Cornelius Cardew - Visionary or Twat?

I have a copy of CC's 'Scratch Music' bk which shamefully I have never read. Might now give it a go for further info...

I don't KNOW this and it may be unfair. But basically he had moved far from the kids-lib childrens-crusade 60s radicalism of scratch music by the mid-70s. As is not unusual, he waved a highly idealised view of a farawary radicalised masses (= the chinese peasantry) to distance himself from having to interlock with actual local working-class politics, or any politics at all, frankly.

He's a VERY interesting figure, smart and inventive, and by no means unworthy of attention, even during rubbish People's Rockband era (actually possibly i think of him as the ghost of a possible disaster in ref.my own political development: ie i'm hard on him becuz i identify).

His isolation was already extreme, as of 1980, say.

Anything except, that is, a steady pulse, eh Dave? So it seems to be a rather constricting world after all. A world without music with a pulse = a shitty world.

jess that was GENIUS!!

And on paperback - and make it cheap! And used!!

He basically was in w/the Darmastadt crowd -- turns to left-wing activism, which includes turn to Maoism, i think -- renounces that stuff (graphic scores, etc.) and starts writing songs.

Interesting to contrast with Nono: one of the major figures to come out of Darmstadt (the only Cardew essay I happened to comes across ws as an added bonus to an old history of classical book in my local library where he enthuses about Boulez, Stockhausen and especially Nono) but who never lost it with his musical background/stayed the course, someone who kept writing so-called difficult, challenging music and doing it as protest pieces.

There are no books on him that i've seen tho'.

it's never been explained to me why maoists don't get a hard time when stalinists do.

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

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.

lol

hahahaha

Figured out how to live.

man I really need this book

I'm more than happy with Tom D's updates tbh.

Finished. You'll thank me for it one day. The last third was a long grind, or a Long March.

great updates, "Red Flame Proletarian Propaganda Team" pretty much ended me.

In honour of the CPGB(ML)'s Progressive Cultural Association's Punk Rock Is Fascist! slogan, I'm working on a punk version of one of Cardew's later I HEART MAO pieces. To be fair, the comrades were never entirely convinced of the wisdom of the Punk Rock Is Fascist! campaign, apart from Cardew (of course) and, er, John Tilbury!

Some stuff for you rock fans out there:

The Scratch Orchestra apparently did a 45 minute version of "Sister Ray" at a concert in '69/'70 - even longer than the Velvets were doing themselves at the time. (Also, in a footnote earlier in the book, Tilbury attributes the composition of the music in "Sister Ray" solely to John Cale - which seems very bourgeois of him.)

Cardew supposedly 'jammed' onstage with Tangerine Dream in Berlin in 1973, though Tilbury speculates that it might have been with Agitation Free instead.

want the book but its like 80$ on amazon.

i hunted down some of his later stuff that was performed at his memorial, i think? and i liked it quite a bit

I am fond of some of the later piano pieces, but the few proletarian rock songs I've heard are dreadful.

Was just saying to a friend over the weekend the only biog I remember reading in the last 10 years was Jean Genet by Edmund White.

Since then I have read about two biogs I want to read and this is one of them. Well done for finishing it.

Stupidly, I've started reading the BS Johnson biog, having promised myself only to read novels for the foreseeable future.

I love Treatise and like some of his later piano music but I'm only now just listening to the album: 'Consciously', wow lol, sounds like a parody.

It's hilarious but, if you excuse the pun, not consciously so.

1970. Pre-Mao.

https://collectionimages.npg.org.uk/large/mw283312/Cornelius-Cardew.jpg

cute

"Consciously" sounds like the worst imaginable result of Art Bears trying to go commercial.

I've got to imagine "condescension" wasn't in his lexicon.

From the "Bits of songs that sound like bits of other songs" thread:

Chorus of "Smash the Social Contract" by Cornelius Cardew and chorus of "Funky Gibbon" by the Goodies.

― Saturated with working class intelligence and not afraid to show it (Tom D.), Tuesday, December 3, 2013 11:44 AM (seven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Was this ever resolved? So basically the Goodies mowed CC down on their trusty trandem, outraged at his blatant looting of their hit single, all as part of a fiendish plot to seize the means of black pudding production from the proletariat? Correct me if I'm wrong.

this stuff is endlessly fascinating to me in the ways it both fails and sort-of succeeds at pop. catchy, kitschy, hilarious and tragic all at once
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXEDZy4Z8os

(xp) As I think I said on this thread or some other thread, Dave McRae from Matching Mole (of 'Little Red Record' er, fame) played on (arranged?) the Goodies records, and I can very well imagine him being familiar with Cardew's work - so maybe the Goodies ripped off Cardew?

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