Cornelius Cardew 1936 - 1981
“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.â€
‘Conversations without Stravinsky', Morton Feldman, 1967
Cornelius Cardew was born in Gloucestershire in 1936. His mother was a painter, his father a potter, a pioneering figure in the English craft renaissance of the mid-20th century. After an archetypally English musical education (from cathedral chorister to the Royal Academy of Music to study piano, cello and composition), Cardew went to Cologne to study electronic music and within a year was Stockhausen's assistant, notably completing the score of Carré from Stockhausen's composition plans and later giving the premiere of Plus Minus. More than any other English composer of his generation, he wholeheartedly absorbed the possibilities of the post-war avant-garde, both European and American, into his compositional language, producing a series of strikingly original piano works including three sonatas (1955-8) and the Two Books of Study for Pianists (1958). By the early 1960s, however, his aesthetic sympathies were shifting from Stockhausen's determinism to the indeterminacy of John Cage. He returned to London, took a course in graphic design and was at the centre of radical music-making in Britain for the next decade.
In the succession of beautiful graphic scores which Cardew made during this period he explored different ways in which marks on paper could release musicians' creativity. Octet '61 (1961), Memories of You (1964), Solo with Accompaniment (1964), Schooltime Compositions (1968) and, above all, Treatise (1963-7) all offer a fascinating mixture of more or less explicit instructions with visually beguiling notational designs - graphic and verbal riddles challenging their interpreters' imaginations. At the same time Cardew was becoming increasingly interested in free improvisation and in 1966 he became a member of the improvising group AMM. His activities as a composer continued but he turned from the enigmatic scores of the mid-’60s to something more
straight-forwardly explicit, a setting of Ezra Pound's translation of Confucius, The Great Learning (1967-70) designed for
performance by large groups of musicians and
non-musicians alike. Each of the seven sections of The Great Learning is based on a 'Paragraph' from Confucius and, like the text, offers a model of collective responsibility articulated through different forms of musical interaction.
In May 1969 Cardew organised the first performance of the ‘Second Paragraph’, drawing together over fifty participants from a wide variety of backgrounds. Out of this gathering grew the Scratch Orchestra, a group that carried on working together only until 1972 but in that short time acquired
legendary significance in the history of English experimental music. The Scratch Orchestra was as much a forum for the exchange of ideas as it was a performing group and in the intense ideological climate of the late-60s debate within the group became highly politicised, a process documented in Cardew's book Stockhausen Serves Imperialism (1974). In the Scratch Orchestra's performance of the first two paragraphs of The Great Learning at the 1972 Promenade concerts Cardew revised the Confucian texts to reflect his now Marxist-Leninist views on social responsibility and order. In the years that followed he went on to denounce not only this revision but all the music he had produced so far as the work of 'a politically backward composer wrapped up in the abstractions of the avantgarde' and instead he concentrated on political activity, becoming a founder member of the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1979. His musical output became avowedly functional: he wrote many songs for specific political campaigns and also returned to the piano, writing a series of rhapsodies and variations on popular tunes.
On December 13, 1981 Cornelius Cardew died, knocked down by a hit-and-run driver in Leyton, London. His killer has never been identified. The radical shift in idiom and aesthetic in Cardew's late music, together with his combative political stance, led to him being increasingly marginalised within the new music world. Since his death, however, his reputation has steadily grown, not only through the advocacy of his
colleagues, students, family and friends, but also through the work of younger generations of musicians like those of Apartment House who have responded to the creative
challenges offered in his scores and writings. We no longer have the chance to encounter Cardew's charismatic
personality at first hand but we can still come to know it through the uncompromising imaginative intensity of his music.
Christopher Fox 2001
Cornelius Cardew - Indeterminate Works
It goes without saying that Cornelius Cardew was a major 'force' in British contemporary music. This would include his work on notation, his playing, his polemics, and also his active engagement in promoting experimental music. He was instrumental in making available works which otherwise would not have been heard in this country. I suspect his reputation as charismatic catalyst may have hindered his own works being taken as seriously as they deserved. This situation, of course was exacerbated by Cardew's embrace - dramatically - of radical politics and the public denunciation of his own earlier work. In the years immediately following his death it was this chasm between early and late work that was focused upon, which was endlessly talked about often at the expense of hearing the music. Those who consistently performed Cardew in those years (and still do), were predominantly his close associates: AMM and John Tilbury, who would characteristically turn out brilliant performances of Treatise or the early piano music. More recently the situation has changed, a wider net of performers are now engaged with Cardew's early work; and this is in tune with the nature of those pieces - with the increased possibility of a kind of maximum interpretative potential being realised.
What lies at the heart of Cardew's early work is his
restlessness, a searching quality, and his tendency not to shy away from conundrums and contradictions. One such
contradiction, which underpins many of the works
represented on this CD, is the relationship between
pragmatism and idealism (perhaps a secret thread which links the earlier and later work.) Cardew's own writings are energised by this duality. His attempts at addressing
practical, concrete, performative problems and the
consideration of more abstract philosophical issues
characterised Cardew's approach to indeterminacy. This marks out Cardew's approach as authentic interventions within the genre rather than - as with so many European composers at this time - a passing fad. Cardew had strong links, as friend, colleague, and performer, with other
composers working in this way, most notably the Americans - Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown - all
colleagues of John Cage. Each of these - Cardew included - developed their own solutions to the problems of 'Open Form' or Indeterminacy.
Four compositions which were originally published together by Universal Edition in 1967 were presented with a prefatory note by Cardew which proves a useful source for understanding his intentions: Autumn 60, Solo with Accompaniment, Memories of You, and Material are discussed together by Cardew, suggesting that "these pieces stand to one another in a relation of mutual support and enrichment; experience gained from one is of vital importance in interpreting the others." He makes it clear that a very active participation is required with these pieces; the performer has to be an active interpreter, on a par, at times, with the composer: "Nobody" he says, "can be involved with this music in a merely professional capacity." Standing at the head of these compositions is Autumn 60. It is a brilliant exercise in persuading individual participation. It consists of a chain of various sections, in which each beat of every bar holds often contradictory performing instructions, potentially generating differing musical events. As Cardew explains: "The musical potentialities of Autumn 60 cannot be fully exploited in a single performance…the number of possible solutions for even a single beat far exceeds the number of musicians that can be got together for a performance…"
The implications of a piece like Autumn 60 might parallel what Umberto Eco referred to as a 'work-in-movement' - work which is never 'closed', a performative event in which composer and performers unite in working within the piece's various limitations: "The 'work-in-movement' is the possibility of numerous different personal interventions, but it is not an amorphous invitation to indiscriminate participation. The
invitation offers the performer the opportunity for an oriented insertion into something which always remains the world intended by the author." What was the world intended by Cardew for Autumn ‘60 ? Generally, the generated sound world has a fragmented, pointillistic atmosphere. Tying in with Eco's description, Cardew reminds us: "The criterion of a good performance is not completeness (i.e. perfection) but rather the lucidity of its incompleteness." This holds true for
Autumn 60 and the other works in this set. Material, rather than exploring timbral discontinuities or interconnections, concentrates more on harmonic density and rhythmic
flexibility. Solo with Accompaniment on the other hand offers a reversal of the usual hierarchy associated with these
designations: the accompaniment is highly complex, the solo is relatively simple. It is Memories of You where the composer breaks almost completely with the traditional mould of
notational practice: "More aggressive, tougher, simpler in conception." The notation consists of various chains of circles each housing a diagrammatic outline of a grand piano; on each of these notations appear points which refer to the positions in space where a sound can either be initiated or stopped. Cardew suggests three objects to be utilised in making these sounds. It is a terse statement of interpretative freedom and the restraint of basic ground rules. Such a piece is difficult to pull off, and might end up as visual as it is aural.
These pieces create a coherent and cohesive statement of Cardew's approach to indeterminacy. They set in motion his dual attention to extreme pragmatism and philosophical, even utopian, ideals. They are subtle essays in how one might initiate a skeletal framework to be fleshed out, to be made corporeal, by future generations. Cardew referred to this as 'growth mechanisms': i.e. how changing performance
practice and musical outlooks can be accommodated by compositional activity. It is a balance between 'cogent explicitness' and 'sufficient flexibility' rather than a fully
notated 'self contained' piece:
"The best guarantee for survival would be a completely self contained, closed logical system for each piece. Such
systems might be rediscovered, even after a lapse of
thousands of years, in a state of preservation comparable to Egyptian mummies. But however beautifully preserved they would nevertheless be dead, their language and meaning forgotten. So these little systems - these pieces - are not self contained; like seeds, they depend on the surrounding soil for nourishment, they are irremovably embedded in their environment which is the musical situation today."
David Ryan 2001
Cornelius Cardew - Early Works
The works on this CD represent arguably the most
experimental and radical works to come out of Britain in the past 40 years. Cornelius Cardew's scores from the early 1960's are notable for their elegant, original and precise notational scores, labyrinthine blueprints for realisation as totally new and original compositions. They are open to ever new interpretations whose possibilities are restricted only by the creativity of the performer. It is this responsibility laid at the feet of the performer that contributes to their originality and beauty. Through performing and organising these scores I am convinced that some of them only really 'live' (notably Octet '61 for Jasper Johns and Solo with Accompaniment) when the interpreted material is welded together by the use of spontaneous improvisation.
Second String Trio and Three Rhythmic Pieces for trumpet and piano (1955)
These two early student works by Cardew are fascinating in their brevity and Webernesque economy of execution. Subtly crafted, they have a fragmentary elusiveness which seems to foreshadow the expressive disjointedness of the later works on this recording.
Autumn 60 (1960)
In this work the conductor subverts his normal role: he can give clear beats or vague beats, increase or decrease tempi, change the order of sections and even stop conducting altogether. The players are also allowed the possibility of ignoring or observing the written music and signs, as well as introducing their own material into the performance. Cardew maintains a skeleton of his own pitch material which will, by chance, remain just in and out of focus.
Octet '61 for Jasper Johns (1961)
The dedication to the American artist Jasper Johns reflects the obvious similarities between the embedded numbers in the sixty graphic signs of Cardew's score and Johns' number-overlaid drawings and paintings, which Cardew had seen at an exhibition in Paris in 1960. In this version I have taken Cardew's use of overlaid numbers as a starting point, so that we hear different parts of the sixty signs in the score played simultaneously, overlaid in a multi-track recording. I have taken Cardew's notation, realised it and doused it with my own spontaneity and improvisatory consciousness, adopting the use of a transistor radio at one point, in an attempt to get to what I perceive to be the heart of the matter.
Piece for Guitar (for Stella) (1961)
Much of Cardew's music developed out of his own activities as a performer and he had learned to play the guitar so that he could play in the British premiere of Boulez' Le Marteau sans Maître. The guitar piece (for Stella) (1961) contains music found in his earlier First Movement for String Quartet from 1961 and has a mobile form of 16 fragments, which the
guitarist can play freely, repeat 'over and over', or even change.
Material (1964)
Material is just that, musical 'material' for any instruments capable of playing the dense chromatic chords in the score, which is a transcription of Cardew's Third Orchestra Piece (1960). The beginning is conducted briefly and then the
musicians are left on their own to 'play', listen and wander about musically in a cool, hocketing and resonant
indeterminate universe.
Solo with Accompaniment (1964)
This score could be read as a critique of Stockhausen's
Plus Minus, which Cardew premiered with Frederic Rzewski in 1964, and like Plus Minus it consists of graphic matrices accompanied by an explanatory text and instructions. There the similarity ends. Few scores come anywhere near the ingenuity of Solo with Accompaniment, with its droll, ironic instrumental dialectic and subtle 'crossword' notation.
Memories of You (1964)
This is perhaps one of the strangest and most austere pieces on this CD. Memories of who? John Cage? The score offers nothing more than a series of circles, each of which contains the outline shape of a grand piano and a dot to represent an activity in, on or around the piano. The graphic symbol for the piano is similar to the dotted outline piano shapes found in Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957-58) and Cardew, along with his pianist colleague, John Tilbury, was instrumental in introducing Cage's music into Britain. Sounds as themselves, floating in the acoustic space, like the music of another American, Morton Feldman.
Anton Lukoszevieze 2001
Apartment House was created by the cellist Anton Lukoszevieze in 1995. Since then it has established itself as the leading British exponent of avant-garde and experimental music from around the world. Apartment House performances embrace radical elements of avant-garde and experimental music creating a wide range of acoustical and theatrical situations within which volatile and stimulating performances occur. The seeds of the Apartment House repertoire stem from the hard-core European avant-garde, the joyful anarchy of The Scratch Orchestra, and the exploratory nature of experimental music. The Apartment House ensemble is of flexible instrumentation, allowing for a vast range of performance possibilities. Apartment House has made many radio broadcasts for BBC Radio 3 and appeared at many international festivals. Events in 2001 included ‘a Clarence Barlow Portrait’ at the Hoxton New Music Days, London, workshops and performances at the GAS Festival, Gothenburg, Sweden and a Cornelius Cardew Retrospective at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. In 2002 they appear at the Wittener Musik Tage, Germany, Ultima Festival, Oslo, present a Sylvano Bussotti/Luc Ferrari event for the Hoxton New Music Days and make a tour of Russia.
APARTMENT HOUSE
Gordon MacKay - violin (7) Bridget Carey - viola (7)
Anton Lukoszevieze - cello/conductor (1, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11,12)
Alan Thomas - guitar (1, 5, 8,11)
Rhodri Davies - harp (5, 11)
Marco Blaauw - trumpet (2, 3, 4)
Andrew Sparling - clarinet (5, 11)
David Ryan - bass clarinet/piano (5, 10, 11)
Sarah Walker - piano/prepared piano (2, 3, 4, 5. 6, 7, 9, 11)
Dave Smith - prepared piano/melodica (6, 9)
Tania Chen - piano (6, 9)
Robert Coleridge - organ (9,)
Michael Parsons - conductor/electronic keyboard (5, 9, 11) Simon Allen - vibraphone/marimba (9)
CD Order
1. Solo with Accompaniment (1964)
2. Three Rhythmic Pieces for trumpet and piano (1955) Movement I 3. Movement II 4. Movement III
5. Autumn '60 (1960) Version I
6. Material (1964) Version II
7. Second String Trio (1955)
8. Piece for Guitar (for Stella) (1961)
9. Material (1964) Version I
10. Memories of You (1964)
11. Autumn '60 (1960) Version II
12. Octet '61 for Jasper Johns
Publishers
Peters Edition Ltd. 5, 10 Universal Edition 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9
Unpublished 2, 6
Credits and thanks
Recording /Editing Steve Lowe - Gateway Studio
Editing - Anton Lukoszevieze, Alan Thomas
The Britten-Pears Foundation
Eddie Prévost, Michael Parsons, John Tilbury
Universal Ediiton for the use of the CD cover image