WeeklyWorker

31.03.2004

From avant-garde to 'socialist realism'

Review: Cornelius Cardew, 'Stockhausen serves imperialism', Ubuclassics, 2004

There is a strange contradiction in the work of Cornelius Cardew. Not necessarily something he would have had any trouble with, though. In fact, Mao Tse-tung’s 1937 essay, ‘On contradiction’ - expostulating as it does the universality of contradiction - would have been a great comfort to him no doubt, if faced with such a charge. Indeed, the other of Chairman Mao’s ideas that Cardew took most to heart was the practice of self-criticism.

However, Cardew’s own peculiar contradiction was that when he became more politically conscious he also renounced his best music. At the same time he adopted some highly spurious political positions, which had the result of taking his artistic activity in a rather odd direction too, as he attempted to revive a 1930s aesthetic of ‘socialist realism’.

Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981) was one of the great British avant-garde composers of the 20th century. He studied at the Royal College of Music before becoming Karlheinz Stockhausen’s assistant in 1958 and studying with Goffredo Petrassi in Italy in 1965. He also quickly came under the spell of John Cage, whose approach to music heavily influenced Cardew’s own until he started to become more politically aware in the late 1960s. While Stockhausen’s music became more mystical and even ‘sub-Wagnerian’, Cardew became progressively interested in Marxist politics and increasingly critical of the musical avant-garde, in whose tradition he had worked until then.

While teaching a class in experimental composition at Morley College, he founded, together with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons, the Scratch Orchestra in 1968. The SO was intended to release its members from the rigid and stultifying abstractions they found in the ‘mainstream’ avant-garde (ie, the part that had been absorbed by the bourgeoisie, or was at least tolerated by it as a diversion from truly radical art). Over the next few years the SO expanded to over 100 members, comprising not only composers and musicians, but also artists, writers and other musical amateurs who shared the same aesthetic programme.

The ‘Scratchers’ would allow all members of the group to make suggestions about projects to be undertaken (mostly consisting of various forms of improvised or semi-improvised music and performance events). These often took them into ‘environmental’ performances out of doors or on tours of culturally ‘starved’ regions like Cornwall and the North East. Indeed the group’s constitution favoured interventions from the youngest members over the older and more experienced.

Cardew wrote a number of exceptional pieces for the Scratch Orchestra, including his most famous work, The great learning (1968-71), based on the first seven paragraphs of the Confucian classics. His other famous work, Treatise (1963-67), was written before this more radicalised stage of his work, and was based on a highly visual, graphic form of notation. The SO also made its name playing music by La Monte Young, Christian Wolff, Terry Riley and Frederic Rzewski among others.

After a slightly disastrous summer season in 1971, the group had a long series of heartfelt discussions about its direction. These ended in the formation of an Ideological Group around Cardew, Michael Chant and John Tilbury, who wanted to introduce Marxist ideas to the SO and make its improvisatory work more appropriate to the needs of class struggle and the society that they intended to serve. By the mid-1970s, however, the SO was almost inactive and after a trip to Berlin in 1973 Cardew founded Peoples’ Liberation Music with Laurie Scott Baker, John Marcangelo, Vicky Silva, Hugh Shrapnel and Keith Rowe.

In 1976 he set up the Progressive Cultural Association and in 1979 was a founder member of the pro-Albanian Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), along with Chant, who is still an active member on its central committee. Cardew was heavily active in the east end of London in the struggle against fascism there in the late 70s and became a victim himself when he was struck by a car in suspicious circumstances and killed on December 13 1981. If he was largely ignored by the establishment after the ‘change’ in his career at the beginning of the 1970s, he has been almost completely forgotten since.

It was clearly an enigmatic career, to say the least. His criticism of the contemporary music scene and avant-garde art world in general as ineffectual at best, and a dangerous agent of reaction at worst, is extremely powerful, although his main source for these ideas appears to have been Mao’s Talks at the Yenan forum on literature and art (1942). Mao argued that all art is necessarily the product of class society, and that if it is going to be progressive it must both be conscious of its class origins and actively serve the working class in its struggle against capitalism. These talks were given at the height of the Anti-Japanese war of national liberation at a forum held over a period of one month in 1942 in the CCP stronghold in northern China.

Despite the peculiar origins of the talks, and the fact that the regime subsequently established by Mao became a mirror of Stalin’s Russia in its levels of political repression and barbarity, they are nevertheless thought-provoking and accurate, as far as they go, in assessing the position of art in class struggle.

Cardew, who before his politicisation had been widely held to be the epitome of British avant-gardism in music, recognised that the historic avant-garde was in grave danger of totally neutralising its potential for political radicalism by a form of mystifying abstraction, alienated individualism and the use of thoroughly anti-human procedures and processes for producing music (for example, creating highly abstract, rule-based and chance-based scores that are virtually impossible to perform, or that can exist only as objects in themselves - reified notational entities with no connection to musicians, let alone an audience).

As case studies he picked Stockhausen and Cage who had previously been his masters and inspiration. He singled them out for writing music that mystified social relations in their attempts to achieve a pure, non-human sound as an abstract quality. It employed techniques which held the idea that ‘anything can be transformed into anything else’ (the very opposite of materialist dialectics), as in Cage’s Atlas eclipticalis, whose score is dependent on patterns in star charts rather than the instruments and players who are to make the music.

Implicit in the theories of music elaborated in Stockhausen serves imperialism is a concern for the condition of working musicians, and especially those at the margins of the music industry who are paid the least, and who often live and work in abject poverty. This was also one of the reasons behind the catholic membership of the SO, with a large proportion drawn from outside the ranks of mainstream orchestras, even to the extent of including untrained musicians in their performances. This, if anything, is the most interesting aspect of Cardew’s career - and one of the most intriguing aspects of the book.

The author is ultimately drawn to conclude that the majority of his work with the SO was a failure - although posterity would suggest that it was in fact his most creative period, and The great learning his greatest work, despite its objectively reactionary content (because of its Confucian basis). The model for the SO that the more politically engaged Ideological Group proposed (while it could equally have taken them to far more interesting territory) led ultimately to a dead-end, as they tried to revive the Stalinist ‘socialist realist’ practices of the 1930s.

However, the analysis they made of the contemporary art world was provocative, to say the least, and even now, 30 years after its initial publication, Cardew’s collection of papers on Marxist aesthetics are still highly engaging and significant. It is for this reason that it is so significant that UbuWeb, one of the largest and most influential web databases of avant-garde writing and critical theory, should have decided to ‘reprint’ this book as a freely available pdf document, and make its title their current homepage banner.

The SO developed a kind of music-making activity that could provide a model for extreme democracy in action: their aesthetic was one of complete freedom within the confines of a group that knew that it was a socially responsive and responsible body and at their best the improvised music and performances were tremendous achievements in politically engaged art. The weakness of the group was ultimately to be found in the insufficient analysis of what it was trying to achieve, and the fact that large sections of the orchestra remained unpoliticised and unconvinced by the Stalinist politics that Cardew espoused. Hardly surprising.

In the end, the undemocratic and monolithic nature of his Stalinist and Maoist politics did not allow him to focus fully on the democratic nature of the SO or to validate sufficiently the political possibilities of the improvisatory aesthetic that the ‘Scratchers’ had initially adopted. Rzewski has said that he believes that towards the end of his life there were indications that Cardew might have started to move in the direction of a more open and democratic political stance, but by then it was already too late..

Now that Stalinist politics have finally had their day for good, and the shadow of the Soviet Union no longer haunts us, it is time to look at Cardew’s aesthetic and Marxist analyses again with fresh eyes and to find out what is still valid in them. There is plenty! Its contradictions are no longer a problem, and hopefully UbuWeb’s decision to reprint will provide opportunity both for criticism of the past and for self-criticism about the lack of political consciousness in contemporary art in the same spirit as Cardew himself.

It may have been written in the dark days of 1974, but there is much to recommend in Stockhausen serves imperialism. And it won’t cost you a penny!