Cornelius Cardew, David Bedford - The Great Learning / Two Poems (2002)

Cornelius Cardew and David Bedford were two of the leading members of the avant-garde in England during the 1960s. Both men studied abroad -- Cardew with Stockhausen and Cage, Bedford with Luigi Nono -- and both experimented in often unusual ways in their search for new means of musical expression. Cardew's The Great Learning Paragraph 2 (1969) was the result of one such radical experiment. Dismayed by the ivory-tower mentality of contemporary composers whose music, with its increasingly complex forms of notation, was accessible to only a select band of performers and listeners, Cardew sought to rediscover the creative and immediate power of music. His Scratch Orchestra was assembled specially for The Great Learning and was made up of professionals and amateurs thrown together more or less at random, singing, playing and drumming in a semi-improvisatory manner and in that way realizing Cardew's instructions, which were jotted down using graphic notation. No compositional caprice was intended to inhibit the performers: each of them, whether amateur or professional, was to enjoy exactly the same rights as his or her colleagues. It was not intended that there should be any overriding compositorial aim. Only when the work was actually performed was the process of creating it complete. And each performance would, of course, recreate that process and, with it, the work anew. In short, the very nature of the piece was influenced by its actual performance, thereby rendering the present recording a unique document in sound, inasmuch as it is the only recording of paragraphs 2 and 7 of The Great Learning , a work which, in total, lasts some seven hours.

A year younger than Cornelius Cardew, David Bedford was involved in many of the performances of Cardew's works, a period that he later recalled with great fondness: "Speaking as a performer of many of Cardew's early works, it must be said that the experience was totally rewarding. Our creativity was constantly being challenged, and the empathy of the performers, channelled into producing a coherent piece of music despite sometimes sketchy and sometimes paradoxical instructions, was often remarkable." With his setting of two love poems by one of his favourite American poets, Kenneth Patchen (1911-72), Bedford adopted a relatively conventional but none the less innovative approach to this material, his Two Poems being not so much a classical exegesis of their texts but a musical game with key words taken from each of them.