Cornelius Cardew: Play for Today
The Drawing Room, London, UK
Walking around ‘Cornelius Cardew: Play for Today’ at The Drawing Room, an archival selection of original graphic scores, ritual instructions, letters and other musical ephemera by Cornelius Cardew (1936–81), it soon becomes clear that the controversial British composer’s career extended way beyond the page (which he redrafted anyway), to address – by means of his ‘Scratch’ philosophy – the realm of performance as social organisation from the internal workings of the human body out.
Most of the material is displayed in Shelf for Cardew (2009), designed by the Swiss artist Luca Frei, which consists of two horizontal sheets of glass supported by wooden brackets. In effect this treats the paper samples as slide-mounts, a sculptural approach which avoids the pitfall (lurking in any such retrospective) of turning the gallery into a shrine.
Double-page spreads from Cardew’s massively ambitious score Treatise (1963–7) are the main focus, their central bar-line and dynamic black suns (or ‘dot events’) representing a challenge to the standard model of Western musical notation. This is also a challenge to the musicians themselves, forced by the blueprint’s sheer scale and complexity to devise a single-use method and set of procedures to translate the idiosyncratic symbolism. In fact a three-hour video of a live performance of Treatise given at The Drawing Room in July greets you on arrival, and immediately conveys both Cardew’s social ethos and a visually striking DIY quality: violins hang from the rafters; a mixing desk comes fitted with peculiar springs; Johnny Cash songs are sampled from an old cassette machine. Cardew himself, in a moment of 24-carat 1960s-speak, described Treatise as ‘a path to the ocean of spontaneity’ – a phrase he would have disavowed in his final Marxist-Leninist phase. However, this is to jump the gun.
Despite the centrality of Treatise to ‘Play for Today’, it can be argued that the ‘composition’ is transitional, the fish course to Cardew’s meatiest achievement: the Scratch Orchestra, defined in its 1969 draft constitution – which is printed in full in the exhibition catalogue – as ‘a large number of enthusiasts pooling their resources’. Documentation of the Scratch Orchestra is also sandwiched chronologically between glass and in a separate vitrine: a host of typed letters, schematics, concert programmes and so on between Cardew and other project members. Nature Study Notes (1969), a project taking its name from a school exercise book, contains the rudimentary cue ‘Sit in a circle’. There are instructions for how to execute improvisation rites, with quirky titles such as ‘Stupid Book Rite’, ‘Stirring Guitar Rite’ and ‘Night Rite’ sketching ways to live and work together. Howard Skempton’s piece Drum No. 1 (1969) proposes: ‘Any number of drums / Introduction of pulse / Continuation of pulse/Deviation through emphasis’. There’s a set of travel directions to find an outdoor concert site at Tatsfield, with the slightly threatening injunction that the players must never get closer than 20 feet to one another. This ‘hippy’ aspect is illustrated in a 16 mm film directed by Hanne Boenish, Journey to the North Pole (1971), a cross between a road movie and a miniature version of Woodstock festival. In short, the remark in John Tilbury’s catalogue essay, that there is ‘a seamless connection between all Cardew’s activities’, is confirmed; it is both sensual, Orphic even, and militant – in the form of agitprop posters such as a 1977 benefit concert in support of the Grunwick strikers shown here.
It is hard to be certain about Cardew’s personality: charming facilitator or control freak? The raft of material in ‘Play for Today’ retools both his image and sound-world though, in preparation for a series of talks and performances held at the ICA last weekend. To borrow a line from Art & Language, Cardew’s legacy is no ‘post-modern corporate ornament’, that’s for sure.
Michael Hampton
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