After an opening passage of music, the unmistakable voice of Cornelius Cardew is heard, refined and almost prissy in lecture mode: “I don’t know how many of you are musically educated…” before going on to explain how indeterminacy might be applied in a performance situation, material specified or elided, rules to be followed, broken or ignored. Later instructions are more specific, but increasingly woven into a rich, almost lilting electroacoustic background that marks something of a departure from Warsaw based Piotr Kurek’s more familiar breakcore mode as Slepcy.
Lectures was originally written for a Cardew event organised under the heading Zakrzywienia Igly in October 2007. The original aim was to perform a number of Cardew pieces, but it was decided instead to use material from his recordings as a basis for improvisation, with additional (unspecified) instruments in the mix. Kurek secured the help of the composer’s son Walter Cardew to gain access to unreleased lecture and rehearsal material, some of which is incorporated here. What’s intriguing about Lectures is precisely the impossibility of telling what is Cardew and what not, and to what extent the music heard relates to, deviates from or ignores the verbal instructions that break through the surface. It’s an unsettling process, akin to watching someone make pancakes while a voiceover describes how to transect a duodenal ulcer.
Or maybe pot-throwing would be a better example, for Cornelius’s father was a fine potter and it was said of a Cardew cup — as John Tilbury relates — that unlike most fine craft it seemed unaffected by damage, dirt or fragmentation, remaining a ‘Cardew cup’ no matter what. So with the son’s music. Ordinarily, a project like this would be drab palimpsest, imposing borrowed authority in place of attained form. Remarkably, Cardew’s spirit shines through at every turn, his ‘authority’ a subversion of authority, the actual sounds all the more effective a collaboration because they in no way resemble anything Cardew might have done, even if he were responsible for much of the sonic material here. This isn’t a complacent irony, but testimony to the aboding strength of The Great Learning. Brian Morton