The Great Learning (Paragraphs 1, 2, and 7) [Audio CD]

Cornelius Cardew & Scratch Orchestra (Author)

Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Cortical Foundation (2002)
• ASIN: B0014FBD1U
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,191,674 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars libertarian transmogrified into What? for now Yehtz-Zeit, April 14, 2008

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scarecrow "scarecrow" (Chicago, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Great Learning (Paragraphs 1, 2, and 7) (Audio CD)

the late Cornelius Cardew knew how to excite masses of people, how to organize them,n' talk to them, he began by introducing the post-war avant-garde into the bland conservatism of British culture, something that Thatcher and Blair further exploited and intensified,with privatizations of public wealth and properties,eradicating the advances of working people, for the ruling elites of Westminster.
Cardew was one of the founders of the Scratch Orchestra, a collection of artists,musicians, serious, jazz, improvisors,giggers from all walks n'lifeworlds, exhibiting multifarious sensibilties, but all deeply devoted to a collective product, working within the human frame most of the time heartfelt and conscious of class,history and place, something we rarely see today, with the cuthroat improvisor tribes that think they control the market of what they do, due to ignorance,they bounce from expression to genre changing whenever convenient mindlessly; Cardew however learned well from working with people,encouraging them to be creative; he was a good listener;and first endorsed the conceptual freedoms of John Cage, Cardew was the first to introduce his music again within British culture that always had a pathological stigma against modernity in any guise or shape. This was the early Sixties,and Cardew thought the USA culture, was quite progressive, even with Elvis and Kennedy and a means for furthering thought within culture, of course the Beat poets appealed to him with more a radical subversive frame;some ten years later "The Great Learning"was written, it functions on multifarious levels,a piece of performance art, conceptual music, in graphic notation for amateurs and professionals simultaneously,written to unite people to work together; ones devoted toward harboring a collective expression of voices and sensibilities, the shame here is that this recording is only part of the entire 9 Hours of the "Great Learning". The piece is without reservation a seminal work of the post-war avant-garde,one that had a social conscious; it responded to the need to work together toward a collective organization,without sacrificing the aesthetic perceptions of pleasures, singable melodies,with organ-like ustains timbres, homemade percussion as stones,all we might see profoundly missing today with concepts of "multitude" discussed within the radical frames of politics,The Scratch Orchestra wanted an art not simply to tiltillate museum and art collectors,( something the Cage School in retrospect had run toward; artistic elitism was an issue that was fast becoming a norm also in now institutionalized forms as exhibited by Stockhausen, and Boulez.Both had it seemed "stopped barking like a dog outside" and was allowed inside the establishment to sell aesthetic wares to the ruling cultural elites of Europa, and then USA. Cardew was never so fortunate, then adopting his own formation of extreme Leftism as a philosophy of life and a central focus for art.The original texts was from the "Analects" of Confucious, later changed to Mao, and returned to its original words; You will not find many recording of this work available, and since Cardew's death in December, 1981, there was some funds made available to record this work in its entirety, the British Council sponsored a performance in London inthe Eighties of collected old Scratch Orchestra performers who after Cardew's death saw another means of collectivity. "The Great Learning" has simply beautiful parts, of untrained voices, who try their best to deliver the text, with percussion moments, and organ. . . the work slowly works on you. . . it needs patience of contemplation and may remind you of a conscious Zen beauty . . .