This album gives me a pretext for the second mention of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in three days, which can't be bad. For the Tractatus is the touchstone for Cardew's Treatise composition, which is my favourite on the first disc of this double album. (Aside: both mentions were mediated by Tom Phillips, since he gave me the lead for the first one, and also performed on this album.)
Cardew is a true English curio. His approach to composition influenced many, including Brian Eno (more on that in a moment), but that's the side of his life that has been absorbed into culture, if not the mainstream. In some ways he's now more intriguing for the side of his life that now seems like it belongs in a completely different country and era, even though it was only a little over 25 years ago. In 1979 Cardew was a founder of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (blimey! they're still going) and just before his death he was elected General Secretary of the People's Democratic Front. He got in trouble with the authorities (for doing little more than confront some of the racist groups in Britain at the time, if the accounts in the booklet with this album are accurate). Whether these activities were connected to him being killed by a hit-and-run driver is not clear — perhaps no one knows for sure?
I can't remember how I came across Cardew. I imagine there would have been a series of references, from AMM, perhaps, from Michael Nyman, and from Brian Eno. And then I would never have found his records in a shop, so I guess I probably got this by mail order from somewhere like Matchless Recordings in the late 1980s.
Paragraph 1 of The Great Learning features on this recording (which, as its title, suggests is of a concert held at the Queen Elizabeth Hall five months after Cardew's death), and I once saw it performed live in Sheffield at the Raise Your Banners festival. It's Paragraph 7, however, that Eno references as a key work in his exploration of generative music in his essay on the subject (included in A Year with Swollen Appendices, and also referencing Nyman's 1-100). "Something quite different from classical compositional technique is taking place: the composer, instead of ignoring or subduing the variety generated in performance, has constructed the piece so that this variety is really the substance of the music," wrote Sir Brian.
Cardew was only a couple of years older than us when he was killed, but his musical career extended from the rarefied theoretical compositional work of being Karlheinz Stockhausen's assistant, to being a member of the radical improvising ensemble AMM, to repudiating arcane and 'difficult' music in favour of folk protest songs that the proletariat could engage with more directly. The latter make up most of Side 4. I'm not quite sure what role Cardew had in Croppy Boy since it also exists a traditional Irish song. I like Watkinson's Thirteens, but that also has the sense of being a traditional piece. Meanwhile the last three songs are by turns a cheery ditty advertising revolution ("Smash, smash, smash the social contract / is the cry of workers all over the land") and conference speeches set to music.
But if strip away all this theoretical and ideological baggage you still have an album that is frequently enjoyable to listen to. You can hear the whole album for free at UbuWeb.
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