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 His early interest in Stockhausen, with whom he worked at the end of the 1950s, was superseded in 1974 by rejection of his example, expressed forcefully in "Stockhausen' Serves Imperialismâ€. 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.