Cornelius Cardew - Visionary or Twat?

Nice pic of CC at the piano in the current Wire piece on AMM. (There is also a v. funny pic of an 80s AMM gig w/ the ultimate beardy chinscratcher in the front row of the audience)

Oh yes I forgot that I've read the Stockhausen essay and yeah its just bad bad, a species of misplaced populism. Good that its made available.

This reader draws from essays written at all points in Cardew's musical life so it will be interesting to look at all the shifts in thinking.

still never heard his people's rockband pieces, but listen to his later piano compositions fairly often and find them pretty lovely.

been listening to the cortical foundation cd reissue of the great learning with the scratch orchestra a lot recently. if his later political songs were maybe a little too obvious, the great learning has the politics audibly pushing the form forward, it's great collective playing. & AMM's The Crypt is already in my box of CDs I'm bringing for my 20 hour drive up the Pacific Coast this weekend.

ubu has the Memorial Concert online.

Had he had to struggle through Secondary-Modern/Apprenticeship/Production Line there's no way he would have become a Maoist. That sense of alienation/discovery-of-self through ideology wouldn't have been there.

If he had eventually moved to the right, well as somebody who gets to smell cutting fluid every day, it's kind of irrelevant. If the proletariat is only ever a theoretical construct, somebody who decides to alternate their relative position to you without ever engaging is pretty much a political non-entity.

That said, on a purely musical front, I'm intrigued and am keen to discover.

Saw this at the weekend, in the end so depressing how it all turned out. Let's call a spade a spade here, it was like he joined a cult. Keith Rowe and John Tilbury both "came back" and didn't lurch to the right but I don't think either of them were quite as fanatical as old Cor. Anyone read Tilbury's book on him?

Mark S said to me the other week that he reckoned that CC, had he lived, would’ve veered way to the right

Meanwhile an old comrade of Cornelius (Visionary or Twat) Cardew's is currently making a fair few headlines

Exactly what I was thinking.

CC's death in a hit-and-run "accident" remains unsolved.

I'm just saying.

Let's call a spade a spade here, it was like he joined a cult.

... and that was me on Cardew abt 3 wks ago

so if I've got this right, Cardew and Comrade Bala were both CPE(ML), (not the same as CPGB(ML)), which became RCPB(ML), (& definitely is not RCP, which ran LM & is now effectively the Institute of Ideas/Spiked-online).

According to this site, RCPB(ML) was a breakaway group from CPE(ML). Cardew was a co-founder of RCPB(ML) and Balakrishnan remained with CPE(ML).

Anyway, I vote Twat.

Interesting 1992 article here.

http://www.marxists.org/history/erol/uk.hightide/cardew.htm

don't know how accurate this is, or what spiked is:

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the_half_truths_and_wild_claims_behind_the_brixton_slave_story/14348#.UpZQG-KJ4ap

by brendan o'neill

yay!

he's basically saying that he doesn't know what the truth is but everybody else is almost certainly wrong about the whole thing

they're wrong about it cos they're Hampstead pinkoes and feminazis tho

shame he didn't use his contacts in the RCP to maybe fill out the historical background a bit more tbh

wow so the RCP crowd really are coming out strongly against this - Furedi in the Guardian too.

O'Neill is - it pains me to me say this - otm about the way the story has changed since the initial reports. It seems like it was more a cult than slavery on a par with trafficking. But the last paragraph is a return to bullshit contrarian form which brushes aside actual slavery in the same way he trivialised the trauma of child abuse during the Savile scandal. Like Claire Fox, he has to ignore or minimise real suffering in order to vent his spleen against "interfering do-gooders".

don't know how accurate this is, or what spiked is:

to fill in - spiked is closely connected to the Institute of Ideas (Basically the same organisation?); IoI is the offspring of Living Marxism libertarianism/contrarianism, & LM was the magazine of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Frank Furedi, Claire Fox, Mick Hume are the core group running from RCP to now aiui.

Long LRB thing on IoI/RCP

Thread of spiked hate:

spiked - the independent online phenomenon

Thanks woof - was always more of a Marxism Today/Stuart Hall reader, back in the day, but haven't really kept up with the intricacies of left-wing factionalism. Some of the rhetoric in the spiked stuff reminded me rather more of Class War shit-stirring than intricate Gramscian discourse.

a lot of it has affinities to the NeoCons i think but who knows any more, this is mostly sectarians looking for a narrower sect to wedge into

They get a fair amount of money from corporate funding, iirc.

yeah I think they're not remotely of the left now (though they might make the odd noise about entryism, idk) - it's a weird cocktail of US-Style libertarianism, 'Enlightenment' grandstanding, trolling for £££.

I think we can agree that they are Twats not Visionaries

✔✓☑୰

O'Neill is - it pains me to me say this - otm about the way the story has changed since the initial reports.

The Furedi piece is also actually very good on this, it's kind of a classic spiked move to stir up the fog of confusion and contradiction around an issue and then... actually I'm not sure what he's arguing for beyond that, other than he's against the media misappropriation of the term 'slavery' (which perhaps is fair enough? i dunno). O'Neill seemed to be in favour of leaving it to the police to sort out and then he spent most of the remainder of the article highlighting perceived police incompetence and backtracking.

The Spiked lot are numbingly consistent in their views (down with liberals, reformers, do-gooders and victims, up with the average joe as long as he's thick-skinned and self-sufficient enough not to need any help from anybody ever) but not particularly good at translating those views into consistent articles because reality keeps getting in the way.

Furedi's railing against the media misappropriation of the term 'slavery' kind of falls down on the fact that he appears to think that there has only been one real historical form of slavery, and that was slavery in the americas in the 18th century? (and his definition of even that is a very very limited stereotype, of the male plantation slave in shackles)

and it's only this apparent belief that domestic slavery and debt slavery have never existed that enables his ignorance of how the term 'slavery' has a broad use, and might be appropriate to cases that aren't this one -- well, that and using a dictionary definition like a first year undergraduate.

There's something deeply cynical about the way he uses historical outrages only in order to disparage lesser outrages today. I'm uneasy with reusing the word "holocaust" in other contexts but I think "slavery" is flexible enough to withstand diverse applications.

xp or maybe not:

i'm not all that up on current usage of the term tbh, but that all sounds fair enough. i did get a vague sense that furedi is waiting to call out as racist anyone who would dare to assail his conception of a one true form of human slavery.

Up to page 700-odd in Tilbury's biog., he's just about to cover Stockhausen Serves Imperialism. Crazy how these whimsical good-.natured bohos turned into icy Maoist robots... and so rapidly too.

Sounds like you are enjoying yourself.

Can't remember reading a good review of this.

love this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fm3SNk3ffoA

1071 pages

You only live once.

Pretty much my thinking, got the chance to read it, beats working etc. Tell you what though, it was all that Keith Rowe's fault... and Chairman Mao's.

Hard not to snigger @ the Scratch Orchestra changing its name to the Red Flame Proletarian Propaganda Team, to name but one of the increasing absurdities as the page numbers pile up.

Past the 850 mark and, in timely fashion, David Bowie has popped up, story recounted here.

950+. Cardew has just been to a Marxist-Leninist cultural festival in West Germany as one of three members of the Stalin Youth Group, he was 43 at the time.

The songs are terrible but, tbf to Cardew, he was expected to churn out dozens of musical settings of the proclamations and thoughts of Hardial Bains as his contribution to the victory of the proletariat. Now, if only he'd realized that "Mouldy Old Dough" could have been re-written as "Hardial Bains".

the last time we discussed this (on a monty python thread, to morbs's huge irritation lol) i raised the possiblity that this shared tune has been repurposed from some common-property chant that pre-exists both: i referred to it as the "vote vote vote for nigel barton" song -- apparently in the belief that this 1965 dennis potter play includes this line being chanted (presumably by barton's political followers?) to this tune

obviously it would fit well, but does this actually happen? i was very confident previously but i now have no idea why

Oh yes, I remember that discussion.

first appearance also of matt #2's mysterious-tricycle solution to the cardew hit-and-run

xps would have helped if he was open to actually learning anything from actual (black) popular music & its connection with already existing struggles instead of trying to reinvent the wheel like a typical vanguardist. he’s obviously a unique figure but in that & so many other ways (the confused anti-imperialism, class guilt, hopeless attempts at populism) he feels like such a familiar “type” on the UK left, he’s painful & fascinating to hear/read/read about

This is quite a light hearted encounter between Cardew and some stuffy Radio 3 guy (from 1972 probably?) which shows he hadn't quite lost his sense of humour yet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oksUcVauHXM

the last time we discussed this (on a monty python thread, to morbs's huge irritation lol) i raised the possiblity that this shared tune has been repurposed from some common-property chant that pre-exists both: i referred to it as the "vote vote vote for nigel barton"

Yeah, this.
There's an episode of "the odd couple" where tony randall reminisces about his time in the army and sings "let's hit hitler where he lives" to this tune.
I forget what the original is but p. sure it's a British march.

I forget what the original is

This is gonna drive me nuts all day

I think there might be a scene in "Inherit the wind" which uses it also

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tramp!_Tramp!_Tramp!

Think this is the original.

I think you're right but, just to complicate matters further, I think this also rips off "Tramp! Tramp! Tramp" ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viXBxuSSS6s

... not a Cornelius Cardew composition.

Could be linked to on any number of threads but the Cardew doc was finally what sold me on this:

https://artdaily.com/news/137857/New-release-showcases-an-eclectic-trove-of-music--poetry-and-spoken-word-made-between-1978-and-1996#.YQGpHy1Q1Bw

This is quite a light hearted encounter between Cardew and some stuffy Radio 3 guy (from 1972 probably?) which shows he hadn't quite lost his sense of humour yet.

Among other things, I was reading his account of collaborating with Stockhausen on "Carré", which he really deserved a co-composer credit for, and he had nicely wry sense of humour which comes across in a lot of his other writings - this was later surgically removed by Mao Tse-Tung. One of the things he mentioned, which kinda blew my mind, is that "Gruppen" was performed in Glasgow and a quick Google revealed that not only was it played in Glasgow but it was the UK premiere and it was broadcast live on the BBC!

OK, this is interesting (to me at least) both of Cardew's sons played with the Pasadenas, Horace on sax and Walter on drums:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Whom_It_May_Concern_(The_Pasadenas_album)

A lot closer to pop music than their dad ever managed!

The Great Learning is sick. I will - maybe - educate myself about Caredew's politics at some point, or I may not bother. But right now this piece is some beautiful fusion of Miles Davis/Herbie Hancock like jazz-rock and Ligetian choral Nirvana.

sat down to leaf thru the lesson books on my sister's piano -- idle sight-reading practice while everyone else is out doing their final xmas shop -- and came across a howard skempton piece by called "well, well, cornelius" (he studied under cardew; unclear from this piece what he learned aside from parallel thirds in several flats and extended-span bassline ostinati)

she tells me she plays it and likes it so well done everyone i guess

He was one of the three "founders" of the Scratch Orchestra, with Cardew and Michael Parsons.

He could be a visionary twat.

(xp) I think that meant he coughed up £5 to cover some printing costs, something like that

i feel like to be true to the way the scratch orc shd have written all the parts out by hand

'visionary' is a pretty twattish thing to be

it's too early to say