Cardew, Cornelius

Average customer rating: a tribute with poor feedbacks "Keep it new" Classical avant-garde experimentalism from.....a rock band? Can you guess what it is yet? lost me as a fan

SYR 4: Goodbye 20th Century Manufacturer: Sonic Youth / Syr ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD General | Alternative Rock | Styles | Music Indie Rock | Indie & Lo-Fi | Alternative Rock | Styles | Music Experimental Rock | Rock | Alternative Styles | Alternative Rock | Styles | Music Cage, John | ( C ) | Featured Composers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music Reich, Steve | ( R ) | Featured Composers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music Electronic | Instruments | Classical | Styles | Music | Computer General | Keyboard | Instruments | Classical | Styles | Music Percussion | Instruments | Classical | Styles | Music General | Classical | Styles | Music General | Chamber Music | Classical | Styles | Music General | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music General | Rock | Styles | Music Pop Rock | Pop | Styles | Music General | Vocal Pop | Pop | Styles | Music Experimental Music | Miscellaneous | Styles | Music General | Alternative Rock | Indie Music | Stores | Music Similar Items: SYR 3: Invito Al Cielo SYR 2: Slaapkamers Met Slagroom SYR 1: Anagrama Mori & DJ Olive SYR 6 ASIN: B00002R0NC Release Date: 1999-11-16

Tracks:

1. Edges (Christian Wolf)
2. Six (John Cage)
3. Six for New Time For Sonic Youth (Pauline Oilveros)
4. + - (Takehisa Kosugi)
5. Voice Piece For Soprano (Yoko Ono)
6. Pendulum Music (Steve Reich)

Tracks:

1. Having Never Written A Note For Percussion (James Tenney)
2. Six (John Cage)
3. Burdocks (Christian Wolff)
4. Four (John Cage)
5. Piano Piece #13 (George Maciunas)
6. Piece Enfantine (Nicolas Enfantine)
7. Treatise (Cornelius Cardew)

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Album Description

Customer Reviews:

a tribute with poor feedbacks.......2006-04-14

"Keep it new".......2005-04-03

Classical avant-garde experimentalism from.....a rock band?.......2004-11-21

Can you guess what it is yet?.......2004-06-11

lost me as a fan.......2003-03-10

milkboydanny@hotmail.com

Average customer rating: change the world, it needs it !

Four Principles on Ireland & Other Pie Cornelius Cardew Manufacturer: Ampersand ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD Chamber Music | Forms & Genres | Classical (c.1770-1830) | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music General | Classical | Styles | Music General | Chamber Music | Classical | Styles | Music General | International | Styles | Music Similar Items: We Sing For The Future! ASIN: B00005QCON Release Date: 2006-03-16

Customer Reviews:

change the world, it needs it !.......2004-11-16

Average customer rating: Admirable playing of an odd mix of music

Time Tracks Manufacturer: Albany Records ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD All Works by Beethoven | Beethoven, Ludwig van | ( B ) | Featured Composers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music Granados, Enrique | ( G ) | Featured Composers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music All Works by Nancarrow | Nancarrow, Conlon | ( N ) | Featured Composers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music Canons | Forms & Genres | Classical | Styles | Music Sonatinas | Sonatas | Forms & Genres | Classical | Styles | Music General | Classical (c.1770-1830) | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music Chamber Music | Forms & Genres | Romantic (c.1820-1910) | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music General | Keyboard | Instruments | Classical | Styles | Music General | Classical | Styles | Music ASIN: B0000049Q5 Release Date: 1996-11-19

Tracks:

1. Sonata In E Major, Op.109: First Movement
2. Sonata In E Major, Op.109: Second Movement
3. Sonata In E Major, Op.109: Third Movement
4. Piano Album 1973: The Croppy Boy
5. Piano Album 1973: Father Murphy
6. Piano Album 1973: Sailing The Seas Depends Upon The Helmsman
7. For Cornelius
8. Two Goyesquas: Lament, Or The Maiden And The Nightengale
9. Two Goyesquas: Fandango By Lamplight
10. Two Canons For Ursula: Canon A
11. Two Canons For Ursula: Canon B

Customer Reviews:

Admirable playing of an odd mix of music.......1999-05-28

Average customer rating: The Legendary Scratch Orchestra Avant-garde Cardew with Bedford's familiar sound Incomplete, but all we have Oddly Effective

Bedford: Two Poems; Cardew: The Great Learning Manufacturer: Deutsche Grammophon ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD General Modern | Modern, 20th, & 21st Century | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music General | Symphonies | Classical | Styles | Music General | Classical | Styles | Music General | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music Deutsche Grammophon: Music | Specialty Stores | Music Similar Items: We Sing For The Future! Tristan Murail: Gondwana; Désintégrations; Time and Again The Ligeti Project I: Melodien / Chamber Concerto / Piano Concerto / Mysteries of the Macabre - Schönberg Ensemble / ASKO Ensemble / Reinbert de Leeuw ASIN: B00006L771 Release Date: 2002-11-12

Customer Reviews:

The Legendary Scratch Orchestra.......2005-01-17

Avant-garde Cardew with Bedford's familiar sound.......2004-06-21

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.......2003-11-24

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.......2003-02-01

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.

Average customer rating: magnificent piano power in solidarity with a fallen comrade

We Sing For The Future! Manufacturer: New Albion Records ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD Chamber Music | Forms & Genres | Classical (c.1770-1830) | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music General | Keyboard | Instruments | Classical | Styles | Music General | Classical | Styles | Music General | Chamber Music | Classical | Styles | Music Classical | Indie Music | Stores | Music Similar Items: Bedford: Two Poems; Cardew: The Great Learning Four Principles on Ireland & Other Pie Rzewski Plays Rzewski: Piano Works 1975-1999 Tigran Mansurian: String Quartets ASIN: B00005UFF4 Release Date: 2001-12-04

Tracks:

1. Theme
2. Cadenza I
3. Candenza II
4. Ending
5. Part I
6. Part II
7. Part III

Album Description

Customer Reviews:

magnificent piano power in solidarity with a fallen comrade.......2001-12-21

Cardew once avant-gardist composer of graphic/conceptual works, as "Treatise" abandoned those endeavors and turned to Marxist activism, caught in the Anti-Vietnam and May,late Sixties rebellions in Europe. The last year of his life he was working with the various Indian, Pakistani families and was actually learning to speak their various dialects.He also was homeless for a time, living in a train station, that he maintained, and had been arrested for his activities in Camberwell. At the time prior to his death, Cardew had been organizing demonstrations against the growing right wing in London, The National Front, where firebombings of innocent working people's homes had been occuring with greater frequency. Recall the Brixton riots in London condemning the growing racism in London was soon to occur.

"We Sing for the Future" is a piano solo written the last year of his life 1981, in a somewhat Schubertian language, with refernces to early English piano music of William Byrd,John Bull,and the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book,a musical language exhibiting a directness,one of immediate communication.Cardew's abandonment of the avant-garde, the Post-Cage universe of purposless purpose was the growing exhibited elitism,and an indifference to the real problems of political struggle and culture.He turned to obvious,base accessible musical forms uncompromisingly. In this way the function of the music served political activist ways,there extending the focus of deeply historical social and political implications.
He felt the art of piano transcriptions or arrangements of Irish and Chinese revolutionary songs to be an interesting aesthetic focus and as a real supplement toward education of Left cultures.Music remained now simply another means, not a central focus to his creativity.
Cardew's piano writing was always a seminal means in his art. High levels of sophisticated ornamentations,rolled chords elegant clusters, and timbres as in his "February Pieces",for example had now adapted itself wonderfully toward this new unique political repertoire of works.Many of his primary works prior to this political period was for piano solo, as the "Three Winter Potatoes",and three piano "Sonatas", the 'Third Sonata' refurbishing the Boulezian language with a degree of originality. Much of the music he wrote during this period, 1972 to 1981 had this directly functional value and purpose,music intended to be played at worker gatherings, meeting halls, fundraisers,or cultural events.

Rzewski here adds an improvisatory section toward the end, much like a development/commentary,and admirably explores dark anguished penumbral dimensions of this rather simple,uplifting heartfelt tune that Cardew wrote.So we hear Cardew's complete work with Rzewski's appendations.
As pianist Rzewski has no equals in improvisatory prowess,never turning back on the global visions of the work, exploring what he had played, turning, returning, re-constituting the materials with further musical commentary. The lamenting power Rzewski imparts here is indeed a compelling content powerfully overwrought moments of extremes of virtuosity very similar to Busoni,Listz or Beethoven.

The inclusion here of the 'Thaelmann Variations' is yet another example toward this functional/educative music in the service of a political cause. The work a rigid set of variations after a known "lied" pastoral opeining the work with beautifully unencumbered rolled chords.
The work was written to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the death of Ernst Thaelmann, leader of the German Communist Party from 1927 until his death in the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944.
The more militant sections of these variations utilizes Hanns Eisler's "Heimliche Aufmarsch"(1927) on the secret gathering of troops. There is also another quote from Charles Koechlin's "Bandar Log" in the more violent variations here. These are followed by more lyrical,melodramatic variations. One striking variation is of softly gentle repeated chords for one hand only. The variations ends in a rousing-like tonal excursion into traditional materials of ascending/descending chords,and scales to maximize the positive dimensions of the struggle Cardew had conducted with his own life and for the benefit of others.

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Chamber Music 1955-64: Apartment House Manufacturer: Matchless ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD General Modern | Modern, 20th, & 21st Century | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music General | Keyboard | Instruments | Classical | Styles | Music General | Classical | Styles | Music General | Chamber Music | Classical | Styles | Music General | Jazz | Styles | Music ASIN: B0000683WK Release Date: 2001-01-01

Tracks:

1. Solo With Accompaniment
2. Three Rhythmic Pieces for Trumpet and Piano: Movement L
3. Three Rhythmic Pieces for Trumpet and Piano: Movement LL
4. Three Rhythmic Pieces for Trumpet and Piano: Movement LLL
5. Autumn '60 [Version L]
6. Material [Version LL]
7. Second String Trio
8. Piece for Guitar
9. Material [Version L]
10. Memories of You
11. Autumn '60 [Version LL]
12. Ocet '61 for Jasper Johns

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Treatise Manufacturer: Hat[now]Art ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD General Modern | Modern, 20th, & 21st Century | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music Electronic | Instruments | Classical | Styles | Music | Computer General | Classical | Styles | Music General | Jazz | Styles | Music General | Miscellaneous | Styles | Music ASIN: B00003W0Z7 Release Date: 1999-01-01

Tracks:

1. Treatise
2. Treatise
3. Treatise

Tracks:

1. Treatise
2. Treatise
3. Treatise

Average customer rating: bric-a-brac of misunderstood ideological detritus

Ghosts & Monsters: Technology & Personality in Contemporary Music Manufacturer: Emf Media ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD Cage, John | ( C ) | Featured Composers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music General Modern | Modern, 20th, & 21st Century | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music Computer | Electronic | Instruments | Classical | Styles | Music General | Classical | Styles | Music General | New Age | Styles | Music General | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music Electronica | Dance & DJ | Styles | Music Minimal Techno | Techno | Dance & DJ | Styles | Music Experimental Music | Miscellaneous | Styles | Music ASIN: B00005YESX Release Date: 2000-05-02

Tracks:

1. Memorial Ode on the Death of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
2. Excerpt from Voiceless Essay - John Cage
3. Lecture of Comrade Stalin at the Extraordinary 8th Plenary ... - Paul DeMarinis
4. Excerpt from Automatic Writing - Robert Ashley
5. There Is Only One Lie, There Is Only One Truth - Cornelius Cardew, English Chamber Choir,
6. Reality Is a Ghost in My Mind (Cruelty and Terror) Op. 174
7. Nothing Is Real (Strawberry Fields Forever) - Alvin Lucier
8. Extract from a Host, of Golden Daffodils - Nicolas Collins, Peter Cusack
9. For Jerry - Shelley Hirsch
10. Music for SalomWho Was That, Who Cried Out?/I Have Slipped/Dance of - Frieder Butzmann
11. Vario - Oval, Markus Popp
12. Blues With Beer, Magazines, Table and Chair - Michael Snow

Customer Reviews:

bric-a-brac of misunderstood ideological detritus.......2005-02-12

Average customer rating:

Historical Recordings 1968-1998 Manufacturer: Musikszene Schweiz ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD Cage, John | ( C ) | Featured Composers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music All Works by Feldman | Feldman, Morton | ( F ) | Featured Composers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music All Works by Rzewski | Rzewski, Frederic | ( R ) | Featured Composers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music General Modern | Modern, 20th, & 21st Century | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music Electronic | Instruments | Classical | Styles | Music | Computer General | Keyboard | Instruments | Classical | Styles | Music Cello | Strings | Instruments | Classical | Styles | Music General | Classical | Styles | Music General | Chamber Music | Classical | Styles | Music General | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music Experimental Music | Miscellaneous | Styles | Music ASIN: B000076CW8 Release Date: 2002-01-01

Tracks:

1. Folio, Daraus: December
2. Mathias Brupacher
3. Variations 2
4. re
5. Durations 2
6. Lachen und Leln
7. Zum Kern Hin
8. Die Sin
9. MF-MP Communication Instrumentale et Radiophonique
10. Abhigkeiten
11. Al
12. Musenkonzept
13. Now or Never
14. Composition for Two Players
15. Mit Dank an Mendelssohn, Daraus: Wald
16. W Ff
17. Prose Collection, Daraus: Play
18. Composition 7

Tracks:

1. Mathias Brupacher
2. Song Books
3. Treatise, Daraus: One Single Page
4. Proporzioni
5. Lachen und Leln
6. Sachen, Daraus: Teil 6
7. Anregung-Z
8. Initiatives, Daraus Matriochka
9. Dritte Studie Zur Metrik
10. Heinelieder, Daraus: Weltlauf
11. Devise Suivi d'Lcare Apprenti
12. Sieben Rosen Spr, Daraus: Leuchten
13. Composition for Two Players
14. Raritn Ferpreten
15. Sechs Partikel
16. Duo for Pianists 1
17. Composition 7
18. Die Rheinter Sind Hier Glich Verschwunden

Music Composers:

1. Carlos, Wendy
2. Carter, Elliott
3. Castillo, Ricardo
4. Cavalli, Pier Francesco
5. Cervantes, Ignacio
6. Cesti, Antonio
7. Chabrier, Emmanuel
8. Chaminade, Cecile
9. Chan Ka Nin
10. Chang, Yu-Hui

Music Composers

Music Composers