Music to Serve

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Cardew's Vietnam Sonata honoured the NLF's fight against imperialism Ronald Reagan, leader of the biggest arms drive in history outside wartime, and main prop and support of the El Salvador military butchers, visits his his loyal ally Margaret Thatcher in June. Join the protests: Sunday 6 June, 12.30 at Hyde Park; Monday June 7, 5.30 at Grosvenor Square; Tuesday June 8, Socialist Organiser Alliance SOCIALIST Organiser fights to act as a real campaigning paper which can organise Reagansother money. Socialist Organiser Alliance groups asked to. undertake to sell a minimum of 6 redicarpet papers per week and contribute at least £1.50 GROSVENOR SOU-RE JUNE 7 $ 30pm / LOBBY PARLIAMENT JUNE 8-1pm Cornelius Cardew, the composer and performer, was killed in a road accident last December at the age of 45. His death robbed not only our musical life of one of its boldest and most original contributors, but also the political struggle of a consistent and principled fighter for his view of socialism.

Cardew was probably best known as an exponent of "'avant-garde' music, through his work with AMM and the Scratch Orchestra, and improvisatory works such as Treatise and the Great Learning.

This aspect of his work, however, forms but a part of the gradual evolution of his work which at the time of his death appeared to be on the brink of finding a solution to the problem of evolving "music for socialism"

After studying at the Royal Academy of Music in the 1950s, where he was influenced by the works of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, the leading figures of the Western European avant-garde at the time, Cardew studied with Stockhausen in Cologne, and assisted in the composition of Stockhausen's Carre. He soon rejected, however, the "super-objectivity" of postSecond World War serially1pm, lobby of Parliament.

Contact: Reagan Reception Box 51, London SW10.

GUATE Wendy Frankland pays tribute to the composer Cornelius Cardew.

composed music, characterised as it is by angular and aggressive tonality, and a denial of the human agency in its performance, and turned instead to the methods of random and arbitrary composition of the American avant-garde epitomised by John Cage.

At the opposite extreme to Stockhausen, Cage expounded the idea that the performer has an equal influence over the form and content of a composition as the composer, thus making each performance of any work unique and different from any other.

It is this anarchistic philosophy that dominates Cardew's major work of the 1960s. His music of this period was highly individualistic and poetic, with a strong improvisatory quality - works such as February Pieces which has been described by Cardew's close associate John Tilbury as being "full of little phrases HONDURAS SALVADOR NICARAGUA COSTA RICA which are subtly associative afathar muaiol mauda mont ul verti musitar worlus, past and present - phrases which haunt and disturb the memory."

Poetry

This unique blend of bold experimentation and gentle poeticism is summed up by the American composer Alvin Curran who has said that "Cornelius was always a true revolutionary, but his poetry was far more interesting and natural"

Cardew describes Treatise - one of his most characteristic works of the period - thus:

'Treatise is a continuous weaving and combining of a host of graphic elements (of which only a few are recognisably related to musical symbols) into a long visual composition, the meaning of which in terms of sounds is not specified in any way... Any number of musicians using any media are free to participate in a reading of this score, and is free to interpret it in his own way •.. What I hope is that in playing this piece each musician will give of his own music - he will give it as his response to my music, which In 1966, Cardew joined the improvisatory group AMM, a group of five musicians who produced collectively improvised works and operated on a democratic basis with no nominated leader.

Scratch

The method of working in AMM led on naturally to the formation of the Scratch Orchestra in the late 1960s. The genesis of the Orchestra was a composition class that Cardew ran on Friday evenings ai Morley College and which was open to anyone interested, trained musicians and the musical ignoramus alike.

The aim was to break away completely from musical elitism, and reflected Cage's philosophy of transcending conventional notions of what was acceptable musical form and content.

The Orchestra also reflected Cardew's preoccupation with questions of democracy - anyone was free to contribute. ideas sOr d Svise compositions for performduco, unen ine most ongın- anna oftan the mant ruinin al and enjoyable ideas came from people with little or no musical training.

John Tilbury recalls the feeling of the Orchestra's work:

"The Scratch Orchestra was a musical commune -. self-contained (it performed mainly its own music) self reliant, engaged in a wide variety or music making in a wide variety of situations: ritual pieces, improvisations, popular classics interpretations; fields, railway stations, streets, demonstrations, trains, buses etc...

Confucius

It was for the Scratch Orchestra that Cardew wrote one of his finest and bestremembered • scores, the Great Learning, a work in sed voipes, the text bassion for the writings of Confucius.

Parts of the Great Learning can be heard on a Deutsche Grammophon record, and something of the controversial nature of the work can be gathered from John Tilbury's recollection of a performance of the work at the Cheltenham Festival.

... the audience had become split into two factions, one supporting, one attacking the music, which could hardly be heard. In the artists' room after the concert, an elderly gentleman who looked like a retired colonel . . - pushed through the crowd to confront the composer. He grabbed Cardew's hand and said, «Thank you, Мг Cardew. What a relief to hear your music after all this terrible modern stuff!"

Elite

By the beginning of the 1970s, however, the contradictions and frustrations within the Scratch Orchestra were bringing about its collapse. Whilst its work altracted interest, controversy and even outright hoslility, its professed aim of breaking down the barriers of conventional music and reaching out towards "ordinary people" was clearly not being realized; the Orchestra appeared to be turning into the very kind of introverted oppose - at best they appeared to be a bunch of harmless eccentrics.

As the heady euphoria of the late sixties gave way to the harsh realities of the seventies, Cardew and many of his colleagues turned towards a political orientation and began to study the Marxist classics with a view to grappling with the knotty problems of art and politics.

Idiom In 1973 he wrote: "I have discontinued composing music in an avant-garde idiom for a number of reasons: the exclusiveness of the avant-garde, its fragmentation, its indifference to the real situation in the world today, its individualistic outlook, and not least its class character (the other characteristics are virtually products of this).

"I have rejected the bourgeois idealistic conception which sees art as the production of unique, divinely inspired geniuses, and developed a dialectical materialist conception which sees art as the reflection of society and at the same time promotes the ideas of the ruling class in a class society.

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Name Address ..... shermal me a tell a diateleshi Or son. 0297 "At a time when the ruling class has become blatantly vicious and corrupt, as it must in its final decay, it becomes urgent for conscious artists to develop ways of opposing the ideas of the ruling class and reflecting in their art the vital struggles of the oppressed classes and peoples in their upsurge to seize political power."

Cardew's initial commitment was to Maoism, and he rewrote the Great Learning replacing the 'Confucian texts with those by Mao, but most of the music he wrote during the 1970s was melodic and tonal, drawing on folk songs, workers' songs and those oppressed people.

Stockhausen

Works of this period include the Thalmann Variations (1974) dedicated to the memory of the German communist), Vietnam Sonata (1976), Boolavogue (1981), We Sing for the Future (1981) and Bathanienlied which was written for a campaign, in which Cardew was active, to save a children's hospital in West Berlin.

By now, Cardew had reacted completely against the established avant-garde and went so far as to characterise Stockhausen as an agent of imperialism (in his book Stockhausen Serves Imperialism) saying that the ideology behind his music was inherently that of the ruling class by fostering the notion of idealism - that things could be changed by thinking about them without any dialectic struggle or conflict.

Cardew was involved actively in the struggles against fascism and racism in London and was imprisoned for his part in organising resistance to fascist attacks on ethnic minorities. His last appearance a week before his death was at an anti-fascist concert which he had organised in a community hall in North London where he was playing and singing alongside a packed multi-racial audience.

Memorial

John Tilbury has written:

"Cardew was a highly controversial figure who suffered adversity throughout his life because of the uncompromising stand he took on many musical and social matters. In the truest and best sense he was a man of principle whose respect and concern for people and their condition led him inevitably beyond music -making into political activity to serve the cause of socialism... [his] death signals the end of an era."

The problems of the reciprocal influences of art and socialism will continue to exercise the minds of those involved in the struggle for socialism. Cornelius Cardew made a valuable and lasting ..contribution to reconciling these questions; he had a lasting influence on all those who worked with him and he will be sadly missed.

A memorial concert to Cornelius Cardew is to be held on May 16 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London. The concert will be a retrospective of Cardew's work from 1961-1981, including excerpts from Treatise and the Great Learning, material from that period not previously performed and examples of Cardew's socialist compositions.

Wendy Frankland

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