CORNELIUS CARDEW

The Great Learning

E S S E N T I A L M U S I C
WASHINGTON SQUARE CHURCH, NYC
what is good is given back Thursday, December 8, 1994
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E s s e n t i a l M u s i c
David Axelrod, J Cobe, Alice Horn, John Kennedy, Jerome Kitzke, Penny Luedtke, Sean Meehan, Artie
Mechsikanz, Patti Onorato, Michael Parsons, Kendall Pigg, Michael Pugliese, Alex Sweeton, Artistic Directors
Edwin Torres, Charles Wood John Kennedy and Charles Wood

Publicity Director
Artistic Directors: John Kennedy and Charles Wood Donel Young

Please be mindful that tonight’s performance is being recorded live by Mode Records for future Essential Music Inc. Board of Directors
release in the first complete recording of The Great Learning. Brian Brandt, Tom Buckner, Nora Farrell, Don Gillespie, Robert Janz, Mimi Johnson, John Kennedy, Charles Wood, Donel Young

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Special thanks to Eero Richmand and Jerome Kitzke of the American Music Center and to Christian Wolff for their Mimi Johnson & Robert Ashley, Robert Bielecki, Tom Buckner, John Cage, Joseph Celli, Mitchell Clark, Peter Cooper,
help in locating the score, to John Tilbury (whose notes for the Cardew memorial concert that was held here in New Merce Cunningham, Peter Garland, Maya Gunji, Evelyn Hinrichsen, Robert Janz, John Jutsum, John Kennedy,
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Essential Music’s series of concerts this season in New York is made possible, in part, with public funds from the New Pauline Oliveros, Michael Rosen, William Russell, Dorothea Tanning, William F. Wagner, John & Denise Wood,
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 U P C O M I N G P E R F O R M A N C E S The Great Learning

On December 13, 1981, the British composer Cornelius Cardew was tragically killed by a hit and run
driver on the streets of London at the age of 45, leaving his wife and family virtually penniless. His life
and work was marked by extraordinary change and development in his attitudes towards music and society.
As a student at the Royal Academy of Music in London during the mid-fifties, Cardew was heavily
Heroes of the Gridiron II influenced by the then-prevalent serialist work of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. While
working as an assistant to Stockhausen in 1958, Cardew attended concerts in Cologne by John Cage and
Essential Music returns to the playing field in this second annual clash of the titans. Our most popular David Tudor that made a deep impression on him. His understanding of both the musical and social
show last year, baseball and hockey fans will find this a welcome diversion. Music not for the faint of implications of Cage’s work led him to experiment with musical structures during the early sixties that
heart, a program of classic aggressive Twentieth Century soundpieces, as well as several newer works of a incorporated improvisation, indeterminacy, and a growing concern for the composer/performer relationship
similar nature, including work by Cornelius Cardew, La Monte Young, James Tenney, Gordon Mumma, as a reflection of social inequality. In fact, Cardew came to identify the serialism that had so deeply
Alison Knowles, Peter Garland, John Kennedy, Larry Polansky, Larry Austin, Christian Wolff, Mitchell influenced his earlier work with the dogmatic and oppressive mechanical materialism that gripped post-
Clark, Charles Wood, and Robert Ashley. Of special interst will be Essential Music’s OSHA Safety World War II Europe.
Training for Experimentalists.
In the early Sixties, Cardew was a champion of the music of Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff,
Thursday, January 12, 1995 8:00 PM LaMonte Young, and Terry Riley. Cardew’s own work at this time focused on both graphic notation and
Washington Square Church, 135 West 4th Street, NYC improvisation. His Treatise , begun in 1963 and completed in 1967, is a massive graphic work employing
such simple shapes as circles, lines, triangles, etc. which are, as Cardew explains in his Treatise Handbook
“subjected in the score to destruction and distortion” along a straight reference line. Performers were free
to interperet the shapes and figures in any way they wished. As Michael Nyman has written, “Treatise is a
comprehensive graphic journey, a continuous weaving and combining of a host of graphic elements into a
long visual composition, the meaning of which in terms of sounds is not specified in any way.” But
Cardew found that traditionally trained musicians had difficulty with Treatise , and that the most successful
performances were with performers that “by some fluke have (a) acquired a visual education, (b) escaped a
The Experimental Tradition musical education and (c) have nevertheless become musicians, i.e. play music to the full capacity of their
beings”. Concurrent with his work on Treatise , in 1966 Cardew joined AMM, a live electronic music
Premiere perfomances of a recently discovered work by William Russell, Music for Minsky (1940) for group that had been formed the previous year by the English jazz musicians Lou Gare, Eddie Prevost, and
chamber orchestra and exotic dancer. José Ardévol’s Estudio en Forma de Preludio Y Fuga, para 37 Keith Rowe. AMM provided Cardew with an opportunity to make music in a completely democratic
Intramentos de Percussión, Fricción y Silbido (1933), Harold G. Davidson’s Auto Accident (1935) for musical environment, freely improvising with the other members of AMM without the use of scores.
percussion, work by Leo Orenstein, and others.
These experiences, as well as Cardew’s frustration with working with traditional musical organizations,
Thursday, April 20, 1995 8:00 PM eventually led Cardew to The Great Learning , which was composed from 1968 through 1971. The Great
Washington Square Church, 135 West 4th Street, NYC Learning grew out of Cardew’s desires to bring together a large group of untrained or “non-specialist”
people as performers, and like Treatise is a comprehensive and exhaustive working through of material,
though in this case the material is not so much graphic as it is social, presenting the performers with
tangible musical materials and situations that allow for and encourage the development of more democratic
performance situations. The Great Learning is based on one of the four classic Confucian books: Ta Hsio:
The Great Digest (or, The Great Learning ) and derives its texts and general structure from the seven
paragraphs of the first chapter, which is believed to have been written by Confucius himself. Cardew had
at this time personally accepted the Confucian principles of behavior as a model for his own life. In the Ta
Hsio Confucius expresses the view that ‘once you have set your own house in order, all will be
automatically well with society'.

In Cardew’s setting of the The Great Learning, a variety of processes are employed, unique to each
paragraph, wherein the communication of the text (whether or not it is explicitly spoken or sung) is the
central organinzing concern. In consideration of Cardew’s incorporation of ‘untrained’ musicians and
singers in The Great Learning , it is not so much the ‘transmission’ of the text to the audience that is of
primary
importance, as it is the influence of the text on the performers in their realization of the work through
which the ideals of Confucius are realized.

The translation orginally used by Cardew for The Great Learning, and that for our performances today, 5.
was by Ezra Pound, though as Cardew came to embrace Marxism-Leninism, and for a period Maoism, in When things had been classified in organic categories,
the Seventies he attempted to revise the text so that it would reflect his current Maoist influenced beliefs. knowledge moved toward fulfillment; given the extreme knowable
The justification for this was Chairman Mao’s thesis that “Works of art that do not serve the struggle of the points, the inarticulate thoughts were defined with precision [the sun’s
broad masses can be transformed into works of art that do.” For instance, the first paragraph was re- lance coming to rest on the precise spot verbally]. Having attained this
translated as follows (as compared with Pound’s version which appears later in these notes): precise verbal definition [aliter, this sincerity], they then stabilized
their hearts, they disciplined themselves; having attained self-
The Great Learning means raising your level of consciousness by getting right to the heart of a discipline, they set their own houses in order; having order in their
matter and acting on your conclusions, thus also providing an example to others. The Great homes, they brought good government to their own states; and when
Learning is rooted in love for the broad masses of the people. The target of The Great Learning is their states were well governed, the empire was brought into
justice and equality, the highest good for all. equilibrium.

In time Cardew came to denounce The Great Learning , and even his own attempt to revise it, in a series of
essays published in 1974, entitled Stockhausen Serves Imperialism and other essays. Confucianism, he
came to believe, embodied the ideals of fascism, and Pound’s aim in promoting The Great Learning was a
result of his search for a ‘philosopher of fascism’. Cardew quotes J.S. Thompson, who describes Pound’s 6.
reasoning as: “To abstract, from the histories of tyranny and oppression, those things that worked to insure From the Emperor, Sun of Heaven, down to common man,
order, 'a world order', the 'social co-ordinate of Confucius and Mussolini'". singly and all together, this self-discipline is the root.

In Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, Cardew’s essay entitled “John Cage: Ghost or Monster”, takes to task
the work of John Cage for both its acceptance by the bourgeois and its irrelevance to the struggle of the
working class. Though Cage embraced anarchism, and regarded his work as an attempt to incorporate
anarchic ideals within art as a way of influencing society (granted this became more defined for Cage in 7.
the years following Cardew’s critique), Cardew’s comments illustrate the basic unresolvable differences If the root be in confusion, nothing will be well governed. The
between anarchism and Marxism. It is a testament to Cage’s magnanimity that he provided considerable solid cannot be swept away as trivial, nor can trash be established as
support for the Cardew Memorial Concert that was held in New York in 1982 for the benefit of Cardew’s solid. It just doesn’t happen. “Take not cliff for morass and
family after his death. treacherous bramble.”

In 1969, early on in the period during which he was working on The Great Learning , Cardew formed The
Scratch Orchestra with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons. All but the first two paragraphs of The
Great Learning were written with The Scratch Orchestra in mind. This ensemble of largely untrained - translated by Ezra Pound
musicians from all walks of life performed the music of Cage, Feldman, Wolff, Cardew, Riley, Young, and
Frederic Rzewski, as well as works that they themselves wrote. The ensemble sought out a wide variety of
audiences, from farmers to industrial workers to traditional concertgoers to students, and these audiences
reflected the diversity of the backgrounds of the performers themselves. The guiding principles for The
Scratch Orchestra were outlined in Cardew’s “A Scratch Orchestra: draft constitution”. As with Cardew’s
early embracing of Western European serialism, then Cage’s anarchism, and his then-current acceptance of
Confucius’ moralism, the ‘draft constitution’ reveals his respect for and fascination with purity, dogma,
and asceticism. Cardew’s vision for The Scratch Orchestra embodied his interpretation of the Confucian
ideals: an ensemble that provided a model for, and a direct employment of, the self-analysis that was
required of both individuals and society for human relations to be structured on a firm, ethical basis.

The ‘draft constitution’ outlines five areas of focused activity for the ensemble: “Scratch Music”, “Popular
Classics”, “Improvisation Rites”, “ Compositions”, and “Research Project”; each of which was rather
rigorously defined in a way that would both allow for the diversity of experience of The Scratch
Orchestra’s members, and provide a framework that would guide the ensemble through the same process of
self-analysis and self-ordering that was suggested by Confucius.
As a direct result of his experience with The Scratch Orchestra Cardew became in 1971 an ardent follower
of Marxism-Leninism. He became actively involved with the English Communist Movement and the
Communist Party of England, and at the First Congress of the Communist Party of England Cardew was
elected to the Central Committee, in which he played an important role in helping to develop the C O N F U C I U S ’ T E X T
ideological, political, and organizational structure of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain, which
was formed in 1979. During these years Cardew was frequently attacked, beaten, arrested, fined, and
imprisoned by the British authorities as a result of his organization and participation in several protests and
demonstrations against fascist and nazi activities in Britain. 1.
The great learning [adult study, grinding the corn in the head’s
Cardew continued to write music, working in a more popular idiom and composing worker’s songs and mortar to fit it for use] takes root in clarifying the way wherein the
other larger-scale works with proletariat themes. Cardew continually struggled with the contridiction intelligence increases through the process of looking straight into one’s
between his devotion to the ‘struggle of the working class’, and his life-long work in the avant-garde. heart and acting on the results; it is rooted in watching with affection
Hans Eisler, a composer Cardew greatly admired, once said: “I have always striven to write music that the way people grow; it is rooted in coming to rest, being at ease in
serves Socialism. This was often a difficult and contridictory exercise, but the only worthy one for artists perfect equity.
of our time.” As John Tilbury has written, Cardew “had come to see the development of music as
inseparable from man’s struggle against privilege, injustice, systematized greed and exploitation. He
believed that it was only through the combination of artistic and political action that contemporary music
could be dragged out of its isolation.” In the end Cardew’s views softened somewhat and he seemed to be
seeking a way to accomodate his previous musical activities, saying (at a 1980 lecture on culture) “ When 2.
we say new culture, proletarian culture, we mean, as Lenin said, a culture which must assimilate and Know the point of rest and then have an orderly procedure;
rework the best of all previous cultures.” having this orderly procedure one can “grasp the azure,” that is, take
hold of a clear concept; holding a clear concept one can be at peace
Few figures, who have played such an influential role in the revolutionary changes that have taken place in [internally], being thus calm one can keep one’s head in moments of
the arts during this past century, have undergone such radical change in their thinking, and have subjected danger; he who can keep his head in the presence of a tiger is qualified
themselves to such self-examination, as has Cardew. Regardless of one’s opinions of the validity of to come to his deed in due hour.
Cardew’s position at any particular time, one can only respect his relentless search for truth, and the drive
to unify art and life that has characterized the whole of his life.

3.
A note about Paragraph Five Things have roots and branches; affairs have scopes and
beginnings. To know what precedes and what follows, is nearly as
Paragraph five is the most ambitious and comprehensive of the seven sections of The Great Learning. It good as having a head and feet.
opens with “The Introductory Dumbshow”, a “dance” which employs a translation of the Chinese
characters of the Confucian text using movements from various sign languages developed in order to
facilitate communication between Naïve Americans and whites during the 19th century. The paragraph
then proceeds into a long first half in which a number of ritualized events and improvisational
compositions are realized as a group or individually, according to a formal set of procedures and guidelines 4.
established in the score. At the center of the paragraph is “The Great Pause”, an intermission of sorts, The men of old wanting to clarify and diffuse throughout the
which in Cardew’s words delineates where “the ritual part ends and the improvisational part begins”. The empire that light which comes from looking straight into the heart and
second half of the paragraph is “The Improvisational Rite”, the only section of the entire Great Learning in then acting, first set up good government in their own states; wanting
which there are no instructions or guidelines for performance, only a suggestion to accord with “the good government in their states, they first established order in their
prescribed spontaneity apparent in Nature”. own families; wanting order in the home, they first disciplined
themselves; desiring self discipline, they rectified their own hearts; and
Members of “the audience” are free to move about and consider the boundry that may or may not exist wanting to rectify their hearts, they sought precise verbal definitions of
between observation and performance. their inarticulate thoughts [the tones given off by the heart]; wishing to
attain precise verbal definitions, they set to extend their knowledge to
- John Kennedy and Charles Wood the utmost. This completion of knowledge is rooted in sorting things
into organic categories.