Stockhausen Serves Imperialism and Other Articles

by Cornelius Cardew, Rod Eley (Contributor), John Tilbury (Contributor)

A notorious, influential and radical critique of the avant-garde music of Stockhausen and Cage, by maverick composer Cornelius Cardew Originally published in 1974, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism is a collection of essays by the English avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew that provides a Marxist and class critique of two of the more revered composers of the postwar Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage.

A former assistant to Stockhausen and an early champion of Cage, Cardew provides a cutting rebuke of the composers, their work and their ideological positions (Cage’s staged anarchism and Stockhausen’s theatrical mysticism, in particular). Cardew considers the role of these composers and their works within the development of the 20th-century avant-garde, which he saw as reinforcing an imperialist order rather than spotlighting the struggles of the working class or spurring revolution against bourgeois oppression.

Cardew’s early works do not escape his own scrutiny, with the book containing critiques and repudiations of his canonical works from the 1960s and early 1970 Treatise and The Great Learning . After abandoning the avant-garde, Cardew devoted his work to the people’s struggle, creating music in service of his radical politics. This music mostly took the form of class-conscious arrangements of folk songs and melodic piano works with such titles as “Revolution is the Main Trend” and “Smash the Social Contract.” Cardew maintained a critical cultural stance throughout his life, later going on to denounce David Bowie and punk rock as fascist. He was killed by a hit-and-run driver in 1981―a death that some speculate could have been an assassination by the English government’s MI5.

Supplementing Cardew’s writings are two essays by his Scratch Orchestra collaborators Rod Eley and John Tilbury.

Genres: Music, Politics, Theory, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Essays

126 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Cornelius Cardew was an English experimental music composer, and founder (with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons) of the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental performing ensemble. He later rejected experimental music, explaining why he had "discontinued composing in an avant-garde idiom" in his own programme notes to his 1974 piano album (Four Principles on Ireland and Other Pieces) in favour of a politically motivated People's Liberation Music.

From 1953 to 1957, Cardew studied piano, cello, and composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Having won a scholarship to study at the recently established Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, Cardew served as an assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen from 1958 to 1960. He was given the task of independently working out the composition plans for the German composer's score Carré.

Cardew became a member of the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) in the 1970s, and in 1979 was a co-founder and member of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist). His creative output from the demise of the Scratch Orchestra until his death reflected his political commitment.

Cardew died on 13 December 1981, the victim of a hit-and-run car accident near his London home in Leyton.

Reviews

[Levi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cornelius Cardew attacks John Cage, Stockhausen, etc, and most remarkably, his own work as leader of The Scratch Orchestra. Cardew's scathing criticism/ self-criticism of the said composers, including himself, as reactionary formalist provocateurs provides a dimension on the criticism of American avant garde that strays away from the usual focus on their works' non-musical aspects. He focused on how the American avant garde's experimentalism was naively heralded as the emancipation of sound from the artistic 'Genius', but was not fully aware of the political implications of 'chance', neutrality and repetition in a society where these very categories were 'pre-digested'and pre-configured to assume a form of apparent revolt.

[Orhan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This kind of music criticism is interesting for what it doesn't say than what it actually says. Both Adorno and Cardew ultimately had the same methodological concern, albeit Cardew does not approach mass culture from the standpoint of negativity. Neither were correct of course. Neither leftist protest music nor Schoenberg's 12 tone serialism are remotely emancipatory (if anything, Lee Scratch Perry and King Tubbys endless versioning as standardised dub is far less methodologically bourgeois than serialisms obsession with absolute determined uniqueness per composition.) That doesn't however mean that Lee Scratch Perry or Tubby were engaging in a pure proletarian culture (as if such a thing could even be conceived within the gradiants of a bourgeois society, quite the contrary in fact. However Cardews weltanschauung was ultimately that of a petit-bourgeois salesman, rather than seeing art as being inseparable from life, it is purportedly to be brought into harmony with it and rescued from the avant-garde (in spite of the fact that even a scronky jazzer like Brötzmann ıs more well known than the sad immediatist.) Which, of course, is why his liberation music is akin to theological cermon and consequently has appealed to miniscule proletarians. Nice compositions for pop songs though, I'll grant him that, and in that sense I do think his marxist break with the ever so preposterous hippy-like mysticism of Stockhausen, Cage and co. was healthy. It is merely that he was too indebted to Maoist influenced state developmentalist revisionism, and in fact gave the proletariat insufficient credit for understanding the burgeoning explorations of atonality and electronics filtering into popular music. This was the era of early Kraftwerk and Stevie Wonder utilising the arp2600 after all!

I shall leave readers with an Engels quote which I fear Cardew did not sufficiently meditate upon when alive, or have access to, at any rate.


"It is an inevitable phenomenon, rooted in the course of development, that people from what have hitherto been the ruling classes should also join the militant proletariat and contribute cultural elements to it. We clearly stated this in the [Communist] Manifesto. But here there are two points to be noted:
First, in order to be of use to the proletarian movement these people must also bring real cultural elements to it. But with the great majority of the German bourgeois converts that is not the case. Neither the Zukunft [Future] nor the Neue Gesellschaft [New Society] have contributed anything which could advance the movement one step further. Here there is an absolute lack of real cultural material, whether concrete or theoretical. In its place we get attempts to bring superficially adopted socialist ideas into harmony with the most varied theoretical standpoints which these gentlemen have brought with them from the university or elsewhere, and of which, owing to the process of decomposition in which the remnants of German philosophy are at present involved, each is more confused than the last. Instead of thoroughly studying the new science themselves to begin with, each of them preferred to trim it to fit the point of view he had already, made a private science of his own without more ado and at once came forward with the claim that he was ready to teach it. Hence there are about as many points of view among these gentry as there are heads; instead of producing clarity in a single case they have only produced desperate confusion – fortunately almost exclusively among themselves. Cultural elements whose first principle is to teach what they have not learnt can be very well dispensed with by the Party.
Secondly. If people of this kind from other classes join the proletarian movement, the first condition is that they should not bring any remnants of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, etc., prejudices with them but should whole-heartedly adopt the proletarian point of view. But these gentlemen, as has been proved, are stuffed and crammed with bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideas. In such a petty-bourgeois country as Germany these ideas certainly have their own justification. But only outside the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. If these gentlemen form themselves into a Social-Democratic Petty-Bourgeois Party they have a perfect right to do so; one could then negotiate with them, form a bloc according to circumstances, etc. But in a workers’ party they are an adulterating element. If reasons exist for tolerating them there for the moment, it is also a duty only to tolerate them, to allow them no influence in the Party leadership and to remain aware that a break with them is only a matter of time. The time, moreover, seems to have come. How the Party can tolerate the authors of this article in its midst any longer is to us incomprehensible."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx...

[Alf Bojórquez · Rating 5 out of 5]

La contraparte de la aristocracia de la música experimental y la tradición de John Cage. La historia de AMM es bien interesante. Aunque no comulgo con el maoismo ni el leninismo, además de Atali, este libro abre la discusión de clase social en la música experimental, el sonido, el ruidismo y la improvisación en general.

[Creiche · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really good read if you are interested in the music of Cardew. It also gives you a lot to think about if you are interested in creating graphic scores and what that means for the interactions between composer, performers, and audience. At times, the Marxist rhetoric seems a little heavy and Cardew's interpretation and optimism about the Cultural Revolution in China seems a bit naive. Still, if you are willing to work through and occasionally look past these ideas there is a lot of value to his ideas and criticisms.

[Tosh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cornelius Cardew is an interesting figure in the British Contemporary (Classical) music world. A hardcore leftist who sees the world in such a light writes about Stockhausen and Cage with respect to the Leftist point-of-view. In the sense, he's not knocking them personally, but more to do with the issue of what a composer represents in culture - especially in a political landscape.

[Matthew · Rating 1 out of 5]

p.44 "...creative listening...can attain a measure of understanding of what a composer is saying about the world." I think this is nonsense. Composers write music; they do not (necessarily) "say things" about the world. To expect them to is to brutally narrow the scope of what music is.

p.45 "The ‘randomness’ idea is a familiar weapon of the bourgeois ideologists to divert the consciousness of the masses from the real laws (laws and randomness are counterposed) underlying the development of the world and human society." The author sadly displays an intense lack of scientific understanding of the world and the role of randomness in it. I wonder if Cardew ever studied probability, or statistics, or chaos.

p.46 "The articles above and the talk on Stockhausen that follows depict this servile role quite starkly and show it as an objective fact, whatever protestations the composers themselves may make to the contrary." What an odd thing to say. Any author that claims that their opinions are "objective" facts should not to be taken seriously.

p.60 "Fourthly: what is the material of a composition? It’s not just notes and rests, and it’s not just a beautiful idea that originates in the unique mind of a genius. It’s ideas derived from experience, from social relations, and what the composer does is to transform these ideas into configurations of sound that evoke a corresponding response in the listener." This shows the authors extremely narrow view of what music composition is.

p.64 "As Mao Tsetung says, ‘There is no such thing as art that is detached from or independent of politics.’ " I hear this a lot, but I think it is either bullshit (there is a lot of art that is independent of politics), circular (anything that is independent of politics is not art, so...), or trivial (*everything* humans do is connected to politics, just as no art is independent of breathing).

p.84 "Let’s start with the idea very widespread in the avant garde and implicit in the score of Treatise that anything can be transformed into anything else. Now everybody knows (not only Marxists and farmers) that a stone, no matter how much heat you apply to it, will never hatch into a chicken. And that even an egg won’t hatch into a chicken without the right external conditions. And yet in Cage’s work Atlas Eclipticalis patterns of stars in a star atlas are transformed into a jumble of electronic squeals and groans. This transformation is carried out through a system of notation (a logic) that has no connection with astronomy and only a very sketchy connection with music." Again, the author displays a sadly narrow conception of what composition can encompass: Cage *did* transform a pattern of stars into a composition. Cardew sounds like a prig. (As far as transforming anything into anything else, I would, if I could, suggest he read about the Banach-Tarki paradox, just for fun.)

p.85 "Change is absolute, there is nothing that does not change." The ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter does not change, and there will always be exactly 5 algebraic groups of order 8. He is speaking about thing too narrowly, again.

This all makes me sad. Cardew sounds like a person who was genuinely interested in social revolution, and this kind of all-too-common nitpicking, holier-than-thou, you're-counter-revolutionary-no-you're-counter-revolutionary stuff is part of the huge pile of things that make revolution less likely, it seems to me.

[Telo Hoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cardew writes about imperialist bourgeois music, criticizing two seminal 20th century composers. Cage and Stockhausen are generally viewed in high regard, at least from our current standpoint in the romanticization of 20th century avant-garde and modernist styles. His criticisms are well developed, though at times too reliant on Mao and Marx, but the accusations of imperialistic music are worth considering.

What I find upon the closing of this book, especially after the concert critiques of Rzewski and Wolff, is that Cardew is too focussed on what is lacking, incomplete, or missing from these musics, even when the composers are attempting to write music for the working person's cause. His criticisms of his own music add to this point, and I am left wondering if what he calls for is even possible in the contexts of modern composition.

[Domenico Francesco · Rating 2 out of 5]

Libro invecchiato malissimo. Se alcune idee di fondo sono giuste la maggior parte sono indubbiamente tipiche e recluse nell'epoca in cui vennero scritte. In questi scritti si criticano i compositori d'avanguardia Karlheinz Stockhausen e John Cage, ma ciò per cui li si critica sono motivazioni tipiche di una ideologia marxista estremamente ortodossa e chiusa. Lo stesso Cornelius Cardew era un musicista e compositore d'avanguardia che successivamente abbandonò lo sperimentalismo per dedicarsi allo studio del marxismo e alle sue applicazioni. Principalmente si criticano i due compositori di essere in realtà dei "borghesi" mascherati e di non occuparsi nelle loro opere dei diritti dei lavoratori e di trattare invece tematiche spirituali e distaccate dalla prassi materiale e marxista (in primis il misticismo, il buddhismo e religioni e filosofie orientali che ovviamente altro non vengono viste dall'autore che come "sovrastrutture" oppressive); di conseguenza anche le loro tipiche sonorità dovrebbero essere "popolari" invece che avanguardistiche e difficili per l'orecchio comune (strizzando l'occhio ad alcune riflessioni di Adorno), si critica inoltre il concetto di "diritto d'autore" e come (ipocritamente, secondo l'autore) i due autori lo conseguano invece di servirsi alla causa comune mettendo la loro arte al servizio gratuito della comunità, senza capire, ad esempio, che molte opere di John Cage erano concepite anche come parodie della commercializzazione dell'arte e della sua "industrializzazione".
Libro oggi per nulla incisivo e anzi piuttosto irritante quando non ridicolo, ma rimane interessantissimo però come documento storico per comprendere alcune dinamiche del pensiero dell'epoca.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Essays on composers and composition by the British composer Cornelius Cardew, circa 1974, more interesting for their tone of anguish, righteous anger, and drive to moral good than as slices of Marxist dogma, which both impels and drags down his discussions of what compositions “ought” to do, and which composers have failed to do so. John Cage is chastised for introducing into music bourgeois notions of anarchy, and Karl Heinz Stockhausen for bourgeois notions of mysticism.

Being a Communist in good standing, Cardew both quotes Mao on “correct” ideas regarding music and denounces his own previous works. (Such Maoist self-denunciations later became absorbed by capitalist corporations and academia, which renamed them “performance reviews.”) But with ideological rigidity comes blindness to see in oneself the faults one intolerantly points out in others. The assumptions Cardew makes—on any given point—go unexamined, and answers are known before (or without) being proven.

There is no joy in the music—intellectually or emotionally, via performing, composing, or listening—just the relentless shame at having not having connected with proletariat audiences, who tend to be put off by all the discussions that must occur before, during, and after each musical performance to assure it has been “properly” contextualized and understood, etc. As Brian Eno reportly said at the end of a (non-Marxist) music conference a couple of decades ago, “So many theories; so little music.”

[Medio Mutante · Rating 2 out of 5]

even if i agree with some of the things cardew is getting at - he writes in such a ludicrously cliché party agitprop style that it is hard to choke down. calling out cage for being a capitalist stooge when the man lived in penury for the majority of his life is... just one example of black and white thinking from cardew, not recommended (but stockhausen was definitely a racist pseudoscientific dillweed)

[Hsu Jui-Ting · Rating 3 out of 5]

Concise if lopsided criticism levied against (of course) Stockhausen, Cage, and later himself. If the content is a bit sparing, it does demonstrate a fierce acuity of political thought intersected within musical grounds, even if the latter is not fully expounded on.

[Rush Falknor]

“Function of bourgeois art not to brighten society, but to make it universal - pessimism, defeatism, nihilism rooted in ‘man’”

“Bourgeois intellectual life is characterized by constant rivalry”

[Grace · Rating 2 out of 5]

not sure how convinced i am and i take issue with some aspects of maoism (the reference to the 'new tsars khrushchev and brezhnev' was kinda ... lol) but some parts were compelling and definitely this is an interesting application of the yenan talks