The Legacy of Cornelius Cardew by Tony Harris

Author:Tony Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Ashgate
Published: 2013-05-28T04:00:00+00:00

Cardew and his Critics

The ‘very bad associations’ to which Tilbury refers are indicative of his anti-capitalist stance: popular music is after all an embodiment of the culture industry identified by Adorno. But Cardew’s reluctance, or inability, to engage in the practices of the popular music industry continue to be a source of criticism. For instance, Four Principles On Ireland and Other Pieces, a 2001 CD re-issue of recordings Cardew made in the 1970s, received this review on a web-based magazine:

Compared to the vicious outbursts of later 70s punk and the seriously political pronouncements of The Pop Group, this sounds about as threatening as afternoon tea at your granny’s … did he seriously believe his compositional solution, a return to somewhere between late Baroque (he described himself as a ‘star player of Bach’) and Gershwin, complete with twee crushed notes and frilly Liberace glissandi, to be capable of inspiring the masses to take up arms and bring revolution onto the streets of Europe? … Surely if the goal was to reach the masses, Cardew should have set his sights on the language of rock and pop and set about subverting the cultural imperialism of the record industry by producing hard hitting revolutionary pop, rather than writing what seems to be little more than dreadful pastiche. (Unknown 2001: online)

This assessment represents a typical initial reaction from uninitiated listeners to this music. Given that uninitiated listeners – that is, ‘the people’ – were Cardew’s ultimate audience then such expressions cannot be ignored. The first problem is that the uninitiated are, by definition, unaware of the specific context of which Cardew seemed fully aware:

I think we simply don’t have access to a working class audience. These pieces were written for a definite audience. It is a definite audience which comes to the Purcell Room – or the students in colleges round the country where you might get a gig. It’s not an audience of workers in their work environment or even in their recreation time. It’s music for a consciously culture-orientated youth. I never believe I claimed it was reaching the working classes. (Cardew in Prévost 2006: 237)

But even within the context of a ‘consciously culture-orientated youth’ there remain critical reservations regarding the integrity of the repertoire. Paul Griffiths, in a review from 1985, described Dartmoor and Consciously as sounding ‘like poorly scored and breathtakingly unimaginative backing tracks for pop songs of the most infantile kind. And I am trying to be generous’ (Griffiths 1985: 13). Griffiths’ misgivings are longstanding, noting in his review of Cardew’s 1982 memorial concert – an event where one would perhaps expect a greater than usual degree of goodwill – that Cardew was ‘hardly one of the outstanding composers’ (Griffiths 1982: 9):

It was much more than sadness at the premature death of Cornelius Cardew that made last night’s retrospective of his music so profoundly depressing … the second half even more miserable than the first … seventh-rate pop music given by People’s Liberation Music, a bizarrely misconceived virtuoso set

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