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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Extremist yet what the musical avant-garde needed,
By Rachel Abbinanti (tusai1@aol.com) (Chicago) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Stockhausen serves imperialism, and other articles: With commentary and notes (Hardcover)
While returning home late on a cold night in December 1981, composer Cornelius Cardew was struck by a hit-n-run driver. The situation surrounding his death is indeed opaque, that he may have been murdered by the extreme right-wing working in London. Cardew led a dangerous life, as an activist Marxist. He was arrested for his activities in Camberwell and for a time was homeless,living in a train station in the north of London. The last year of his life he was learning various Asian languages, Pakistani,and Indian to work within those communities against a growing racism,where firebombings of homes was becoming a frequent occurence. He also had an innate gift for organizing rallies and demonstrations against the Right-Wing, and that may have been the cause of his demise. Still he was loved and admired by countless musicians,artists and activists. There were numerous memorial concerts after his death in London,Rome,New York,Toyko, Australia and Chicago, as well as specific pieces written for him in remembrance by Skempton,Curran,Lombardi. This work"Stockhausen serves Imperilaism" was like a cup of hot black coffee for sobering the musical avant-garde when it was written in the early Seventies and it is a shame it is now out-of-print. There is an Italian translation, although next to impossible to obtain.Although Cardew's demeanor, the tenor of his language was a bit extreme, against the avant-garde he once loved and became an important integral part of in England,he believed in the path he had chosen. And here he gives along with Rod Ely and John Tilbury a brief history of The Scratch Orchestra, an odd mixtures of professional and non-professional musicians,conceptual artists,composers from all walks of life. One Scratch credo was"to create music for those who need it". And they frequently did this playing Beethoven Symphonies with whatever means available, piano,two saxophones,one cello, one trumpet and accordeon. Morton Feldman once said of Cardew, that any advancements,any progressive strains for music in England will only come about because of Cardew's efforts. So you might ask "why does Stockhausen serve imperialism?" and not Cage, nor Berio,nor Boulez. Well they all do, and it was Cardew's function here to make known the growing elitism that was becoming part of the avant-garde. To make known the role of the artist. Stockhausen was an consummate example for Cardew's diatribe, a careerist composer(Stockhausen) who expolited the market and musical genres freely obsconding with concepts from Cage,and Cardew and whatever was the current buzz as his hippy=like "Stimmung" where six vocalists sit in a circle intoning the names of lost Indian and Asian gods, or his excursions into graphic notation holdovers from Cage, and more importantly Cardew, his 193 page "Treatise" written in with impeccable craftsmanship of a means toward a structured improvisation. But Cardew's relavance in retrospect of close to 30 years, is he tried to question what the avant-garde was doing and attempted to create a bridge between the advancements of culture and aesthetics and a politics that craved freedom unpretenciously. He began to set Irish and Chinese revolutionary songs for the piano, and made music the central means of his activism. No one to date has really appraised Cardew's political work in culture from within this context, and no one has seriously dealt with the set of problematics of an engaged musical artist. All see him as an ungifted extremist,as critics John Rockwell, Norman Lebrecht,Adrian Jack,Robert Morgan,or Samuel Lipman. In contrast perhaps the current work on Brecht by Frederic Jameson or the writings of Paolo Freire are more vigorous beginningsin attempting to identify the conceptual categories envolved for an engaged political artist. But the New Left today has ceased having an affinity for activism as Cardew espoused, he is like an ancient preserve of an old lost time that few would care to remember or rethink. The opposite theoretical realm of this work would be Derrida's "Spectres of Marx" where activism it seems only exists in the performative realm of thought within the safe confines of the four corners of the page.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
art & politics: documenting praxis,
By
This review is from: Stockhausen serves imperialism, and other articles: With commentary and notes (Hardcover)
This a compelling (& still relevant) grouping of criticism, performance history & discussion of compositional choices. The focus on integrating aesthetic production with (some might say subordinating to) active political commitment to social progress is something of an antedote to the melancholic or hibernating sensibility that seems to have haunted & paralyzed much of the avant-garde over the past quarter century. The writing is clear, empassioned and, like the music Cardew et al argue for, concerned with serving its audience - the working class. The almost economistic Marxism is refreshingly very anti-pomo (e.g. the authors see a very clear correspondence between cultural products and the class positions they reveal). Still, what i find most useful about this book is its very provisional, dialectical and self-critical honesty as we are allowed a glimpse of what it is to be a committed artist engaged in active social change. Don't take my word for it; the entire book is available for free download at ubuweb.
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