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Cornelius Cardew's Music for Moving Images

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Cornelius Cardew's Music for Moving Images Cornelius Cardew’s Music for Moving Images: Some Preliminary Observations Clemens Gresser Some initial thoughts Whereas Cardew’s autonomous music (especially within a modernist or more experimental framework) has received some attention, his music for moving images and for radio has been little discussed to date.1 Such applied music seems to fit none of what could be seen as the four core areas of Cardew’s musical activity: 1. his modernist and avant-garde music (all his works before starting his early experiments with the Scratch Orchestra),2 2. his experimental and improvisational music (Scratch Orchestra, AMM), 3. his overtly political and tonal music (mainly songs, and often performed by PLM3 or the Songs for Our Society Group), or 4. his programmatic, indirectly political music (mostly piano music, such as Thälmann Variations).4 However, film and radio music might also feature (or can have traces of) any of the approaches found in other areas of his oeuvre. This research was supported by a three-month British Library Research Break (an annual scheme for BL staff). I am extremely grateful to my former colleagues in Music Collections, and particularly to Nicolas Bell and Sandra Tuppen, for allowing me to have access to uncatalogued material and generally answering all my questions; to Trish Hayes (BBC Written Archives), for helping me with BBC archival materials; and to Susan Reed for not interrupting my research work with queries relating to my previous library position. 1 John Tilbury, Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981): A Life Unfinished (Matching Tye, Essex, 2008), and Eddie Prévost (ed.), Cornelius Cardew: A Reader. A Collection of Cornelius Cardew’s Published Writings (Matching Tye, 2006) hardly mention Cardew as a composer of film music, but cater well for other areas of his musical output, as do numerous articles and some academic theses such as Virginia de Vere Anderson, ‘Aspects of British Experimental Music as a Separate Art-Music Culture’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London, Royal Holloway, 2004) and Kathryn Gleasman Pisaro, ‘Music from Scratch: Cornelius Cardew, Experimental Music and the Scratch Orchestra in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern University, 2001). 2 Cornelius Cardew, ‘A Scratch Orchestra: Draft Constitution’, The Musical Times, cx:1516 (Jun. 1969), 617-19. 3 The People’s Liberation Music (PLM) was a political music group, founded in 1972 by Laurie Baker, John Marcangelo, Brigid Scott Baker and John Tilbury. Tilbury left in 1973, and Cornelius Cardew and Keith Rowe became members. Vicky Silva was the main vocalist; the group was dissolved in 1978 ‘under directive from the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) [CPE (M-L)]’; it was reformed as the band of the Progressive Cultural Association (PCA) (Tilbury, Cornelius Cardew, pp. 728-9; also see Tilbury, Cornelius Cardew, pp. 682-3 for further info on PLM). 4 Such a categorization is somewhat problematic as the first two categories are more about compositional style and approach, whereas the third and fourth describe the works’ function. However, it is obvious that some of the music for moving images could fit into one or two of these categories. Nicholas Cook has described Cardew and his music in just two phases: as an ‘avant-garde (and hence inevitably élitist) composer up to 1970, and the musically reactionary populist of the last decade’ (Nicholas Cook, ‘Orchestral, Choral’, The Musical Times, cxxiii:1673 (1982), p. 490). John Tilbury has avoided such a broad division of his oeuvre, even though he acknowledges the almost exclusive focus on composing political songs in the last decade of Cardew’s life; for example see Tilbury’s entry on Cardew in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. by Stanley Sadie, vol. v (2000), pp. 119-20, or see his biography of Cardew. 1 eBLJ 2013, Article 4 Cornelius Cardew’s Music for Moving Images: Some Preliminary Observations Another reason why this music has been largely ignored is the issue of whether such commissions and projects give a hint of capitalist or at least of commercial interests and intentions. For some, this might not fit the conventional view of Cardew (as either a modernist, or experimentalist or an overtly political composer and musician). One could speculate that Cardew himself maybe felt that these more ‘applied’ compositions for radio or moving images were not as noteworthy as his ‘proper’ music (as they were neither art music, nor ‘in scope’ for being politically useful).5 From some of Cardew’s correspondence of the 1960s and 1970s, it is clear that lack of sufficient income was of crucial concern to him and to his family’s life;6 therefore, one can imagine that Cardew may have primarily composed music for moving images in order to generate income. He was involved in providing music for a couple of moving image productions (mostly TV documentaries and teleplays), and also at least one contribution to a radio programme.7 Whereas most of these compositions pre-date Cardew’s very pronounced communist stance (i.e. the musical contributions listed below were composed pre-1971), it is nevertheless clear that prior to his self-declared political motivation for composing, these works show a side of this composer who is not primarily focusing on a modernist or experimental agenda. Such an attitude, which is very pragmatic and aims to fulfil a function of serving a visual context, can also be deduced from an example of Cardew trying to find his stance as a composer; a composer, like many others, who would like to live from his music-making; however, this was not easy as he seems to have been on the one hand uncertain how to combine the monetary side of composing with his stance as non-capitalist composer. On the other hand, there is a definite need to make money, and to gain recognition for his work: Cardew’s reply to a critical letter from Michael Chant might have been laced with a good amount of irony and even sarcasm; however, it indicates that he was aware of how to exploit his skills to make money: ‘I don’t see myself as a great composer, but yes indeed as a business musician investing my life in music, and yes I will create a market if short-shrifted in the common or commercial ones’.8 Though not proof that Cardew was thinking about how to make money from his compositional work, his letter to Howard Skempton (20 December 1974) asks Skempton whether he could obtain a (free?) ‘copy of The Composer in the Marketplace if you are in a position to swing that kind of thing’ (this refers to Alan T. Peacock’s book published by Faber in 1975); the idea of Cardew being interested in a book-dealing, amongst other issues, with the financial aspect of composing, is probably not surprising – after all, Cardew was a freelance musician and composer who had to feed his young family. His struggles with trying to make money with his musical activities are also evident in the same letter: he calls the Composers Guild ‘that feudal organisation’, but also refers indirectly to being unsuccessful in becoming a composer represented by Faber Music, and that his scores were (at that time) 5 This is only a hypothesis, as I am not aware of any kind of written reflection by Cardew about film music, comparable to Hanns Eisler’s – see Theodor W. Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (New York, 1947) – or about ‘applied’ music for a specific, conventional form of the media. 6 When replying to a request to have a snippet of Soon reproduced in a book by Paul Griffiths, Cardew asked to be given higher reproduction fees. See letters from Julia Kellerman (Dent publishers) to Cardew (18 Jan. 1980 and 29 Feb. 1980), found in as yet uncatalogued Misc. Correspondence 2, BL, Music Collections [June 2010]. The book was Griffiths’s Modern Music: The Avant Garde since 1945 (London, 1981), where sixteen bars of Cardew’s Soon appear on p. 183. 7 ‘Project ‘67 : Silent Spring in Palomares’ produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (producer: Howard Engel); produced on 15 January 1967 (date of broadcast unknown). Available at National Library of Ottawa (Catalogue number: 670115-12). The catalogue description reads: ‘A documentary on the January 17, 1965 in-air explosion of two American planes carrying hydrogen bombs, over Palomares in the South of Spain.’ 8 Letter 23 Jun. 1969, Jun. 2010 uncatalogued, BL, Music Collections, Misc. Correspondence Box 2, Folder Cardew-Chant correspondence. 2 eBLJ 2013, Article 4 Cornelius Cardew’s Music for Moving Images: Some Preliminary Observations with Chappell, ‘but heaven knows if they’ll bite’.9 This might indicate Cardew’s ambivalence about being a composer in the market place and trying to make a living from being a composer. Whatever the exact motivation Cardew might have had for writing applied music, Table 4 (below) gives an overview of how he contributed to moving image projects and at least one programme for a radio broadcast. This list goes beyond the works listed in John Tilbury’s biography,10 while some works mentioned elsewhere in his book are included; for most I was able to find more evidence than a reference by Tilbury, proving their existence or that Cardew wrote music for these projects.11 Nine ‘film’ projects are listed, of which seven were created in the 1960s, and two in the 1970s. Most of the 1960s works were documentaries produced or directed by the Canadian film director Allan King, and were predominantly for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.12 Whereas this might be at a first glance somewhat surprising, it is less so if one realizes that King resided in Europe for a long time during the 1960s, and that Cardew and he were friends.13 The first of Cardew’s collaborations with King wasThe Pursuit of Happiness: Beyond the Welfare State (1962), which is also the very first moving image project for which Cardew wrote music (I have been unable to track down information about any earlier film projects with which Cardew was involved.) The two film projects for which the British Library holds scenarios and ideas for music are A Search for Strindberg (1971; BL, Music Collections, Add.
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