Cheap Bedford: Two Poems; Cardew: The Great Learning (Music) (Cornelius Cardew, David Bedford, Helmut Franz) Price

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Customer Reviews of Bedford: Two Poems; Cardew: The Great Learning

Cornelius Cardew studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen in the 1950's, but his public career really began in London's experimental art scene in the 1960's. Towards the end of that decade, he became convinced that contemporary music was accessible only by an elite group of intellectuals. The unfortunate consequences of this revelation later came to be a fixation with Maoism, the founding of a Marxist-Leninist Party, a curious collection of essays entitled "Stockhausen Serves Imperialism", and perhaps Cardew's own death in a 1980 hit-and-run, which many believe was politically motivated.

However, his disillusionment with ivory-tower composition gave Cardew the motivation to get the common man on the street interested in new musical developments. He founded a musical collaborative called the Scratch Orchestra which welcomed people with no musical training and supported improvisation, theatrics, and audience participation. It is this group which performs on this disc two portions from "The Great Learning", Cardew's setting of a work from Confucius which in its entirety is some nine hours long. The first, "Paragraph 2", is a wild work and worth hearing, consisting of constant drumming and shouted lyrics. It sounds something like a beachside gathering of hippie counterculture, something no other contemporary composer has, to my knowledge, done. Unfortunately, DG decided that there would not be enough space for the entire work, and it fades out after just over twenty minutes. The second portion, "Paragraph 7", is quite different from the first's wild savagery, a somewhat lush mumbling of the lyrics with hushed instrumentation. It is much less interesting than the first portion.

The second half of the disc is filled by David Bedford, who moved in the same avant-garde circles before ultimately doing various orchestral things based on rock music. He contributes settings of two poems by Kenneth Patchen, an avant-garde poet of some talent who is regrettably nearly forgotten now. These pieces date from 1964-65. "Oh the drenched land wakes" sounds extremely reminiscent of Gyorgy Ligeti's vocal works (sometimes his "Lux Aeterna" or "Requiem" due to an extremely dense polyphony in which individual voices are made unintelligible, and at other times his "Aventures" or "Nonsense Madrigals"). The second setting follows in a similar vein, though is less dense. These two pieces are indeed remarkable, but tends to retread ground already covered for fans of Ligeti. The Chor des Norddeutsche Rundfunks Hamburg gives an excellent performance in a type of polyphony that is not easy, though it is unfortunate that a
spoken word portion comes in a very thick German accent.

Though these recordings are quite old, with the performances of Cardew's works dating from circa 1970, the sound quality is generally fine. I did not find DG's liner notes satisfactory, as they tend to whitewash Cardew's political leanings and give little space indeed to Bedford.

All in all, this disc is one of the less vital entries in the "Echo 20/21" series. I'd recommend it for people curious about Cardew's unusual life and work.

Incomplete, but all we have
Cornelius Cardew's The Great Learning, when performed complete, is one of the longest works of music ever written. Its seven paragraphs--one based on each paragraph of the first chapter Confucius' The Great Learning--last approximately nine hours in performance. The performances on this disc--recorded by the Scratch Orchestra before Cardew had refashioned the work in a more politically oriented manner--thus only capture fractions of the work. (The recording of Paragraph 2 includes only the first and last of the five cycles that make up the complete Paragraph, while we only hear an excerpt from Paragraph 7.)

What we have, though, is intriguing concept music in the English experimental tradition that was springing up around this time. Both Paragraphs are based around a single idea--Paragraph 2 on the contrast between vocal and non-vocal sound (inspired by the idea of Buddhists chanting against the background of a waterfall), Paragraph 7 on slow harmonic change and clarification.

In Paragraph 2, a group of vocal melodies and drum rhythms are used, the performers gradually progressing through them over about an hour. The intention is that the singers should be exhausted by the end, at which point the drumming is becoming more regular and clear and dominating the musical effect. In this recording this process can still be heard, but it is very drastically telescoped.

Paragraph 7 features soft singing of luminous harmonies. As the work progresses, the harmonies gradually clarify until they reach a two-note chord, with the performers spreading out physically as the sound density reduces. The sonic effects here are at times astoundingly beautiful--this is certainly musical minimalism at its best.

Recordings, of course, cannot possibly capture the spatial effects of these works, whether it be the moving performers in Paragraph 7 or the invitation for the audience to stroll amongst the players in Paragraph 2. And of course, there's the problem of the truncated performances themselves--this recording is really no more than a taster kit for the whole work. In particular, Paragraph 7 feels totally incomplete in this recording--I'd love to hear the harmonies clarifying over the intended 90 minutes instead of fading out after 20 it takes on this recording. Nonetheless, this is the only commercial recording I'm aware of, so we have to be thankful for what we have. (Anyone for a Scratch Orchestra revival?)

The fill-ups on this disc are David Bedford's two brief choral settings of poetry by Kenneth Patchen--whose words also appear in the John Cage collaboration The City Wears A Slouch Hat. These are early works, and are nothing like the mature Bedford's rock-influenced tonal output. Instead, they're rather anonymous choral music, well-written but exploring very much the same orbit as many Darmstadt works of the time. They're well-performed by the NDR Chor, but I don't feel tempted to return to them often.

Oddly Effective
The concept of Cardew's work, The Great Learning has fascinated me since I first saw the score in Source magazine back in the early 70s. The textually based piece was elegant, but left my 12 year old mind with no way to imagine what the actual sound would be. In the time since, Cardew abandoned his avant-garde roots for music based in his Maoist ideology and my interest in the composer waned, as it did in many music circles. But with the rediscovery of European improv in the 90s, Cardew has become more in vogue again. This rerelease of the original Scratch Orchestra realizing two paragraphs of the Great Learning has done much to reanimate the reputation of this fascinating composer, performer, conceptualist and political activist.

The complete text score of The Great Learning is seven pages long and yet, in performance, it lasts over nine hours. Each paragraph of the work takes a portion from one of the seminal texts of Confucism and sets it in a conceptual framework. Paragraph Two is an elegant conception. The "orchestra" (drummers and singers) are divided into small groups of one drummer and several singers, dispersed throughout the performance hall. The drummers are given a list of rhythms from which they may choose. Once the rhythm is established, the singers sing words on any of 25 "sentences", scale fragments, singing a word on each note and holding each note for the length of a breath. When each "sentence" is finished the drummer moves on to another rhythm and the process is repeated. In concert, the audience is invited to move around from group to group, or to stand in one place and experience the overall sound. In the recording of course, the latter is all we can do, but the overall sound is oddly affecting. Through the cacophony of drumming droned notes seem to appear and disappear, and the rhythms coelecse and then pull apart again. The work feels less like a musical performance and more like a shamanic ceremony, doubtless exactly what Cardew was going for.

While paragraph 2 is all energy and wild abandon, paragraph 7 is light and peace. The conception for this paragraph is even more simple than for Paragraph 2. The score consists of 25 events (sing 9 (F2)swept away - this means sing the words "swept away" nine times with two of the times loud and the rest soft) and a set of directions. Each performer is to pick an individual note for the first event and us it for the duration of the event. During each subsequent event, each performer picks a note that they hear another singer singing. The result is a very complex chord that, over the time of the work, gradually becomes more simple, until it morphs into an open fifth. (Reports claim that this always happens even though it is never specified in the score.) Cardew displays a deep knowledge of human musical behavior and psychology in this piece, but the results are much deeper and more effecting than the concept. Paragraph 7 is a half an hour meditation on tone and the spirituality of tone.

The rest of the disc is filled out with material by David Bedford, a colleague of Cardew's during the Scratch Orchestra period. The Two Poems for Chorus on Words by Kenneth Patchen are both interesting works, but they are more conventionally avant-garde than Cardew's work. Portions of the piece sound like things that would be written by Ligeti or Xenakis, based on clusters, vocal glissandi and the gradually morphing of soundshapes.

The performances must be considered definitive. The Bedford pieces are performed by the Northern German Radio Choir of Hamburg and are expert. The Great Learning is performed by the Scratch Orchestra, a group of Bristish avant-garde experimentalists from the 60s along with their friends, family and people off the street. Cardew's work was not meant to be performed by trained singers and it shows, but in a good way. Judging this work by western performance and composition standards would be like judging the vocalizations of Pygmy yodellers or backwoods Kentucky musicians. It's beyond normal western standards of good or bad and takes on the quality of a tribal ceremony.

If the above description floats your boat, you should get this CD. But be warned, it is not like the European avant-garde, or even the American experimentalist tradition. Cardew is one of the grandfathers of the happening, along with Cage, Fluxus and Lamonte Young. Unlike the work of the Darmstadt serialists, which is really squarely within the scope of the western tradition and as such not quite as revolutionary as they would have you believe, this stuff has no true antecedents in western music. It can be best thought of as a sound object rather than a "composition" in the traditional sense. I find myself less interested in the details of the work and more awash in it's sonic force. Don't try to "figure it out". This is music for the body, not the mind.