review The Wire

Cornelius Cardew: A Reader
Edwin Prevost (Editor) COPULA

If you talk with people who knew composer Cornelius Cardew you'll soon be struck by the genuine affection, as well as profound respect, that he generated. It's undoubtedly the case that Cardew was hugely influential in the immediate lives of his friends, irrespective of widely varying temperaments and backgrounds. That in itself is far from negligible, but his reputation as a vital activist in music from the late 1950s until his early death, struck by a car in 1981, remains considerable, and this collection of his written material, edited with characteristic care by AMM percussionist Eddie Prévost, sheds necessary light on the terms of Cardew's broader and more enduring significance.

Prévost has brought together most of Cardew's published writings and occasional pieces, from the essay "Unity Of Musical Space" (1959) to a speech delivered as a representative of the Revolutionary Communist Party Of Britain at an International Youth Concert in London in 1980. As composer Michael Parsons remarks in his "Introduction", Cardew's "trajectory had nothing in common with the conventional career structure of a composer who builds up a consistent body of work, fulfilling the expectations of those who provide him with incentives and commissions".

These articles delineate shifts of emphasis in Cardew's inquiries into the nature and meaning of music, starting with investigation of notation and its interpretation, becoming involved increasingly with improvisation and eventually prioritising unequivocally music's socio-political role. His early interest in Stockhausen, with whom he worked at the end of the 1950s, was superseded in 1974 by rejection of his example, expressed forcefully in "Stockhausen' Serves Imperialism”. After witnessing a concert by John Cage and David Tudor in 1958 Cardew became preoccupied with Cage and his American avant garde associates; that gave way in time to his search for viable popular forms to communicate urgent political messages.

Close reading of philosophers of language, especially Ludwig Wittgenstein, was followed by immersion in key texts of Marxism. However you choose to react to the convolutions of that trajectory, there are in these writings discernible elements of continuity. They display, above all, what American composer Christian Wolff once identified for me as Cardew's "passionate clarity." The critical edge of Cardew's prose is acute. His inquisitiveness had rigor without being clinical; his questioning involved excitement — you can tell from his writing that he cared deeply about the issues he researched.

The concluding section of this book includes useful commentaries, collected from a range of sources, extending from early 1970s reviews of Cardew's ambitiously radical work The Great Learning to recent sleeve notes by cellist Anton Lukoszevieze. Prévost in this section alludes to Cardew’s "determination to humanise music." Pianist John Tilbury, an especially insightful commentator upon his close friend's life and work, points out the importance for Cardew of reading Marxist critic Christopher Caudwell's assertion that art is not "a relation to a thing. It is is a relation between men, between artist and audience, and the art work is only like a machine which they both grasp as part of the process." Cardew had sensed this all along; it's an insight underpinning almost all the material in this Reader, whether the ostensible concern is his involvement with composition of Stockhausen's Carré, performing Feldman's piano music, the making of his own beautiful graphic score Treatise, improvising with AMM or the formation of the idealistically egalitarian Scratch Orchestra.

The spirit that animated Cardew's activism was fostered by this privileged libertarian bohemian upbringing. It coincided with a surge of cultural idealism in England during the decades following post-war austerity. In his later years Cardew took pains to familiarise himself first-hand with conditions of the lives of underprivileged and oppressed people. The importance of Cardew in music and in politics seems to me to be encapsulated in an affirmation made by John Tilbury in a 1983 essay: "For Cardew there were no two ways about it: people could be encouraged, inspired, or even cajoled, but ultimately they had to be trusted to make their own music on the basis of their own background, experience, and attitudes." That openness and confidence are made explicit in this book and they are surely qualities that granted him the trust of others.

Julian Cowley
The Wire October 2006.

review Critical Studies in improvisation

Cornelius Cardew is a legendary figure in the history of the musical avant-garde and British improvised music. Indeed, he is almost like Forrest Gump in those genres: he was Karlheinz Stockhausen’s assistant for two years; he was involved with the pioneering British free improv group AMM for almost ten years; he created and performed numerous ground-breaking notated, indeterminate, and graphic scores; he taught at the Royal Music College in London; and he was a driving force in the creation of the community-based Scratch Orchestra. Then, in the last decade of his life, he rejected it all, turning his political and musical attentions towards Marxist/Leninist communism, with which he remained deeply involved until his early death in 1981 at the age of forty-five.

Eddie Prévost has compiled a wonderful and weighty tome dedicated to the life and work of Cornelius Cardew. As the only consistent member of AMM over its 40-plus year history, Eddie Prévost witnessed Cardew’s mid-60’s to mid-70’s tenure with the group, as well as Cardew’s profound impact on free improvisation and the musical avant-garde in Britain generally.

The book has two sections: the first is an exhaustive collection of Cardew’s published work (articles, reviews, talks, etc.) and some interviews, while the second is a collection of measured and thoughtful essays by a variety of writers on Cardew’s music, philosophy, and legacy.

The introduction, written by Scratch Music co-founder Michael Parsons, sets the stage by providing a brief but thorough overview of Cardew’s music and his Wittgenstein-influenced philosophical positions, as well as the ways in which the latter informed the former.

Cardew’s own writings provide engaging and insightful first-hand observations of many individuals and events associated with the musical avant-garde. For example, of Morton Feldman he writes, “Only when one has become accustomed to the dimness of the light, can one begin to perceive the richness and variety of colour which is the material of the music” (46). Of John Cage, “Cage’s works represents [sic] unquestionably the most important development in musical composition since the war, and will exert more influence on the future evolutions and changes in composition and performance than the work of any European composers” (68). In contrast, Cardew’s Marxist era writings focus primarily on the social and class aspects of modern music. For example, in an essay titled “Wiggly Lines and Wobbly Music,” Cardew savages the tradition of the graphic score, consigning such works to the dustbin of history as socially irrelevant, save a few which he feels are not “a safe refuge for the musically incompetent” (254).

One of Cardew’s most inflammatory essays is his 1974 Marxist polemic, “Stockhausen Serves Imperialism.” This infamous piece is included in this collection with the exception of the first chapter, a history of the Scratch Orchestra written by orchestra member Rod Eley that was withheld at Eley’s request.1 Unfortunately, the Reader does not include any writings that document the transition between Cardew’s pre- and post-Marxist phases. If such writings do exist (perhaps in some of his written correspondence?), they fall outside of the scope of this volume.

The commentaries in the second half of the Reader provide a balanced analysis of Cardew’s music and legacy. Many of the authors represented herein had personal contact with Cardew: Eddie Prévost provides the program notes from Cardew’s Memorial Concert; Scratch Orchestra member and post-Cardew AMM member John Tilbury (who is currently at work on a forthcoming biography of Cardew, also to be published by Copula Press) contributes two articles. Composer and Scratch Orchestra member Brian Dennis discusses Cardew’s epic works, Treatise and The Great Learning, in a pair of essays. The Great Learning is also the subject of a review by celebrated British minimalist composer Michael Nyman. There are entries from other noted composers and performers as well, including Christian Wolff, Anton Lukoszevieze, Christopher Fox, and Richard Barrett.

There is a certain temptation to view Cardew as a tragic figure in light of his significant pre-Marxist body of work that he ultimately discarded. His Marxist-era writings and music are often viewed as unsophisticated, unimaginative, and boring. This narrative is hard to resist especially to those that are sympathetic to—or were directly involved with—the music that Cardew rejected.

In the introduction, Parsons suggests that Cardew’s interest was in the “cruder” vein of Marxist/Leninist thinking, which Parsons sees as an oversight of the links between culture and society that were theorized by Marxist thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Walter Benjamin. “His [Cardew’s] refusal to take account of theoretical work of this kind,” states Parsons, “suggests that he chose to regard Marxism as a fixed and self-justifying doctrine, rather than as a developing tradition of argument and analysis, subject like any other to critical examination and renewal” (xiv).

It could be argued that Cardew’s early activities in the avant-garde were equally as “fixed and self-justifying” as his later political interests. In many ways, he simply traded one set of ideologies for another. Reading the articles in this volume, one thing that cannot be doubted is Cardew’s profound level of commitment to whatever musical and/or political systems of thought he chose to align himself with at different points in his career. Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981): A Reader puts that commitment—and the complex and contradictory personality behind it—on display, blemishes and all, and is therefore a most welcome addition to the growing body of literature on improvised music and the avant-garde.

Notes

1 It is, however, available at the following address along with the rest of Cardew’s essay: http://www.ubuweb.com/historical/cardew/cardew_stockhausen.pdf

Ted Harms
Critical Studies in Improvisation. ISSN: 1712-0624

review Tempo — July 2007

Cornelius Cardew — A Reader edited by Edwin Prévost with an Introduction by Michael Parsons. Copula, Harlow, U.K.

'It is not enough to decorate the world; the point is to influence it. Thus speaks Cornelius Cardew in his passionate and inflammatory tract Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, first published in 1974 and reprinted in the new Cardew Reader. It is a credo that runs through his life's work: music must stir up, awaken consciousness, and conscience, socialise, humanize. For Cardew, music was primarily about people: his lifelong commitment, as John Tilbury remarks, was to social music-making, from the ingenious notational stimuli of the Two Books of Study and Autumn 60, through the provocative beauty and obscurity of Treatise, the years of improvisation with AMM, the formation of the Scratch Orchestra and The Great Learning, and finally the decade of radical left-wing political activism before his early death in 1981. The theme of humanism, andthe complex and sometimes contradictory development it undergoes in Cardew's work, guides the reader through the often labyrinthine twists of his restless, self-questioning thought.

That we are able to penetrate so far into Cardew's musical mind in this book is a testimony both to the thoroughness of its editor, Eddie Prévost, and to the importance Cardew attached to theorizing throughout his working life. There are major writings from every part of his career (some of them, it should be said, currently available elsewhere in print or online),
[The Treatise Handbook is published by Peters edition: Stockhausen Serves Imperialism may be downloaded from www.ubu.com] including numerous early articles, analyses and journal reviews, the 'Report on Stockhausen's Carré' , all of the Treatise Handbook,except Bun no.2 and Volo Solo, the verbal score The Tiger's Mind, the draft constitution of the Scratch Orchestra, articles from his Marxist-Leninist period and the whole of Stockhausen Serves Imperialism (minus the first chapter, which anyway Cardow did not write).[ The Reader also contains a selection of commentaries on Cardew's life and work by Richard Barrett, John Tilbury, Brian Dennis, Michael Nyman, Christian Wolff and others.] Together they reveal (to those of us too young to have experienced it first-hand) his extraordinary articulacy, the creative brilliance of his thinking. as well as the same deep-rooted morality that was to manifest itself so clearly in his life. Cardew is incapable of dissembling. intellectual laziness or sophistry: his prose chips away at doubts and problems, rigorously interrogates, frequently falls silent or admits (temporary) defeat, where others would be. quite satisfied to coin a resonant if empty phrase to fill the space in their understanding.

Articulacy in words was for Cardew a counterpart to his struggle for articulacy in musical notation: they strive side-by-side in his work towards ever-changing ideals of communication, sometimes indeed coming together for the purpose in instruction-scores such as The Tiger's Mind and parts of The Great Learning. 'IN THE NOTATION OF MUSIC YOU ARE DEALING PRIMARILY WITH PEOPLE' he wrote in 1962, and he was quick to realize that his genius lay in his virtuosity in using both words and musical notation to persuade, cajole and inspire creative thought and action in others. From the beginning his ideas and their expression are dazzling. In 'The Unity of Musical Space', written at the age of 23, he writes: “the difference between a world and a tone-row is only quantitative: a stable world with an inverted tone-row in it, and a stable tone-row with an inverted world round it are equivalent phenomena.” Soon such fluent Darmstadt-inspired formulations are abandoned as he discovers the thought — and, crucially, the writings — of Cage and Feldman, and quickly proves their equal in speculative brilliance and insight. The article 'Notation-interpretation, etc.', published in Tempo in 1961 (No. 58 Summer 1961), is especially rich, particularly as Cardew's dual expertise as composer and performer (his instrument was the piano) allows him to ask questions and investigate theoretical dilemmas and subtleties few others could have done.

There is inevitably in these early writings a sense that Cardew is still working through ideas and influences (both from European serialism and the Americans) and yet his own voice, somewhat professorial at times but passionately engaged and rigorous, is remarkably evident. Equally evident is his insistence on an ethical dimension of music-making. the demands (and not simply musical ones) made by indeterminacy on both composer and performer. Frequently this leads to an apprehension of failure. In a lecture on Autumn 60 he laments the insecurity and 'melancholic' air of a performance of the work, attributable, he feels, to the 'transitional' character of the present time with regard to indeterminate music, and his inability to help the musician transcend it. His restlessness drives him to find more successful notations, and finally to abandon conventional notation altogether in the great graphic score, Treatise.

Treatise can be seen as the climax of his philosophical engagement with notation and as a crucial transitional stage to his adoption of free improvisation with AMM. The accompanying Treatise Handbook begins thus:

"6th Feb 63
A composer who hears sounds will try to find a notation for sounds. One who has ideas will find one that expresses his ideas, leaving their interpretation free, in confidence that his ideas have been accurately and concisely notated.
8th Feb 63
Notation is a way of making people move. If you lack others, like
aggression or persuasion. The notation should do it. This is the most rewarding aspect of work on a notation. Trouble is: Just as you find your sounds are too alien, intended 'for a different culture', you make the same discovery about your beautiful notation: no one is willing to understand it. No one moves." (p.99)

Such views are indicative of the direction Cardew's thoughts had taken through the early 1960s, shifting by degrees from the idea of notation as embodying or representing a specific sound, to the idea of notation as a stimulus for interpretation; that is, any notation must take into account the likely or possible interpretation of the performers themselves rather than be imposed from without. A notation must 'mesh with life'.

In Treatise Cardew takes notation's interpretative potential to the limit, avoiding anything that may be literally 'translated' into sound; by the end of the Treatise Handbook he has gone further, doing away with any compositorial mediation whatsoever and espousing free improvisation, proclaiming that the 'writing down of music is in the process of disintegrating.' Ever one to see clearly the extreme points of a situation, he recognized the need to go beyond even what little determination Treatise offers and liberate the performer completely from the constraints of notation. 'We are searching for sounds ... rather than thinking them up,' he wrote of his collaboration with AMM. 'The search is conducted in the medium of sound and the musician himself is at the heart of the experiment.' His beautiful essay Towards an Ethic of Improvisation finally abandons notation theory altogether for 'Virtues that a Musician can Develop': Simplicity, Integrity, Selflessness, Preparedness/ Awakeness, Identification with nature and Acceptance of Death.

In Treatise and AMM Cardew arrived at a radical realization of the limitations of notation and of language itself. After the intense theoretical period of Treatise, there is a noticeable sense of relief as thinking becomes doing, and both his writing and his musical activities become increasingly people-oriented. The composition of his masterpiece The Great Learning, and the foundation of the Scratch Orchestra in 1969 (initially in order to perform Paragraph 2 of that work) set the seal on his all embracing humanism as his search for untrained 'musical innocents' bore fruit in the social music-making of the orchestra. Both the Draft Constitution for the orchestra and the essay 'Scratch Music' speak a language of idealism and freedom. Cardew's subtle prescriptions of games, rules and rites were intended primarily to stimulate the participants to collective- and self-discipline within a liberated musical environment.

By the end of 1971, this brief Eden of collaborative music-making had turned sour, as perceived social contradictions within the orchestra (among other things, Cardew's de facto leadership) were exposed and challenged by its more politically radical members. Cardew, who, as Howard Skempton remarks, treated the Scratch as an 'oracle', was deeply impressed by the politics espoused by his colleagues and soon began to identify with Marxist-Leninist-Maoist principles, committing himself wholeheartedly to proletarian revolution, renouncing all his previous works and denouncing practically the entire musical avant-garde, from Stockhausen to Cage.

The change in tone is shocking. Cajoling is replaced by hectoring. Stimulating is replaced by demanding. Questioning, philosophic enquiry is replaced by brittle assertions of dogma. No longer is Cardew content to 'watch with affection the way people grow'; direct, even violent intervention is now a revolutionary necessity. Only that which serves the people may be countenanced. Cardew's previous attempts to socialize and humanize music, he now believed, were nothing but bourgeois individualism run to seed, the freedom of the artist in capitalist society an illusion that conversely strengthened the prevailing structures of inequality while pretending to undermine them. Michael Parson's, in his magisterial introduction, argues that Cardew's understanding of Marxism was essentially flawed by its simplistic adoption of the dogmas of Maoism. Parsons is worth quoting at length:

"In relying upon Mao's prescriptive and utilitarian attitude to culture and taking his thought as a model of Marxism as such, Cardew ignored
important features of the theoretical and philosophical basis of
Western Marxism. He appealed to Marx's 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, taking it out of its original context and interpreting it as a call to
give up theorising and resort to direct political action. He tried to
understand complex issues in terms of polarised opposites, such as
progressive/reactionary, individual/collective, for/against the
interests of the working class. Some may take this as an example of
(Brechtian)'crude thinking' ... others will have strong reservations
about the use of this oversimplified terminology, with its hectoring
dacticism, its reliance on catch phrases, slogans and generalisations
and its tendencyto argue from foregone conclusions ... In his
enthusiasm for revolutionary change, he ignored the significance of
Western Marxist theory in the domain of culture and politics ... His
refusal to take account of theoretical work of this kind suggests that
he chose to regard Marxism as a fixed and self-justifying doctrine,
rather than as a developing tradition of argument and analysis,
subject like any other to critical examination and renewal." (p.xiv)

Why! The reasons for Cardew's adoption of radical left-wing politics per se are not hard to find. It is a natural step in the development of his humanist aspirations, from the liberation of people’s minds and creativity to the liberation of humanity itself through direct political action. The directness and concreteness of his life and work as an activist is everywhere reflected in the later writings: his gregarious humanity radiates out from behind the slogans, and is testified to in John Tilbury's moving memorial essay. There is no doubt that Cardew's politization and subsequent activism represents in one sense the culmination and crowning achievement of his life's unfinished narrative. Yet the adoption of a narrow, Maoist utilitarianism unsuited to political conditions in Western Europe (though he later renounced it) and his denial of the possibility of radicalism in avant-garde art (however quickly it might be absorbed into the Establishment without constant vigilance) remain deeply problematic.

As Richard Barrett shows in his fine biographical article, Cardew was intent on remaining a composer, but never came close to resolving the question of a Socialist Music, and the interim conclusions of Stockhausen Serves Imperialism are simplistic and untenable. One is tempted to speculate: that this extreme self-repudiation was a felt necessity at the urgency of the political situation to which he had suddenly awoken; that the denial of his own capacity for articulate, independent thought by accepting the theoretical limitations of Maoism acted as a corrective to his previous bourgeois philosophical self-indulgence; that he considered it necessary to act against his own intellectual grain, seeing in its individualistic attractions an ideological hall of mirrors … .

Reading Cardew today, a quarter of a century after his death, the freshness and relevance of his thought to the current artistic and political climate is striking. Idealistic, morally driven, intellectually acute, passionately committed to people, and their capacity to live through their convictions: Cardew has much to tell us, and it is unsurprising to find him — both through his music and his thought — being adopted as a figurehead by a now generation of experimental musicians around the world. His early investigations into notation and improvisation are of exceptional value as theory, returning us to the crucible of experimentalist thought. The texts on the Scratch Orchestra are uniquely inspiring. More surprisingly, the political texts from Stockhausen Serves Imperialism onwards maintain their ability to shock and force the modern reader into a consideration of his or her own position in the world, musically and socially

We may no longer live in a society clearly divided into proletariat and bourgeoisie, but beyond that, little has changed. Cardew's vigorous evisceration of both the structures of international capitalism and those of the musical establishment are as true in essentials now as they ever were. We need Cardew's example to shake us up out of complacency or comfortable despair, back into wakeful confrontation with the world. This is a great and important book that should send the reader back to his music and back to his ideas. If it achieves only academic notoriety or promulgates only a wave of sentimentalizing over the good old days of experiment and action, then it —or we — have failed.

James Weeks
Tempo — July 2007