Browse by Artist: CARDEW, CORNELIUS

Artist:	CARDEW, CORNELIUS
Title:	Cornelius Cardew: A Reader
Label:	MATCHLESS RECORDINGS (UK)
Format:	Book
Price:	$48.00
Catalog #:	MR COPULA3

A collection of Cornelius Cardew's published writings, edited by Eddie Prévost. With commentaries and responses from Richard Barrett, Christopher Fox, Brian Dennis, Anton Lukoszevieze, Michael Nyman, Eddie Prévost, David Ryan, Howard Skempton, Dave Smith, John Tilbury and Christian Wolff. Introduction by Michael Parsons. "The English composer Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981) was among the most adventurous, controversial and innovative musicians of his generation. After an initial association with Stockhausen and the European avantgarde, he became engaged with the aesthetic ideas of John Cage and the New York School. A leading figure in the experimental music of the 1960s, Cardew is widely acknowledged as a pioneer of indeterminacy, graphic notation, free improvisation and performer involvement. As well as extending the boundaries of music in unprecedented directions, he inquired deeply into its social relevance and meaning. His passionate and untiring quest for wider social significance led him eventually to become a political activist. In the 1970s he repudiated his earlier experimental work and adopted a more traditional musical language. He joined a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist party and devoted himself to political action, at the same time searching for ways to express his commitment in musical terms. At the height of his political involvement he died tragically at the age of 45, killed by a hit-and-run driver near his home in East London. This reader brings together a diverse collection of Cardew's major essays and writings from different stages of his career, together with commentaries by other writers associated with his work. It reflects developments, changes and contradictions in his thinking about music from the late 1950s to the end of his life. As a companion volume to John Tilbury's biography -- Cornelius Cardew: A Life Unfinished, Copula, 2006 it provides essential material for the study of Cardew's life and ideas; it also makes a significant contribution to discussion of the wider issues involved in the relationship between music, ideology and political commitment." Illustrated 390 pages, paperbound.

Artist:	CARDEW, CORNELIUS
Title:	Piano Music 1957-1970
Label:	MATCHLESS RECORDINGS (UK)
Format:	CD
Price:	$19.00
Catalog #:	MRCD29

Studio recordings from 1996 of solo piano music by the late composer (and key figure in the early days of AMM), Cardew, as performed by AMM's John Tilbury. "All the music included in this recording belongs to Cardew's early period of radical exploration and experimentation in the late 1950s and 60s, when having fully assimilated the advanced language of the European avant-garde, he went on to develop new techniques and new aspects of indeterminacy, to use notation in increasingly flexible and open-ended ways and to encourage the creative involvement of performers in the realisation of his musical ideas."

Artist:	CARDEW, CORNELIUS
Title:	Treatise (Prague Version, 1967)
Label:	MODE
Format:	2CD
Price:	$25.00
Catalog #:	MODE 205CD

Featured work: "Treatise (Live Recording, Prague 1967)." Performed by: QUaX Ensemble (Petr Kotik, Director). "This performance of Cardew's monumental 193-page graphic score 'Treatise' was recorded live in Prague in 1967 by the Czech QUaX Ensemble, directed by composer/flutist/conductor Petr Kotik. This historical recording offers a unique perspective to hear 'Treatise' as interpreted by Cardew's contemporaries. Kotik met Cardew in Warsaw in 1962, and they began exchanging scores by mail, including 'Treatise,' which was a work in progress. Upon meeting again in London (1966), Cardew provided Kotik with additional portions of the score and insights. Fresh from this encounter, Kotik started the QUaX Ensemble upon his return to Prague in 1966. The first thing QUaX did was to rehearse 'Treatise,' working through the pages Kotik had: 'The piece was very important for getting all of us together, musically speaking, besides having a lot of fun working out individual pages by having all the musicians contribute ideas and suggestions. We worked regularly over a long period of time, ending up with a 2-hour version of the piece -- only performed once, at the concert on October 15, 1967 in Prague.' It is presented here. Cardew said: ''Treatise' is a continuous weaving and combining of a host of graphic elements (of which only a few are recognizably related to musical symbols) into a long visual composition, the meaning of which in terms of sound is not specified in any way. Any number of musicians using any media are free to participate in a 'reading' of this score, and each is free to interpret it in his own way.' Liner notes by Petr Kotik and Cardew's friend and colleague John Tilbury. Tilbury says of this performance: 'There is much to admire in this 1967 version of 'Treatise' by the QUaX Ensemble from Prague: the feeling of spontaneity, its uninhibitedness, the rough-hewn sounds, the accidental, the half-intended, the blurred.' High resolution 96khz, 24-bit remastering from the original analog tape."

Artist:	CARDEW, CORNELIUS
Title:	We Sing For The Future!
Label:	NEW ALBION
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	NA 116CD

Performed by Frederic Rzewski, piano. "Twenty years on, Cardew's music still provokes controversy. Even amongst his many admirers, his later 'political' music in particular creates unease and perhaps misgivings. The relation of the music to its 'programme' and to the lofty aims it purports to serve is problematic enough, so let us remind ourselves what Cardew himself wrote about this music in the seventies: 'I have discontinued composing music in an avant-garde idiom for a number of reasons: the exclusiveness of the avant-garde, its fragmentation, its indifference to the real situation in the world today, its individualistic outlook and not least its class character (the other characteristics are virtually products of this). "We Sing For The Future" is a composition based on a song. The song is for youth, who face bleak prospects in a world dominated by imperialism, and whose aspirations can only be realised through the victory of revolution and socialism. In the framework of a solo piano piece lasting about 12 minutes, something of this great struggle is conveyed. The music is not programmatic, but relies on the fact that music has meaning and can be understood quite straightforwardly as part of the fabric of what is going on in the world.' Rzewski's interpretations of these two works are wholly admirable, the performances compelling, and the two improvisations towards the conclusion of 'We Sing For The Future' -- an unexpected bonus -- are quite magnificent. He stretches the boundaries of style and musical language drawn up by Cardew without rupturing them, and, at the end of the improvisations, Cardew's music is ushered back, seamlessly and convincingly. In the second improvisation we are reminded of the great Bach/Liszt transcriptions; there can be no higher praise. Cardew would certainly have approved the inclusion of the improvisations and would have relished the verve and boldness of Rzewski's playing." -- John Tilbury

Artist:	CARDEW, CORNELIUS
Title:	Treatise
Label:	PLANAM (ITALY)
Format:	LP
Price:	$27.00
Catalog #:	PLANAM CCC

"Cornelius Cardew's opus magnus Treatise is a 193-page graphic score written between 1963 and 1967 while he was performing with the improvisation group AMM. The score's graphic notation, with its intricately devised graphic lines, shapes and symbols, was intended to question the limits of compositional practice. Decisions concerning pitch, timbre and duration, along with the choice of instruments and the number of performers, are left entirely to the discretion of those willing to devise the rules and means for its performance. This realisation of 4 pages from Treatise by Keith Rowe (tabletop guitar) and Oren Ambarchi (guitar), possibly the most powerful ever achieved, was recorded live at Bimhuis in Amsterdam on Feb 8th 2009. Rowe and Ambarchi use the guitar as a point of departure for completely new techniques and sound environments. Already in the 1960s Rowe made a radical departure from traditional jazz, redefining the guitar in the British collective AMM. He prefers to lay the instrument on the table to manipulate its sound with springs, fans, office appliances and electronics. Ambarchi, also in Sunn O))), Menstruation Sisters and Burial Chamber Trio, predominantly mould guitar sounds into dark sonic patterns. Cornelius Cardew might be considered the most relevant contemporary composer from Great Britain. In the end of the 1950s Karlheinz Stockhausen was very impressed by Cardew's abilities as a musician and his knowledge of new music and invited him to participate to the historical 'Kontrefestival' concerts in Cologne (an important pre-fluxus event). In 1960 Cardew was at Darmstadt were he met John Cage, David Tudor and among others Walter Marchetti. Cage's experimental techniques were very inspiring for Cardew who, in 1969 founded the Scratch Orchestra, a large, rotating group of professional and amateur performers committed to collective experimentation which might be considered as one of the most convincing collective experiments in the history of 20th century avant-garde culture. Edition limited to 300 copies, reproducing, on the sleeve and the innersleeve, the 4 pages from Treatise performed by Rowe-Ambarchi."

Previous Page Index of Artists Next Page