From: dbarker@spang.Camosun.BC.CA (Deryk Barker)
Subject: Re: Cornelius Cardew
Organization: Camosun College, Victoria BC, Canada
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 03:36:50 GMT

In article <CB.92Aug26131517@tamarack13.timbuk> cb@tamarack13.timbuk (Chris Brewster) writes:
>Stephen Smoliar writes:
>
>   I was too wrapped up in [Cardew's] ideas about music, notation, and 
>   performance. ...  The very idea of the Scratch Orchestra was 
>   absolutely liberating ...
>
>I have somehow completely missed Cornelius Cardew.  Could someone
>summarize his ideas and what he represented (other than politically)?  

Well, without reference books to hand. CC was born in 1936, the son of
a well known potter. He studied at the Royal College (could have been
Royal Academy) and was an accomplished cellist. During the early
sixties he was assistant to Stockhausen. More drawn to Cage than KS he
gravitated towards "performance" art, happenings, and music in which
the performer took many of the decisions.

The ultimate example of the latter is probably his "Treatise" (1967?),
appx. 250 pages of graphic score - beautifully drawn, BTW, he was a
qualified draughtsman - with no indication to the performer as to
interpretation. 

In 1969 he published, in the Musical Times, his "Draft Constitution
for a Scratch Orchestra", together with an invitation to the inaugural
meeting in July, which is where I first met him. The idea of the
orchestra was to include both qualified, less than qualified and
totally unqualified musicians. Each member of the orchestra would take
it in turns to plan a concert, starting with the youngest (who was
just 16). There were various categories of music which would be
performed, including (my favourite) "popular classics", in which one
performer would be armed with a part of the score (e.g. just the 1st
violin line, or a single page) and everybody else would join in with
what they could remember. This, BTW for those who remember them, is
where the Portsmouth Sinfonia took their ideas from. I believe they
sprang from a class of Gavin Bryars, a friend of CC.

As an example, in 1970 the orchestra played at the Queen Elizabeth
Hall. The programme was Richard Ascough's "Music for the mind and
body". The concert began with a spoken piece, initiated by those
members of the orchestra on stage. At the word "heart" the rest of us
- who had been seated in the auditorium, joined in and gradually
filtered onto the stage. There were 4 popular classics involved, to
represent 4 parts of the body: the mind was represented by Mahler's
Sixth Symphony - one member of the orchestra was seated at the hall's
organ, a tape recording of the piece playing inaudibly (to everyone
else) beside him; he played the first chord on each page of the score.
The inner ear was represented by Terry Riley's "In C", of which
someone was playing the pulse. The stomach (what an army marches on
after all) was represented by the 1812 overture. This was not
scheduled to begin until the score in the table-tennis match
progressing in fronnnt of the stage (oh, did I forget to mention
that?) reached 18-12. I don't think this part quite worked out. The
heart was represented by the 1968 Eurovision song "Boom Bang a bang".
This was a fairly typical Scratch concert. The music critic of the
Financial Times once described us as being "on the fringe of the
avant-garde". 

CC once took up the guitar at short notice in order to be able to
take part in a performance of Boulez's "Le Marteau sans Maitre"!

He translated Gerhard von Westerman's "Concert Guide" from the German
and contributed the section on contemporary music, in which he write
of Stpckhausen's Carre "When he had sketched the layout of the whole
piece, Stockhausen delegated the actual writing of it to another
composer." Too modest to mention that *he* was that other composer.

CC's magnum opus was probably "The Great Learning", seven huge pieces
setting the text of the first seven paragraphs of that Confucian
Classic. The score to this is one of the most beautifully designed and
drawn things I have ever seen - as various musician friends have
agreed. The orchestra recorded (highly truncated) versions of paras 2
and 7 for DG in 1972.

Alumni of the scratch orchestra include Gavin Bryars, Brian Eno and
Michael Nyman.

Sometime in the early seventies he became a Maoist. I am not sure what
started this, but he devoted much of the later part of his life to
writing and performing simpler, more "accessible" music, in accordance
with his political beliefs.

Cardew died in December 1981 in a road accident in East London. AS I
have intimated, there are suspicions surrounding his death. I have -
somewhere - an article from the British newspaper The Independent,
published in May, when I was in the UK. I'll dig it up and enter the
gist at a later date.

Although I hadn't seen CC for several years when he died, I was
shocked to hear of it. He was a kind, modest, and gentle man who is
much missed.

Deryk Barker, Computer Science Dept., Camosun College, Victoria B.C.