The Legacy Of Cornelius Cardew

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.

The composer and pianist Michael Finnissy (b. 1946) is an unmistakeable presence in the British and international new music scene, both for his immeasurable generosity as prolific composer for many different types of musicians, major advocate for the works of others, and performer and conductor who has also been a driving force behind ensembles; he was also President of the International Society for Contemporary Music from 1990 to 1996. His vast and enormously varied output confounds those who seek easy categorisations: once associated strongly with the ‘new complexity’, Finnissy is equally known as composer regularly engaged with many different folk musics, for working with amateur and community musicians, for a long-term engagement with sacred music, or as an advocate of Anglo-American ‘experimental’ music. Twenty years ago, a large-scale volume entitled Uncommon Ground: The Music of Michael Finnissy gave the first major overview of the output of any ‘complex’ composer. This new volume brings a greater plurality of perspectives and critical sensibility to bear upon an output which is almost twice as large as it was when the earlier book was published. A range of leading contributors – musicologists, composers, performers and others – each grapple with particular questions relating to Finnissy’s music, often in ways which raise questions relating more widely to new music, and provide theoretical foundations for further of study both of Finnissy and other composers.

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 collection of Cardew's published writings.

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.

In this first of a groundbreaking multivolume set, THE MCCARTNEY LEGACY, VOL 1: 1969-73 captures the life of Paul McCartney in the years immediately following the dissolution of the Beatles, a period in which McCartney recreated himself as both a man and a musician. Informed by hundreds of interviews, extensive ground up research, and thousands of never-before-seen documents THE MCCARTNEY LEGACY, VOL 1 is an in depth, revealing exploration of McCartney’s creative and personal lives beyond the Beatles. When Paul McCartney issued a press release in April 1970 announcing that the world’s most beloved band, the Beatles, had broken up no one could have predicted that McCartney himself would go on to have one of the most successful solo careers in music history. Yet in the years after the Fab Four disbanded, Paul McCartney became a legend in his own right. Now journalist and world-renowned Beatles’ historian Allan Kozinn and award-winning documentarian Adrian Sinclair chronicle in technicolor McCartney’s pivotal years from 1969 to 1973, as he recreated himself in the immediate aftermath of the Beatles breakup – a period when, newly married and with a growing family, he conquered depression and self-doubt, formed a new band, Wings, and recorded five epochal albums culminating in the triumphant smash, Band on the Run. Part 1 of a multivolume set, THE MCCARTNEY LEGACY, VOL. 1 documents a pivotal moment in the life of a man whose legacy grows increasingly more relevant as his influence on music and pop culture remains as relevant as ever. It is the first truly comprehensive biography, and the most finely detailed exploration of McCartney’s creative life beyond the Beatles, ever undertaken.