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AguidetoCorneliusCardew'smusic|Music|TheGuardian

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 15.48GMT

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 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
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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 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 pro-revolutionary 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
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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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