'What do we remember about Cornelius Cardew?' asks Richard Gott in an article about the composer in the London Review of Books, reviewing the 1000 page biography, Cornelius Cardew: a life unfinished, by John Tilbury.
What do I remember? I was an annoyingly precocious child with a strong interest in music, though without the talent to make anything of it, and so I first came upon him in the pages of the Musical Times, to which i graduated when too old for Look and Learn, and where he seems to have been a frequent writer. The piece I remember was a manifesto or a criticism/self-criticism about the Scratch Orchestra, which I think later appeared in a collection of his writings with the snappy title Stockhausen serves Imperialism. I remember also hearing a performance of excerpts from the Great Learning, his settings of Confucius, on Radio 3, though not the whole of that nine-hour work. At one point the choir were required to pebbles on the floor. It was curious that China, the country Cardew was to admire so much, in 1974 embarked on a major campaign against Confucian philosophy, under the slogan 'criticise Lin Piao and Confucius'.
Cardew's music changed abruptly when he joined an ultra-left sect called the Communist Party of England Marxist Leninist . Quite what Cardew was doing in this gallery is hard to understand. His considerable intellect must have found their doctrinaire and over-literal application of the line of Peking Review to British conditions ridiculous. The group, long defunct, was run by a Canadian and distinguished themselves by habit of picking fights with the police at every opportunity, notably at an anti-national Front demonstration in Red Lion Square in 1974, when a young student, Kevin Gately, died. This tendency led many to speculate whether they were not in fact police provocateurs.
My last encounter with Cardew was at a National Union of Students conference in the mid-1970s. I cannot remember whether it was Blackpool or Llandudno, or one of the other seaside towns where the union would meet twice a year. These conferences were crazy; it was not unusual for sessions to last until midnight by which time any political judgement delegates might have had in the morning was long gone under the influence of booze and other mind-altering substances. Cardew's group, Peoples' Liberation Music, played late one night after the close of conference, and I went along out of curiosity. I remember little about the band except that they played a number of Irish rebel songs, and a toe-tapping number, whose refrain went:
Five fingers, five fingers, five fingers make one fist
Death to the British monopoly capitalists.
The sentiments were sound, their lyrical and musical expression infantile.
