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The Great Learning

The Great Learning

a review by simon hopkins of
release format The Great Learning by Cornelius Cardew (CD Album)

text

Based on the Confucian classic of the same name, The Great Learning was a piece instrumental in leading its composer, Cornelius Cardew, to form what became known as The Scratch Order: a significant moment in any history of experimental music. For Book Two of this giant piece, Cardew found that the group of about twenty musicians and composers he'd assembled to perform the premiere in May 1969 simply didn't supply a big enough sound. So these performers - Gavin Bryars and pianist John Tilbury among them - set about teaching the piece to friends and family members. The idea took root, and various Scratch Orchestra line-ups followed - often comprised of 'non-musicians' - taking a program of defiantly experimental music by such radical composers as John Cage, Terry Riley and Christian Wolff around Europe to audiences unaccustomed to such a repertoire. As important a politico-aesthetic act as any from a period that saw so many.

The version of 'Paragraph 2' featured on this Cortical Foundation CD reissue was recorded in 1971 and is utterly exhilarating, as a massed choir literally fights to be heard over even more massed 'tribal' drumming. After 20 minutes or so, it's easy to empathise with the exhaustion Cardew claimed the singers felt in performance.

The CD also features 'Paragraph 7 and "Paragraph 1". The Seventh was recorded at the same time as the second and is quite beautiful. Cardew wrote that it was "about the individual voice and the sound it makes in relation to other voices". A huge choir mumbles, moans, and occasionally even 'sings' - but quietly - and the results are as disquieting as they are ravishing. It's the single most engaging piece of music I've heard all year. And it's thirty years old. The album opens with a recording of "Paragraph " made over a decade later, in concert in London in 1982. It forms a contrast to the other pieces, making its way from sparse percussion environment, through grating organ solo to the remarkable heart of the piece, in which a large group of vocalists intone lines from Confucius over an edgy soundscape of electronics and 'ethnic' wind instruments.

An important document then, but also a wonderful record. Posted by simon hopkins at 00:00, 03 Nov 2000