Moving in decency: The music and radical politics of Cornelius Cardew

Music and Letters

Volumn 79, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 555-576

  Taylor, Timothy D ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61949155289     PISSN: 00274224     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/ml/79.4.555     Document Type: Review

References (74)

1. See, for example, Bernard Holland, 'Music and Virtue: Is Making Art Good Making Good Art?', The New York Times, 20 July 1993, B2
2. Like most contemporary composers, Cardew has received scant scholarly attention. The two major sources on his music are Richard Barrett, 'Cornelius Cardew', New Music '87, Oxford, 1987
3. and John Tilbury's extensive liner notes to Cornelius Cardew Memorial Concert (London: Impetus IMP 28204, 1985), a recording difficult to obtain
4. Cardew is also a significant presence in Michael Nyman's excellent Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, London, 1974
5. See also Paul Griffiths, Modern Music and After: Directions since 1945, Oxford, 1995
6. Quoted in Karl H. Wörner, Stockhausen: Life and Work, ed. & trans. Bill Hopkins, London, 1973, p. 43
7. Cardew, Sextet - The Tiger's Mind, [London], 1967
8. For a history of AMM, see Edwin [Eddie] Prévost, No Sound Is Innocent: AMM and the Practice of Self-Invention; Meta-Musical Narratives; Essays, Matching Tye, Essex, 1995
9. Peter Paul Nash, interview with Howard Skempton and John Tilbury, 'Music Weekly', BBC Radio 3, 26 November 1991. A recording of this broadcast is held at the British Music Information Centre, London, and I thank them for making it available to me when I visited there in May 1992
10. Brian Dennis, 'Cardew's The Great Learning', The Musical Times, cxii (1971), 1066-8, at p. 1067
11. For a characterization of 'academic music', see my 'The Gendered Construction of the Musical Self: the Music of Pauline Oliveros', The Musical Quarterly, lxxvii (1993), 385-96
12. Linda J. Dusman, 'The Individual as Structure in Cornelius Cardew's The Great Learning: Paragraph 7', Interface, xvi (1987), 201-17
13. Keith Potter, 'Cornelius Cardew: Some (Postmodern?) Reflections on Experimental Music and Political Music', New Music, Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. Mark Delaere, Helga de la Motte & Herman Sabbe, Wilhelmshaven, 1995, pp. 152-69
14. Cornelius Cardew, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism and Other Essays, London, 1974
15. Mao Tse-Tung, On Literature and Art, Peking, 1967, p. 28
16. Cardew, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, 81
17. Cornelius Cardew, programme notes to Piano Album, London, 1973
18. Nyman, Experimental Music, p. 148
19. Cardew, The East Is Red, London, 1988
20. Michel Foucault, 'What Is an Author?', The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, New York, 1984, pp. 79-85
21. 'The East in Red Glow', in Historical Revolutionary Songs, 1971
22. The most prominent example is Cardew's own Treatise, which Paul Griffiths has called the Ring of graphically notated works: see The Thames and Hudson Encyclopaedia of 20th-Century Music, London, 1986, p. 84
23. Also see Brian Dennis, 'Cardew's "Treatise": Mainly the Visual Aspects', Tempo (1991), No. 177, pp. 10-16. Composers who employed the kind of notation that Cardew decried include Robert Ashley, Earle Brown, John Cage and La Monte Young
24. Cornelius Cardew, 'Wiggly Lines and Wobbly Music', Breaking the Sound Barrier: a Critical Anthology of the New Music, ed. Gregory Battcock, New York, 1981, p. 236
25. Mao Tse-Tung, On Literature and Art, p. 18
26. Cornelius Cardew, The Great Learning, London, 1971
27. Quoted in Dennis, 'Cardew's The Great Learning', p. 1066
28. The term 'ideology' is used here as it is in Marxian theory: 'the system of ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group'. This is the summary that Louis Althusser offers: see 'Ideology and the State', Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, New York, 1971, p. 158
29. David McLellan, Ideology, Minneapolis, 1986
30. and Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford, 1977
31. For a particularly cogent recent discussion of music and ideology (among many other issues), see Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music, Minneapolis, 1991
32. Marshall Berman, All that Is Solid Melts into Air: the Experience of Modernity, New York, 1988, pp. 34-5
33. Michel Foucault, 'On Popular Justice: a Discussion of Justice', Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-77, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. idem, Leo Marshall, John Mephan & Kate Soper, New York, 1980, pp. 27-8
34. Griffiths, The Thames and Hudson Encyclopaedia of 20th-Century Music, p. 140
35. Henze, for example, while committed to the Left, consciously decided to write music in the bourgeois style: 'I have taken the decision that in my work I will embody all the difficulties and all the problems of contemporary bourgeois music, and that I will, however, try to transform these into something usable, into something that the masses can understand': Hans Werner Henze, Music and Politics: Collected Writings, 1953-81, trans. Peter Labanyi, London, 1981, p. 180
36. Compare, for example, Eisler's writings collected in Hanns Eisler: a Rebel in Music. Selected Writings, ed. Manfred Grabs, trans. Marjorie Meyer, New York, 1978
37. See also Lydia. Goehr's discussion of Eisler and political music generally in 'Political Music and the Politics of Music', The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, lii (1994), 99-112
38. and Stephen Hinton, 'Hanns Eisler and the Ideology of Modern Music', New Music, Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. Mark Delaere et al., pp. 101-20
39. One rare exception is Keith Potter's interview, 'Some Aspects of a Political Attitude: Cornelius Cardew Interviewed by Keith Potter', Contact, x (1974-5), 23-6
40. For a discussion of Rzewski's music and politics, see Christian Asplund, 'Frederic Rzewski and Spontaneous Political Music', Perspectives of New Music, xxxiii (1995), 418-41; this article, however, curiously omits all reference to Cardew, whom Rzewski himself has frequently credited as a significant influence
41. There have also been fellow travellers, such as Louis Andriessen, who has taken a somewhat different route in his espousal of a wide variety of musical styles, including those from the popular realm, nonetheless rooted in avant-garde musical idioms that refuse to pander to audiences, in works such as De Staat (1972-6) (recorded by Reinbert de Leeuw and the Schoenberg Enzemble on Elektra Nonesuch 9 79251-2, 1991). See David Wright, 'Louis Andreissen: Polity, Time, Speed, Substance', Tempo (1993), No. 187, pp. 7-14
42. Meredith Oakes, 'Composers Talk and Talk', Music and Musicians, xix (1971), 4
43. Adrian Jack, 'Cornelius Cardew', Music and Musicians, xxiii (1975), 31
44. From an introduction he gave to a performance of The Great Learning, quoted in Dennis, 'Cardew's The Great Learning', p. 1066
45. An example of how wrong-headed quantifications of art works can be is provided by Guy Sircello, who puts forward a theory of PQDs ('properties of qualitative degree') in his A New Theory of Beauty: 'A PQD of an "object" is beautiful if and only if (1) it is not a property of deficiency, lack, or defect, (2) it is not a property of the "appearance" of deficiency, lack, or defect, and (3) it is present in that "object" in a very high degree; and any "object" that is not a PQD is beautiful only if it possesses ... at least one PQD present in that "object" to a very high degree'. Quoted in Peter Kivy, The Corded Shell: Reflections on Emotions and Music, Princeton, 1980, p. 123 (italics in the original)
46. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt, ed. Gretel Adorno & Rolf Tiedemann, London, 1984, p. 349
47. The one article I have found is Richard Williams, 'Up against the Wall', Melody Maker, xlviii (25 August 1973), 27, which does not mention Cardew as a composer for the group. Williams praises their music, calling it a cross between Stevie Wonder's 'Superstition' and Terry Riley's A Rainbow in Curved Air
48. Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, New York, 1969
49. As did Trotsky, who is better than many early Marxians on art and the use of art in society: see Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art, ed. Paul N. Siegel, New York, 1970
50. This is a complex concept, relevant to all cultural products. See Music and Society: the Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, ed. Richard Leppert & Susan McClary, Cambridge, 1987
51. Susan McClary, 'Historical Deconstructions and Reconstructions', Minnesota Composers Forum NewsLetter (April 1982), 1
52. Timothy D. Taylor, 'Aesthetic and Cultural Issues in Schumann's Kinderszenen', International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, xxi (1990), 161-78
53. and idem, 'When We Think about Music and Politics: the Case of Kevin Volans', Perspectives of New Music, xxiii (1995), 504-36
54. Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington, 1976, pp. 262-3
55. Eco pursues the concept of ambiguity in his later books, most importantly in The Open Work, trans. Anna Concogni, Cambridge, Mass., 1989
56. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge, Mass., 1984, p. 486
57. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 344
58. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: an Introduction, 2nd edn., Minneapolis, 1996. Adorno talks at length about the 'neutralization' of art that can occur if it is not understood properly. He invokes Sartre at one point, writing that Sartre thought that the principle of l'art pour l'art 'was perfectly acceptable to the bourgeois because it served as a means to neutralize art', and goes on to say that, in Germany, the 'bourgeois appropriated art by assigning to it the role of an ally in its attempt to institute social control': Aesthetic Theory, p. 336
59. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 1981
60. Edward Said, Musical Elaborations, New York, 1991
61. Popular culture is no less active in the construction of our individual identities. Unlike much political art, it simultaneously provides us with material that is attractive according to traditional norms. Melody Maker, interviewing fans at a Billy Bragg concert in England, discovered many who did not share Bragg's democratic socialist politics: they go to his concerts just to hear the tunes. For a discussion of this and other issues relating to Billy Bragg's music, see my 'Re-Signing Mass Culture: Billy Bragg's "There is Power in a Union"', Popular Music and Society, xv (1991), 33-48
62. For an excellent discussion of the popular culture and left politics, see Tony Bennett, 'The Politics of "the popular" and Popular Culture', Popular Culture and Social Relations, ed. idem, Colin Mercer & Janet Woollacott, Milton Keynes, 1986
63. Peter J. Pirie, The English Musical Renaissance, London, 1979, p. 241
64. R. Murray Schafer, British Composers in Interview, London, 1963
65. Kevin Volans, Summer Gardeners: Conversations with Composers, Durban, 1985, pp. 39-40
66. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, New York, 1975, p. 139
67. Jack, 'Cornelius Cardew', p. 31
68. Steve Lake, 'Rzewski/Cardew' (concert review), Melody Maker, li (7 February 1976), 47
69. Anon., 'Sages, Seers and Prophets', Melody Maker, li (24 April 1976), 27
70. Jacques Attali, Noise: the Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, 1985
71. Susan Bradshaw, 'Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981)', Tempo (1982), No. 140, p. 22 (ellipsis in the original)
72. Cornelius Cardew, Thälmann Variations (1974)
73. 'Notes & Queries', The Guardian, 11 May 1992
74. Edward Fox, 'Death of a Dissident', The Independent Magazine, 9 May 1992, pp. 24-30