May Day, with the first meeting of his parents. Later, we encounter the intrepid schoolboy and student, who impressed sufficiently at the Royal Academy of Music to receive funds to study in Cologne with Karlheinz Stockhausen. The narrative during this period is delightfully picaresque, a colorful prelude to the years of family responsibilities and extraordinary musical endeavor and achievement. As events unfold, discussion of the music is given due weight, but is never unduly weighty.

A notorious, influential and radical critique of the avant-garde music of Stockhausen and Cage, by maverick composer Cornelius Cardew Originally published in 1974, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism is a collection of essays by the English avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew that provides a Marxist and class critique of two of the more revered composers of the postwar era: Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage. A former assistant to Stockhausen and an early champion of Cage, Cardew provides a cutting rebuke of the composers, their work and their ideological positions (Cage's staged anarchism and Stockhausen's theatrical mysticism, in particular). Cardew considers the role of these composers and their works within the development of the 20th-century avant-garde, which he saw as reinforcing an imperialist order rather than spotlighting the struggles of the working class or spurring revolution against bourgeois oppression. Cardew's early works do not escape his own scrutiny, with the book containing critiques and repudiations of his canonical works from the 1960s and early 1970s: Treatise and The Great Learning. After abandoning the avant-garde, Cardew devoted his work to the people's struggle, creating music in service of his radical politics. This music mostly took the form of class-conscious arrangements of folk songs and melodic piano works with such titles as "Revolution is the Main Trend" and "Smash the Social Contract." Cardew maintained a critical cultural stance throughout his life, later going on to denounce David Bowie and punk rock as fascist. He was killed by a hit-and-run driver in 1981--a death that some speculate could have been an assassination by the English government's MI5. Supplementing Cardew's writings are two essays by his Scratch Orchestra collaborators Rod Eley and John Tilbury.

Cornelius Cardew is an enigma. Depending on which sources one consults he is either an influential and iconic figure of British musical culture or a marginal curiosity, a footnote to a misguided musical phenomenon. He is both praised for his uncompromising commitment to world-changing politics, and mocked for being blindly caught up in a maelstrom of naïve political folly. His works are both widely lauded as landmark achievements of the British avant-garde and ridiculed as an archaic and irrelevant footnote to the established musical culture. Even the events of his death are shrouded in mystery and lack a sense of closure. As long ago as 1967, Morton Feldman cited Cardew as an influential figure, central to the future of modern music-making. The extent to which Cardew has been a central figure and a force for new ideas in music forms the backbone to this book. Harris demonstrates that Cardew was an original thinker, a charismatic leader, an able facilitator, and a committed activist. He argues that Cardew exerted considerable influence on numerous individuals and groups, but also demonstrates how the composer's significance has been variously underestimated, undermined and misrepresented. Cardew's diverse body of work and activity is here given coherence by its sharing in the values and principles that underpinned the composer's world view. The apparently disparate and contradictory episodes of Cardew's career are shown to be fused by a cohesive 'Cardew aesthetic' that permeates the man, his politics and his music.

A classic text by a composer who believed that music is meant to be perceived by the eye as much as the ear. Cornelius Cardew cofounded the Scratch Orchestra in 1969 with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons. The orchestra was a culmination of the ideals expressed in Cardew's own innovative and experimental music through the 1960s. Scratch Music is a collection of the repertory the Scratch Orchestra created. Brought back into print with a new preface by John Harries and Sharon Gal, this reissued edition of a classic work makes a key title in sound studies available to new audiences. Scratch Music is as much graphic and visual as it is musical and descriptive. After all, scratch music itself is meant to be perceived by the eye and all the senses--not just by ear--so the notation used in preparing the scores for performance might be be graphic, collage, verbal, or musical. The scores in Scratch Music are composed of written words, photographs, maps, graphs, diagrams, musical flow charts, conventional musical notation, whimsical drawings, playing cards, crossword puzzles, and other devices. Contemporary musicians, artists, and critics have long recognized both Cardew's music and this text as influential and significant. Scratch Music demonstrates the extraordinary richness of this particular compositional matrix, and gives the reader a sense of the excitement and creative vibrancy of a scratch music event.

"Any direction modern music will take in England will come about only through Cardew, because of him, by way of him. If the new ideas in music are felt today as a movement in England, it's because he acts as a moral force, a moral centre." This is Morton Feldman's assessment of Cardew's importance, an assessment that took on prophetic status when Cardew cofounded the Scratch Orchestra in 1969. This orchestra was a culmination of the ideals expressed in Cardew's own music in the 1960s when, working in almost total isolation from the musical establishment, he patiently drew together a large group of composers and performers into experimental music through his own compositional activities and through teaching. This group became the nucleus of the orchestra. The draft constitution of the Scratch Orchestra opens as follows: "Definition:A Scratch Orchestra is a large number of enthusiasts pooling their resources (not primarily material resources) and assembling for action (music-making, performance, edification). "Note:The word music and its derivatives are here not understood to refer exclusively to sound and related phenomena (hearing, etc).What they do refer to is flexible and depends entirely on the members of the Scratch Orchestra. "The Scratch Orchestraintends to function in the public sphere, and this function will be expressed in the form of—for lack of a better word—concerts." This lively book on the repertory the orchestra created is as much graphic and visual as it is verbal and about aural events and happenings. This is because scratch composers are often possessed of strong visual imaginations—after all, scratch music itself (as the above "Note" suggests) is meant to be perceived by the eye and indeed by all the senses and not just by the ear (the sensual mix varies from one composition to another). Also, the notation used in preparing scores for actual performance may be graphic, collage, verbal, musical, or whatnot. The main body of the book depicts a selection of such scores. They are composed of written words, photographs, maps, graphs, diagrams, musical flow charts, conventional musical notation, whimsical drawings, playing cards, crossword puzzles, and various other things. Together, they give the reader some idea of what it is like to put on a scratch music event.

John Cage's disdain for records was legendary. He repeatedly spoke of the ways in which recorded music was antithetical to his work. In Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs argues that, following Cage, new genres in experimental and avant-garde music in the 1960s were particularly ill suited to be represented in the form of a recording. These activities include indeterminate music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live electronic music, free jazz, and free improvisation. How could these proudly evanescent performance practices have been adequately represented on an LP? In their day, few of these works circulated in recorded form. By contrast, contemporary listeners can encounter this music not only through a flood of LP and CD releases of archival recordings but also in even greater volume through Internet file sharing and online resources. Present-day listeners are coming to know that era's experimental music through the recorded artifacts of composers and musicians who largely disavowed recordings. In Records Ruin the Landscape, Grubbs surveys a musical landscape marked by altered listening practices.