Liberation Music

Liberation Music

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n05/gott01_.html

Richard Gott
12 March 2009

Cornelius Cardew: A Life Unfinished by John Tilbury

What do we remember about Cornelius Cardew? That he was a brilliant
avant-garde composer who pioneered free improvisation and led a
Scratch Orchestra of musicians and artists; that his father was
Michael Cardew, the potter; that he wrote a polemical tract alleging
that Stockhausen 'serves imperialism'; and that, after spending a
decade as a prominent Maoist, he was killed by a hit-and-run driver,
in an apparent accident that conspiracy theorists have liked to
construe as the work of the intelligence services.

Now we have a thousand-page book to fill in the details of his life,
written with affection, humour and perspicacity by the pianist John
Tilbury. Tilbury was Cardew's friend and colleague, and a one-time
(and part-time) fellow-traveller on the Maoist road; he has spent a
quarter of a century writing this book. Aficionados will love his
account; others might have preferred a more succinct version; yet for
all its length, Tilbury's book is a sparkling account of a moment in
British history when debates about music, art, poetry and
revolutionary politics became the obsessive concern of a small group
of talented practitioners. It has been relegated to a footnote in
most cultural histories of the time, but Tilbury provides a more
complete story.

Cardew left a large archive as well as a detailed and reflective
journal, maintained from 1952, when he was still at school, until
1974. Tilbury, generally a sympathetic biographer, suggests that the
journal was 'an expression of middle-class vanity', the product of
someone 'with an unshakeable belief in his own historical destiny'.
Cardew was by all accounts a charismatic figure, but in the 1970s, at
the height of his messianic Maoism, his self-belief had begun to
evaporate. His life hadn't quite worked out the way he might once
have hoped, and in what turned out to be his final years he backed
away from almost every position he had formerly held, even rewriting
his early and most difficult 'elitist' compositions to make them more
accessible to the 'masses'.

Born in 1936 to a radical, bohemian and impoverished middle-class
family in Cornwall, where art and music flourished, Cardew had a
precocious musical talent, first nurtured as a chorister at
Canterbury Cathedral, and later at King's School Canterbury. He
learned to play the piano and the cello, took lessons in composition,
became interested in the music of Schoenberg, and soon seemed
destined for the Royal Academy of Music. His headmaster couldn't wait
to get rid of him, describing him as 'one of the most difficult boys
I ever knew ­ shy, reticent, introverted, self-centred, obnoxious to
most people; lacking graciousness and humility . . . everyone was
glad when he left.'

The Royal Academy in the 1950s was hardly a place for progressive
spirits, and although Cardew proved an exceptional interpreter of
Bach and Schubert, his natural dissidence soon led him to the
European avant-garde ­ Webern, Boulez and Stockhausen ­ to which his
contemporaries Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney Bennett were also
drawn. The mecca for music students in those days was Stockhausen's
headquarters at Darmstadt, where the 'Darmstadt Headbangers', as Tom
Lubbock describes them, treated Britten and Shostakovich with
derision as traditionalists, and serialism reigned supreme. In 1957
Cardew won a scholarship to study at the electronic studio of
Westdeutscher Rundfunk, then considered the most advanced outpost of
Western musical thought and practice.

Initially, he threw himself into the machinery of electronic music
with enthusiasm, becoming Stockhausen's protégé, helping him with his
musical production, and lodging at his home. Stockhausen was only
eight years older than Cardew, and together they visited the Brussels
International Exhibition of 1958, and listened to the music composed
by Varèse and Xenakis for the Phillips stand that Le Corbusier had
designed (a recording was played at the recent Cold War exhibition at
the V&A). Yet he all too soon became aware of the group's
inadequacies. He disliked Stockhausen's 'religious mania', and
complained about having to say grace before meals ­ not at all the
habit of an irreligious former choirboy. He was ready for something
new, and when a fresh wave of American composers, influenced by John
Cage, arrived at the annual Darmstadt summer school to sample the
European experience ­ and find it wanting ­ Cardew was excited by the
alternative that they appeared to offer. David Tudor, Cage's pianist
and pupil, was an important new influence, as were other American
composers like Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and La Monte Young. He
even contemplated emigrating to the United States.

Cardew returned to London to digest these discoveries and to
propagate the music of his new friends. He became involved, as the
music editor, with New Departures, an arts magazine established at
Oxford by his schoolfriend David Sladen and the poet Michael
Horowitz. Soon, as Live New Departures, this became a vehicle for
itinerant artists, poets and musicians to spread the counter-culture.
Contemporary music as a 'happening' gradually became familiar to
reviewers. As early as June 1962, a Times critic at a Wigmore Hall
concert where music by Cage, Feldman and Christian Wolff was played
noted with pleasure that Cardew 'actually played the piano instead of
trying to demolish it'.

It took time, though, for the new experimental music to be widely
accepted in London. Cardew and Tilbury had played pieces by Feldman
and Cage at a concert at the Conway Hall in January 1960, and Rodney
Bennett, who was present, recalled that the audience of 70 sat
'transfixed with gloom' while the two pianists produced, slowly and
laboriously, 'a series of small tired noises, not violent, not
beautiful, not exciting, not even remotely interesting: the whole
effect as soporific as an evening spent listening to the complete
Methodist Hymnal'.

Eventually, and largely through dance, the new American music began
to gain an audience. When Merce Cunningham's company first appeared
in London in September 1964, Cardew noted (in the Musical Times) that
the music of Cage, Feldman, Wolff and Young had been slipped 'without
protest . . . into the ears of the ballet public, and been enjoyed',
receiving 'a high degree of acceptance from the ballet press'. At the
same time, he observed caustically, it had been 'unwaveringly
rejected by our more powerful pundits of musical taste' ­ Hans
Keller, William Glock and Peter Heyworth.

For someone like Keller, the gatekeeper of the debate about new music
in the 1960s and 1970s, Cardew was a godsend: Keller might not agree
with what he wrote, but he enjoyed orchestrating the subsequent
controversy. Cardew became known not just as an outstanding and
original composer, and a charismatic performer of difficult music,
but also as a fluent writer and critic, able to discuss the crossover
from art to music. 'It was impossible to disentangle the compulsion
of the audience to cut, and Yoko Ono's compulsion to be cut,' he
wrote in the Financial Times in 1966 of the famous performance in
which Ono encouraged her audience to attack her clothing with
scissors. She was his house guest at the time and had long outstayed
her welcome.

Re-established now in England, Cardew quickly discovered that the
composition and performance of new music, coupled with occasional
journalism, were unlikely to prove profitable. He needed more regular
means of support and, like many artists and musicians, was obliged to
make his living in an adjacent field. He had acquired a passion for
notation and design while working as Stockhausen's amanuensis, and in
1961 took a typography course at the London School of Printing.
Later, he secured a job as an assistant art editor at Aldus Books,
where he joined a team of designers that included Germano Facetti,
who later transformed the jackets of Penguin Books. Cardew's interest
in typography was soon transferred to musical notation and to the
almost insurmountable task faced by a composer of contemporary music
who sought to give performers some freedom of action. He was more
aware than most, Tilbury writes, of 'the limitations which the
constraints of the Western notational system imposed on compositional thought'.

Fascinated with music as sound, with the human response to different
sounds, and with the difficulty of exactly notating their production,
he explained to Horowitz, circa 1960, when taxed with his lack of
interest in politics, that he was really interested only in 'noise'.
He was exploring a line of inquiry first mapped out by the Futurists,
half a century earlier. Luigi Russolo's The Art of Noises (1913)
advocated walking through the city and listening to 'the throbbing of
valves, the bustle of pistons, the shrieks of mechanical saws, the
jolting of trams on the tracks, the cracking of whips, the flapping
of awnings and flags'. But despite musicological attempts to place
Cardew in the Futurist tradition, no evidence exists to suggest that
he had much awareness of his musical forebears.

He came to believe, Tilbury says, that it was only 'through the
spontaneous generation of sounds in freely improvised music' that
music could aspire to a sourceless and transient autonomy, the
ambition of his friend Morton Feldman. As a result, the manuscript of
his first major work, Treatise, looks more like an artwork than sheet
music ­ a 'graphic score' ­ with wavy lines and exuberant diagrams
providing only the most approximate guide to what needs to be played
(two pages from the score are shown here). Based on Cardew's reading
of the Tractatus, it was composed between 1963 and 1967, and some
parts of it were broadcast on the Third Programme. Cardew later
described it as 'an attempt to escape from the performance rigidities
of serial music and to encourage improvisation amongst avant-garde
musicians'. Tilbury, who has himself wrestled with the playing of
Treatise, regards it as the culmination of Cardew's career, and
several heroic pages of his book describe the problems with which its
performers are faced, noting philosophically that some of them feel
'frustrated and sceptical'. Another Herculean (nine-hour) work was
The Great Learning (1968-71), based on Confucianism. Unlike other
avant-garde artists of the 1960s who were taken with Indian
mysticism, Cardew was more intrigued by China, perhaps because of an
inherited family interest. He was steeped in Chinese philosophy and
culture long before he became aware of the works of Mao Tse-tung.

Inspired by his interest in jazz (he was never a jazz performer), he
moved ever further in the late 1960s towards free improvisation,
joining the guitarist Keith Rowe and the drummer Eddie Prévost in the
ensemble AMM (an acronym whose meaning remains unknown). In 1968, as
revolutionary ideas spread through institutions of higher education,
notably art schools, Cardew was asked to set up an experimental music
workshop at Morley College, an adult education centre in South
London. His class attracted musical amateurs, students from the Royal
Academy, and avant-garde enthusiasts from the visual arts, many of
whom came together in the Scratch Orchestra, created under Cardew's
inspiration and leadership in 1969. Among those who passed through
the orchestra are Brian Eno, Michael Nyman, Hugh Shrapnel, Howard
Skempton and Tilbury himself.

A significant number of artists and musicians, some with little
musical training and no ability to sight-read, were attracted both by
Cardew's charisma and by his desire to escape from what were
perceived as the principal enemies of the cultural world. Artists
were opposed to the conservatism of the art schools, while musicians
disliked the elitism of serious music, even of the avant-garde that
Cardew had earlier espoused. Both were hostile to the commercialism
of pop and to the prevailing 'discotheque culture'. The Scratch
Orchestra sought to provide a radical alternative, organising London
concerts and taking to the road in hippie fashion in the summer of
1970, to play in village halls in Cornwall and Wales.

Because of the support for Cardew within the Arts Council and similar
bodies, the orchestra secured some external funding, even appearing
on one occasion on the BBC. Yet sometimes the players would outnumber
the audience, and inevitably, in the politicised climate of the time,
such a large democratic body became ever more radicalised, splitting
into factions. The orchestra couldn't survive the strain of these
internal divisions, and petered out after a controversial appearance
as part of the cultural programme of the Munich Olympics in 1972. The
radicals emerged on top, and in 1974 the orchestra changed its name
to the Red Flame Proletarian Propaganda Team.

Cardew had by now taken up the Maoist cause with enthusiasm,
influenced by Keith Rowe, a fellow 'Scratcher' and member of AMM who
had become an ardent and persuasive member of a Maoist groupuscule,
originally known as the Communist Party of England
(Marxist-Leninist). In the obscure and largely forgotten interstices
of the British left during the upheavals of the 1970s, when hundreds
of actors, artists and musicians took up the cudgels (usually
Trotskyist) in support of what they hoped was an imminent revolution,
there were few more perverse and irrelevant political groupings than
this particular sect. Cardew was to devote the last ten years of his
life to promoting its interests.

The CPE(ML)'s prophet was a Punjabi-born Communist called Hardial
Bains, one of the first Communists anywhere to set up a 'revisionist'
Party in the early 1960s, designed at the time of the Sino-Soviet
rift to support the pro-Chinese cause. From his base in Canada, Bains
helped to establish pro-Chinese parties in India and the United
States, as well as in Britain and Ireland. A flavour of Bains's
uncompromising stand can be gleaned from the title a Maoist study
group at London University gave to a meeting held in November 1971:
'Alan Sillitoe and David Mercer: Traitors to the English Working
Class'. Further meetings, with more innocuous titles like 'Seek Truth
to Serve the People', were held in December that year, and Cardew and
Tilbury, with other members of the Scratch Orchestra's 'Ideological
Group', were persuaded by Rowe to go along. Soon the Ideological
Group began to criticise the inadequacies of the Scratch Orchestra
itself. 'The message of Yenan' is clear, Cardew wrote in his journal
in January 1972: 'We must associate with, talk to, study, know
deeply, live with, make intimate friends amongst, work with, the
working class.' In practice, he went on, we have regarded 'our petty
bourgeois comrades and friends as more important than workers'.

Obsessed with the Maoist command 'to serve the people', Cardew now
began to condemn avant-garde and 'elitist' music ­ his own and
others'. The main focus of his attack was Stockhausen, his old friend
and mentor. Stockhausen Serves Imperialism was the title of a talk he
gave on the BBC in 1972, later published in the Listener. In it he
attacked Stockhausen's music (and more specifically Refrain, an
electronic work of 1959, scored for three players on piano, celeste,
cymbals, cowbells and vibraphone) for being 'part of the cultural
superstructure of the largest-scale system of human oppression and
exploitation the world has ever known: imperialism'. Stockhausen's
mystical music, he implied, belonged with 'the American war machine
in Vietnam' as a manifestation of imperialism. 'Salesmen like
Stockhausen,' he wrote, 'would have you believe that slipping off
into cosmic consciousness removes you from the reach of the painful
contradictions that surround you in the real world.'

In 1974, this essay formed part of a small book in which Cardew
engaged in a ferocious bout of Maoist self-criticism, questioning all
his earlier enthusiasms: Stockhausen and Cage, of course, and then
his own entire oeuvre from Treatise onwards. All his compositions
needed serious revision. When William Glock, controller of music at
the BBC, asked for part of The Great Learning to be played at the
Proms in 1972, the Ideological Group demanded changes. Cardew
presented Glock with a programme note that quoted Mao to the effect
that 'works of art that do not meet the demands of the struggle of
the broad masses can be transformed into works of art that do,' and
announced that 'slogans' would be inserted 'to link the work with the
current situation'. The slogans may seem quite anodyne now but it is
hard to imagine the Prom audience being confronted with banners
declaring (for example) that 'a revolution is not a dinner party; it
is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows
another.' Glock politely requested the version of the piece that he
had asked for. He eventually got one 12 minutes long (the version he
wanted lasted for an hour), and a programme footnote which said that
'by agreement between the composer and the BBC the political content
has been removed.' Honour was saved by the Listener, which printed
the offending slogans.

As Cardew became ever more radical, so he was more and more in
demand. 'For educational and art institutions, and the media,'
Tilbury writes, 'Cardew's reputation as a maverick composer made him
a desirable temporary presence: a Maoist on the loose for a day or
two, marauding through the minds of the inhabitants of the
institution, ruffling a few feathers' and 'provoking apathetic
students to stir themselves ­ something the lecturers themselves were
unable to achieve'. Cardew toured the country's art schools with his
revolutionary message.

Cardew and Sheila Kasabova, his third wife, went to live in East
London, where he helped to form a political rock group ­ People's
Liberation Music ­ for which he sang and composed. Chinese
revolutionary songs, and later Irish rebel and folk music, became his
principal inspiration. Yet he remained much in demand in his earlier
incarnation, playing and lecturing in Ireland, Germany, Italy, the
United States and Canada, and even, for his Thälmann Variations of
1974, receiving praise from 'revisionist' critics. Alan Bush, a much
older composer, who belonged to a more conservative musical tradition
but was a member of the (Moscow line) British Communist Party,
described the Variations as 'splendid'. (The two men remained
friendly, and when the impecunious Cardew was fined after accusations
that he had assaulted the police at a demonstration, he was not above
touching Bush for money.)

Cardew's supporters today make much of the fact that he 'later
rejected Maoism' (which is true), but they tend to gloss over the
fact that he substituted for Mao the Albanian leader Enver Hoxha, and
eventually ended up a defender of Stalin. In 1979 Bains's party
renamed itself the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain
(Marxist-Leninist), but Mao's ghost and influence remained in the
background. Tilbury notes that the party's high-handedness often
created resentment and alienation, and led to the 'total withdrawal'
of many supporters. Yet Cardew remained obsessed by his political
activities. They took up almost all his time, and he composed little
of quality in his last years.

In a bizarre episode at the end of 1979, he went with half a dozen
composers from Britain on a tour of Canada, sponsored by the
ineffable Bains. Their principal task was to set to music texts that
Bains had written ­ texts 'of an unsurpassable political and literary
crassness', Tilbury writes. One was called 'Workers of Ontario':

We are the workers of Ontario,
We work for the rich of the United States,
We work for the rich of Canada,
We work under the yoke of wage slavery
Hauling the riches out of the earth,
Manufacturing commodities for the rich to< sell.
We are the workers of Ontario,
A mighty section of the Canadian working class.

The following year We Sing for the Future was published, containing
78 such songs; unkind critics noted that the title music, composed by
Cardew, bore some similarity to the 'Eton Boating Song'.

Cardew continued with his political activism in the early years of
the Thatcher era, taking part in the Irish and anti-racism struggles.
In June 1981, he addressed a large conference against racism and
fascism at the Conway Hall (some 500 people attended), and in October
of that year was thrown out of the House of Commons gallery after
shouting 'this House stinks of racism' during a speech by Enoch
Powell. He was frequently arrested, and on one occasion sent to
prison for a month. Tilbury writes of Cardew's 'unfinished life', and
it is of course possible that he might have dusted himself down and
set off in a new direction after the collapse of Communism. Yet
having rejected so much of his past, it is difficult to imagine what
he might have gone on to do.

Very early in the morning of Sunday, 13 December 1981, walking in the
dark from Stratford station to his home in Leyton, Cardew was knocked
down by a car on an icy road and killed instantly. He was only 45. He
had returned late from a political meeting in Birmingham. The car
disappeared and the driver was never traced. The coroner concluded
that the death was accidental, but other political activists had been
killed in strange circumstances in the course of that year, and in
the obsessive atmosphere generated by a small sect, conspiracy
theories were inevitable. On an unlit road, why had he been walking
with, rather than against the traffic? As someone who suffered
terribly from the cold, why were his thick socks still in his
briefcase? Was it possible that he had been pushed out of a car, and
that his severe injuries ­ a massive blow to the head and an almost
severed leg ­ had been caused earlier by an unknown assassin? Was
this the work of the state, or of a Nazi activist? 'The possibility
that Cardew was assassinated cannot be ruled out,' Tilbury writes
judiciously, though he leaves the reader with the impression that he
thinks it unlikely.

Cardew received unsympathetic obituaries. Time has been kinder.
Articles, films and radio programmes have been produced about his
work, not just in Britain and the United States but also in Europe,
particularly in Germany and Italy. Much of his music is available on
CD and he still enjoys a stellar position in the leftist firmament.
Having passed through the wilder shores of Maoist cultural debate and
the revolutionary desire to wipe out history, he came at the end to
believe, or so Tilbury suggests, that 'contemporary culture has to
assimilate and rework the best of the past.' He seemed in his final
years to be groping towards his roots in an English cathedral town ­
to the folk music tradition, to the choral singing he heard as a
child, and to the Renaissance music once written for the virginals.
Some of his final songs, many written on the hoof while campaigning
in Canada, have impossible words but delightful tunes, and an
irresistible rhythm.
--

Richard Gott has written several books about Latin America, including
Land without Evil: Utopian Journeys across the South American Watershed.

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