A guide to Cornelius Cardew's music | Music | The Guardian

11/2/15, 23:57

A guide to Cornelius Cardew's music

This classically trained avant-garde tearaway brought hard-left politics into his music and was
possibly assassinated for it
Tom Service
Monday 17 December 2012 15.48 GMT

A wee warning today: this is a little tune that, once you've heard it, you won't be able to get out
of your head for days, possibly weeks; but then everyone needs some alternative earworms at
this time of year to cleanse their brains of Chris Rea and the Pogues and Slade. It's Cornelius
Cardew's Revolution Is the Main Trend in the World Today comes from Cardew's last period, in
the years before his tragically curtailed life (he was the victim of an unsolved hit-and-run in
1981 at the age of just 45, and may have been targeted for his leftwing political activism read
John Tilbury's
essential biography for more).
Yet in his far too short life, Cardew made one of the most astonishing musical, social and
political journeys in the whole 20th-century music. His student days were spent shocking the
stuffy establishment of the Royal Academy of Music, giving performances such as the British
premiere of Boulez's Structures 1A with Richard Rodney Bennett, and learning the guitar
specifically in order to play the instrument in the first British performance the same
composer's Le marteau san matre as you do. He then became Stockhausen's assistant in the
late 1950s in Cologne, where he was charged with responsibilities that Karlheinz scarcely gave
to any other musician, allowing Cardew to work out the compositional systems of his piece for
four orchestras, Carr.
So what's the link between the tune you heard at the start of this piece, and which is no doubt
going round your head in endless and joyful circles right now, and those musical beginnings? It
seems an unconscionably long way from the music of avant garde immersion that Cardew was
involved in composing, playing and improvising in the 60s (he joined the free improv gurus of
AMM
in 1966) to writing Maoist melodies such as The East Is Red and Smash the Social Contract
more than a decade later. But that's because Cardew's avant garde infatuation was really only
an upbeat to what would become his life's work, attempting new ways of thinking about the
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A guide to Cornelius Cardew's music | Music | The Guardian

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relationship between musical organisation, whether at the level of individual compositions or

institutions, and social and political change.
Which all sounds like a lot of fun, doesn't it? But if the idea of music as proto-political ideology
doesn't float your boat, don't worry: what makes Cardew's work so important is how pieces
such as Treatise
with its 193 pages of beautifully rendered graphic score, each one a creative catalyst for the
compositional and improvisational imaginations of its performers (such as Sonic Youth, here)
or the seven paragraphs of The Great Learning dissolve the distinction between a musical
work and social action. These pieces have symbiotic links between the way the music is
written on the page, the processes the performers have to engage in to play them, the sounds
that an audience hears and the bigger cultural message Cardew is trying to communicate.
Here's what I mean, in perhaps one of the most succinctly powerful pieces of notation ever
conceived: the instructions for Paragraph 7 of The Great Learning
, that huge cycle of pieces that Cardew wrote based on translations of Confucius by Ezra
Pound. The Great Learning required a new kind of performance practice and a new ensemble
too: the hugely influential Scratch Orchestra, a hotbed of musical experimentalism and
political radicalism that only lasted for four years, until Cardew felt that even the Scratchers'
anarchic convictions weren't enough properly to mobilise revolutionary politics in music.
Back to Paragraph 7. What happens in a performance of the piece is that everyone sings a word
of Confucius for a prescribed number of times, sustaining each repetition for the duration of
your individual breath. When you move on to the next line, you take your next pitch from
another vocalist in the group. That means that having started with a completely unpredictable
chordal texture, because everyone sings a note of their own choosing for the very first word,
the pitch content of the piece gradually narrows as notes are shared among the ensemble, until
there's just a single singer and a single note left. (Read the instructions for yourself here.) Every
performance of Paragraph 7 is different in terms of its notes, its length, and the particular
sounds it makes, and yet you can't mistake it for any other piece of music. It's also a piece
that's a rare triumph of musical democracy, because anyone can sing it. Providing you can hold
a note, you can be part of Paragraph 7 and if you've never sung it, get a group of friends to do
it soon; it's much better and more socially and musically fulfilling than any carol service.
But in the 1970s Cardew came to reject Paragraph 7, and indeed everything else he had written
(including not just Treatise and The Great Learning but his earlier and more conventionally
modernist pieces such Bun No 1
) as contributing only to the morbid decay of capitalist oppression. Relentlessly self-critical, he
was also brilliantly uncompromising about everyone else too, and his later musical and
political philosophy is summed up in his book Stockhausen Serves Imperialism. (You can hear
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him talking on the same subject here.) Cardew took the fight to the streets, in his music and in
the literal sense of being involved in anti-fascist protests and social activism, which sometimes
landed him in jail.
And that's where Revolution is the Main Trend comes in. It's easy to patronise these songs that
Cardew wrote, performed and recorded towards the end of his life as socially naive and
musically limited. But I think that's to underestimate them. First of all even if today it looks
like the height of idealistic fancy to think that a few songs, however Maoist and prorevolutionary in their lyrics, could ever contribute meaningfully to the downfall of
international capitalism Cardew's sincerity and his craft are never in doubt. And musically
these tunes, and his performances of them, are much more subtle than they might at first
seem. Listen to his solo piano versions of his own songs and his arrangements of folk tunes to
hear what I mean. Cardew's sensitivity and brilliance as a musician was something that he
never lost, even while attempting to rouse the international working classes. Ironically, his
songs are really too sophisticated to have become popular rallying-cries, and are too demotic in
tone to have been taken seriously enough by the establishment which he anyway reviled.
Cardew's life in music is one of the most important of the 20th century in the questions he asks
and the answers he finds provisional, paradoxical and full of still-to-be-realised potential.

Five key links

The Great Learning: Paragraph 1

Treatise
Revolution Is the Main Trend in the World Today
Bun No 1
Cardew with AMM

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