review 2 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