Cornelius Cardew (1936–1981): A Life Unfinished, and: Cornelius Cardew: A Reader (review)

"I have an insane desire to be an unsolved mystery" (A Life Unfinished, p. 1019), wrote Cornelius Cardew in his journal at age seventeen or eighteen. Given his remarkable life, with its dramatic changes in course, passionate engagement, and the distressing circumstances of his untimely death, that statement strikes the reader as eerily prophetic. Copula Press, an imprint of Matchless Recordings (noted for consistently excellent recordings of experimental improvisatory music), provides rich material for readers interested in the intersection of experimental music and Marxist-Leninist activism as manifest in Cardew's life and work.

Cardew grew up in a middle-class family involved in the arts; his father, Michael Cardew, was a noted potter. His early education included choral training at the Canterbury Cathedral School (relocated to a village in Cornwall during World War II). He chafed at the authoritarian structure, and, coming from an atheist family, was not at all at home in the ecclesiastical environment. He entered the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) in 1953, further developing his performance skills as a pianist and embracing serialism as a composer. He found serialism easy to embrace, enjoying the exploration of conceptual links between serial composition and Wittgenstein's philosophy (especially the Tractatus logico-philosophicus), in which he had already immersed himself.

From 1957 to 1961 he studied and worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen at the electronic music studios in Cologne. His close association with Stockhausen ensured connections with the European avant-garde. Cardew's journal entries show his ambivalence in the competitive atmosphere and orthodoxy of integral serial practice. Encounters with John Cage, David Tudor, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, and Morton Feldman opened a pathway of freedom from the integral serialists. Cardew returned to London, trained in graphic design, worked in the book design industry, and established himself in the forefront of the musical avant-garde in the United Kingdom. Further study in Italy linked him to musical and political developments there, and in Buffalo, New York, he grew closer yet to American Experimental lineages.

He brought his passion for experimentation and empowerment of performers to creation in his masterful graphic score Treatise (1963–67) and involvement with the seminal free improvisation ensemble AMM. Developing from his composition teaching at the RAM and Morley College, he cofounded (with Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton and others) the Scratch Orchestra. That ensemble combined democratic organizational principles with various modes of experimental music making. Cardew's expansive setting of the Confucian text The Great Learning stands out from that period for that ensemble.

Keith Rowe, of AMM and the Scratch Orchestra, led initiatives for study of the works of Mao Zedong. In a fairly short time, the formerly relatively apolitical Cardew embraced Maoism with exceptional vigor, reminiscent of religious conversion. The Maoist activists transformed the Scratch Orchestra into an ensemble directly supporting the work of the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist). That Maoist faction denounced the revisions of Khrushchev and, influenced by Canadian Maoist Hardial Bains, hewed to Stalinism in the Sino-Soviet split. Friendships and musical associations ruptured in this turmoil, as the charismatic Cardew denounced his former experimental/avant-garde music as counter-revolutionary. Stockhausen Serves Imperialism (1974) contains essays on these topics and is reprinted in Cornelius Cardew: A Reader.

The last decade of Cardew's life was spent in the service of Marxism-Leninism. The energy and passion he brought to serialism, and then to experimental music, he also brought to fighting racism and economic injustice. Following Mao's death in 1976, and the realization that the atrocities of his regime were undeniable, Cardew and others denounced the Chinese leader, and the anti-revisionist CPE (ML) reformed as the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist). He was a member of the Central Committee and submitted virtually...