Bath festival
It's now almost 30 years since Cornelius Cardew died ? in a hit-and-run accident that remains unexplained. He was a unique figure in 20th-century British music, the most radical composer of his generation, whose music of the 1960s brought together ideas from both the European and American avant garde at the time.
Cardew would have been 75 last month, and the Bath festival devoted a day to him in tribute. Composer Howard Skempton, who studied with Cardew, and pianist John Tilbury, his biographer, shared a morning event that was a quirky mix of lecture, reminiscence and recital. The afternoon was given over to a simultaneous performance of the seven "paragraphs" of Cardew's biggest work, The Great Learning, given in a variety of locations, museums and churches around the city, performed by vocal and instrumental ensembles from Bath Spa University, CoMa, and other improvising and electro-acoustic groups.
Tilbury's selection of piano pieces neatly encapsulated Cardew's development, from the coiled up intensity and angular beauty of the February Pieces and Winter Potatoes, through a realisation of some pages of the huge manual of graphic notation Treatise, to The Croppy Boy. This was a haunting arrangement of an Irish folk tune that was one of Cardew's first "socialist realist" pieces of the 1970s, when he rejected his experimental works as "elitist" and concentrated instead on political activism.
That requirement for music to be socially useful was anticipated in The Great Learning, based upon Confucius. The texts are declaimed or howled, sung or spoken, generating music of strikingly different characters, sometimes improvised, sometimes meditative. Commuting between the different performances, each seemed utterly different from the next and yet somehow the product of the same, rather special musical personality.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/jun/06/cardew-day-bath-festival-review
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