Cornelius Cardew

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Cornelius Cardew (May 7, 1936 – London, December 13, 1981) was an English avant-garde composer, and founder (with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons) of the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental performing ensemble.

Cardew was born in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire. He was the second of three sons whose parents were both artists — his father was potter Michael Cardew. The family moved to Wenford Bridge Pottery Cornwall a few years after his birth where he was later accepted as a pupil by the Canterbury Cathedral School which had evacuated to the area during the war due to bombing. His musical career thus began as a chorister. From 1953-57, Cardew studied piano, cello, and composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. In 1957, he performed in the British premiere of Pierre Boulez's Le Marteau sans maître (having learnt to play the guitar for the occasion as no professional guitar player was available). Having won a scholarship to study at the newly established Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, Cardew served as an assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen from 1958 to 1960. He was given the task of independently working out the composition plans for the German composer's score Carré, and Stockhausen noted:

As a musician he was outstanding because he was not only a good pianist but also a good improviser and I hired him to become my assistant in the late 50s and he worked with me for over three years. I gave him work to do which I have never given to any other musician, which means to work with me on the score I was composing. He was one of the best examples that you can find among musicians because he was well informed about the latest theories of composition as well as being a performer.

In 1958, Cardew witnessed a series of concerts in Cologne by John Cage and David Tudor which had a considerable influence on him, leading him to abandon post-Schönbergian serial composition and develop the indeterminate and experimental scores for which he is best known. He was particularly prominent in introducing the works of American Avant-Garde composers such as Morton Feldman, La Monte Young, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, and Cage to an English audience during the early to mid sixties and came to have a considerable impact on the development of English music from the late sixties onwards.

Cardew's most important scores are Treatise (1963-67), a 192-page graphic score which allows for considerable freedom of interpretation, and The Great Learning, a work in seven parts or "Paragraphs," based on translations of Confucius by Ezra Pound. The Great Learning instigated the formation of the Scratch Orchestra.

In 1966, Cardew joined the free improvisation group AMM which had formed the previous year and included English jazz musicians Lou Gare, Eddie Prévost, and Keith Rowe. Performing with the group allowed Cardew to explore music in a completely democratic environment, freely improvising without recourse to scores.

While teaching an experimental music class at London's Morley College in 1968, Cardew, along with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons formed the Scratch Orchestra a large experimental ensemble, initially for the purposes of interpreting Cardew's The Great Learning. The Scratch Orchestra gave performances throughout Britain and elsewhere until its demise in 1972. It was during this period that the question of art from whom was hotly debated within the context of the Orchestra, which Cardew came to see as elitist despite its numerous attempts to make socially accessible music. Following the demise of the Orchestra, Cardew became more directly involved in left-wing politics and abandoned avant-garde music altogether, adopting a populist though post-romantic tonal style. He spent 1973 in West Berlin on an artist's grant from the City, where he was active in a campaign for a children's clinic. During the 1970s, he produced many songs, often drawing from traditional English folk music put at the service of lengthy Marxist-Maoist exhortations; representative examples are Smash the Social Contract and There Is Only One Lie, There Is Only One Truth. In 1974, he published a book entitled Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, which denounced, in Maoist self-critical style, his own involvement with Stockhausen and the Western avant-garde tradition. Cardew was active in various causes in British politics, such as the struggle against the revival of neo-Nazi groups in Britain, and subsequently was involved in the People's Liberation Music group with Laurie Scott Baker, John Marcangelo, Vicky Silva, Hugh Shrapnel, Keith Rowe and others. The group developed and performed music in support of various popular causes including benefits for striking miners and Northern Ireland.

Cardew was a co-founder and member of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist). His creative output from the demise of the Scratch Orchestra until his death reflected his political commitment. Cardew stated his attitude towards the avante-garde in Stockhausen Serves Imperialism:

I'm convinced that when a group of people get together and sing The Internationale this is a more complex, more subtle, stronger and more musical experience than the whole of the avant-garde put together.

Other composers in the same vein (either early avant-garde or later political-polemical), and sometimes collaborators with Cardew, include Hanns Eisler, Michael Chant, Marc Blitzstein, Frederic Rzewski, Christian Wolff, and Luigi Nono.

Cardew died in 1981, the victim of a hit-and-run car accident near his London home in Leytonstone. The driver was never found.

It is claimed that the first time the term minimalist was publicly used to describe a musical composition it was in a review of Cardew's The Great Learning by then music critic and later composer Michael Nyman published in 1968 in The Spectator.

In 1999 Cardew's Treatise was performed by the experimental rock group Sonic Youth on their album SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century.

The German musician and composer Ekkehard Ehlers published a Cardew-inspired work in 2001, Ekkehard Ehlers plays Cornelius Cardew, on Staubgold Records.

A 70th Birthday Anniversary Festival, including live music from all phases of Cardew's career and a symposium on his music, took place on Sunday, May 7, 2006 at the Cecil Sharpe House in London.

[edit] Selected discography

The Great Learning Paragraphs 2 and 7 (1971; re-released 2002) Deutsche Grammophon.
Thälmann Variations (solo piano, rec. 1975 in New York, publ. posthumously, 1986)
Cornelius Cardew Piano Music musicnow 1991 (the composer; Andrew Ball and John Tilbury, Andrew Bottrill, 79.00)
We Sing for the Future! Interpretations of two compositions for solo piano (We Sing for the Future!, Thälmann Variations) by Frederic Rzewski (2002) (New Albion)
Four Principles On Ireland And Other Pieces (Ampersand)
Treatise (Hat[Now]Art)
Chamber Music 1955-1964 Apartment House (2001) (Matchless Recordings mrcd45)
Material (Hat[Now]Art)
Cornelius Cardew — piano music 1959-70 (1996) John Tilbury (Matchless Recordings mrcd29)
AMMMUSIC — Cardew as an improviser. With Lou Gare, Eddie Prévost, Lawrence Sheaff and Keith Rowe, London 1966. CD release (ReR Megacorp.)

[edit] Bibliography

Coriún Aharonián, "Cardew as a Basis for a Discussion on Ethical Options" Leonardo Music Journal 11 (2001) pp. 13-15
Virginia Anderson, "Chinese Characters and Experimental Structure in Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning" Journal of Experimental Music Studies
Virginia Anderson, "Cornelius Cardew Lives" openDemocracy.net
Brian Eno, "Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts," Christoph Cox & Daniel Warner eds. Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (New York & London: Continuum Books, 2005) An insightful study of "Paragraph 7" of The Great Learning
Michael Nyman, "Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
Michael Parsons, "The Scratch Orchestra and the Visual Arts" Leonardo Music Journal (Vol. 11, 2001) pp. 5-11
Victor Schonfield, "Cornelius Cardew, AMM, and the Path to Perfect Hearing" Jazz Monthly (May 1968)
Timothy D. Taylor, "Moving in Decency: The Music and Radical Politics of Cornelius Cardew" Music & Letters 79:4 (November 1998): pp. 555-576
John Tilbury, "Cornelius Cardew" Contact No. 26 (Spring 1983) pp. 4-12
John Tilbury, "The Experimental Years: A View from the Left" Journal of Experimental Music Studies. Originally published in Contact 22 (1981), 16-21
Daniel Varela, "‘A Question of Language’: Frederic Rzewski in conversation about Cornelius Cardew" Journal of Experimental Music Studies
Eddie Prévost (ed.), Cornelius Cardew: A Reader (Copula, 2006). A collection of Cornelius Cardew's published writings together with commentaries and responses from Richard Barrett, Christopher Fox, Brian Dennis, Anton Lukoszevieze, Michael Nyman, Eddie Prévost, David Ryan, Howard Skempton, Dave Smith, John Tilbury and Christian Wolff. Introduction by Michael Parsons. 400pp illustrated. ISBN 0-9525492-2-0. www.matchlessrecordings.com