1 eBLJ 2013, Article 4 Cornelius Cardew’s Music for Moving Images: Some Preliminary Observations Clemens Gresser Some initial thoughts Whereas Cardew’s autonomous music (especially within a modernist or more experimental framework) has received some attention, his music for moving images and for radio has been little discussed to date. 1 Such applied music seems to fit none of what could be seen as the four core areas of Cardew’s musical activity: 1. his modernist and avant-garde music (all his works before starting his early experiments with the Scratch Orchestra), 2 2. his experimental and improvisational music (Scratch Orchestra, AMM), 3. his overtly political and tonal music (mainly songs, and often performed by PLM 3 or the Songs for Our Society Group), or 4. his programmatic, indirectly political music (mostly piano music, such as Thälmann Variations). 4 However, film and radio music might also feature (or can have traces of) any of the approaches found in other areas of his oeuvre. This research was supported by a three-month British Library Research Break (an annual scheme for BL staff). I am extremely grateful to my former colleagues in Music Collections, and particularly to Nicolas Bell and Sandra Tuppen, for allowing me to have access to uncatalogued material and generally answering all my questions; to Trish Hayes (BBC Written Archives), for helping me with BBC archival materials; and to Susan Reed for not interrupting my research work with queries relating to my previous library position. 1 John Tilbury, Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981): A Life Unfinished (Matching Tye, Essex, 2008), and Eddie Prévost (ed.), Cornelius Cardew: A Reader. A Collection of Cornelius Cardew’s Published Writings (Matching Tye, 2006) hardly mention Cardew as a composer of film music, but cater well for other areas of his musical output, as do numerous articles and some academic theses such as Virginia de Vere Anderson, ‘Aspects of British Experimental Music as a Separate Art-Music Culture’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London, Royal Holloway, 2004) and Kathryn Gleasman Pisaro, ‘Music from Scratch: Cornelius Cardew, Experimental Music and the Scratch Orchestra in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern University, 2001). 2 Cornelius Cardew, ‘A Scratch Orchestra: Draft Constitution’, The Musical Times, cx:1516 (Jun. 1969), 617-19. 3 The People’s Liberation Music (PLM) was a political music group, founded in 1972 by Laurie Baker, John Marcangelo, Brigid Scott Baker and John Tilbury. Tilbury left in 1973, and Cornelius Cardew and Keith Rowe became members. Vicky Silva was the main vocalist; the group was dissolved in 1978 ‘under directive from the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) [CPE (M-L)]’; it was reformed as the band of the Progressive Cultural Association (PCA) (Tilbury, Cornelius Cardew, pp. 728-9; also see Tilbury, Cornelius Cardew, pp. 682-3 for further info on PLM). 4 Such a categorization is somewhat problematic as the first two categories are more about compositional style and approach, whereas the third and fourth describe the works’ function. However, it is obvious that some of the music for moving images could fit into one or two of these categories. Nicholas Cook has described Cardew and his music in just two phases: as an ‘avant-garde (and hence inevitably élitist) composer up to 1970, and the musically reactionary populist of the last decade’ (Nicholas Cook, ‘Orchestral, Choral’, The Musical Times, cxxiii:1673 (1982), p. 490). John Tilbury has avoided such a broad division of his oeuvre, even though he acknowledges the almost exclusive focus on composing political songs in the last decade of Cardew’s life; for example see Tilbury’s entry on Cardew in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. by Stanley Sadie, vol. v (2000), pp. 119-20, or see his biography of Cardew.