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PLAY FOR TODAY: Cornelius Cardew a symposium SYMPOSIUM @ ICA, London Part of ICA Calling Out Of Context season 21 & 22 November 2009, 1pm – 6.30pm Through talks, performances and panel discussions, this two-day symposium aims to remake – rather than repeat – the legacy of Cardew, examining the questions and contradictions of his practice for their contemporary relevance. To book please visit the ICA website and follow the link to Calling Out Of Context, or phone our box office on 020 7930 3647.The tickets for one day of the conference are £8 (£7 for ICA members) or £12 (£10 for ICA members) for both days.
– Cornelius Cardew, Thälmann Variations for piano solo, performed by Frederic Rzewski (composer and pianist) – Cornelius Cardew: selected piano works, performed by John Tilbury – Cornelius Cardew: Autumn ‘60 and The Great Learning (Paragraphs 3 and 6), directed by Dave Smith (musician & Scratch Orchestra member) and John Tilbury
The Programme Lower Gallery 13.00 – 18.00 Saturday and Sunday (10 hours) Ultra-red: School of Echoes - The Cardew Project For the entire length of the symposium members of Ultra-red and the School of Echoes will conduct a ten-hour performative inquiry into Cardew's work in the ICA gallery. The duration commemorates the ten-hour performance of Cardew's Schooltime Compositions at the ICA in 1969. The entire performance will be open to the public who will be invited to contribute. The final outcome will be the articulation and analysis of, as well as proposals stemming from, new terms for further collective engagement into Cardew as an object cause of inquiry and collectivity. Saturday 21 November Theatre 1.00pm ‘Cornelius Cardew - the final decade’ a talk by John Tilbury illustrated with recorded examples of Cardew’s late music. During the last decade Cardew made a radical move from the aesthetic to the political avante-garde, rupturing professional and personal alliances and instigating a debate that continues to this day. Intimately involved with Cardew during this period, his biographer will revisit the issues that were at stake. 2.00pm Panel 1: 'Cornelius Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra revisited: why now and how should this be done?’ Grant Watson, Adrian Rifkin, Rob Stone & Kate Macfarlane Is it important and useful to go back and look afresh at what happened then? Can we go back in all honesty in the light of theorisation and historicisation? Are the questions and contradictions raised by Cardew’s practice still alive and relevant today? 3-3.30pm BREAK 3.30-4.00pm Cornelius Cardew: selected piano works, performed by John Tilbury 4.15-5.45pm Jamming session with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, the Otolith Group, Adrian Rifkin, Dieter Roelstraete and Andrea Phillips Sunday 22 November Lower Gallery 13.00 – 13.05 (5 mins) Ultra-red – The Cardew Object, opening protocol and continuing until 18.00 13.05 – 13.20 (15 mins) Cornelius Cardew, Autumn ‘60 (directed by John Tilbury) The score for this indeterminate work for any number of musicians demands an individual and personal response from each performer. In a talk delivered at the ICA in 1960 Cardew said of this piece: “The modern audience likes to hear things once, and then throw them away, like our paper handkerchiefs, our cardboard cups, our polythene wrappers. Autumn ’60 is freshly brewed each time”. 1st Winter Potato (1961) February Piece 1961 4th System (from February Pieces) Unintended Piano Music (1970)
13.30 – 14.00 (30 mins) Cornelius Cardew, The Great Learning: Paragraph 3 (1970) (directed by Dave Smith) ‘The Great Learning’ (1968-70) is a work in seven parts or ‘Paragraphs’, based on Ezra Pound’s translations of the Chinese poet Kung Confucius. The score consists of a combination of written instructions and musical and graphic notation in what some saw as “a unique equanimity of means between a musical poetry and political beliefs” (Morten Feldman, 1982). ‘The Great Learning’ instigated the formation of the Scratch Orchestra in 1969. 2 – 2.45pm ‘The Great Learning: Paragraph 6’ This Paragraph consists of short, written instructions, which seem to incite exploration and attention to the sounds created by the performer, the sound of others, and environmental sounds. Strict in instruction but loose in its interpretation, the performer is free to use any sound source. The result is a spare texture of events, encouraging a highly concentrated attention to the sounds and the way they interact. This Paragraph was written to meet the needs of the newly formed Scratch Orchestra and focuses on the idea of collaboration with fellow performers, mutual need, and interdependence. 2.45-3.15pm: break Theatre 3.15 – 3.45pm Beatrice Gibson: 'if the route': the great learning of london [a taxi opera]’ 3.45 - 4.45pm Panel 2: John Levack Drever, Andrea Phillips, Frances Rifkin, Rob Stone and Marcel Swiboda respond to the performances of ‘Autumn 60’, and Paragraphs 3 and 6 of ‘The Great Learning’ and to Beatrice Gibson's presentation and to Ultra-red's performance. Biographies of participants Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an artist and musician based in London. He uses performance, video, writing, cartography, illustration and shoe-making to explore sound, the voice and its spatial performance in relation to urbanity. His work has been performed and exhibited at CCA, Glasgow, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, C-E-M, Lisbon, Artangel interaction London, No.w.here, London, and Festival di Santarcangelo 39, Italy. Beatrice Gibson is an artist based in London. Referencing experimental music and film, her practice explores sound, sociality, models of collective production and the problems of representation. Her latest film, ‘A Necessary Music’, made in collaboration with composer Alex Waterman, won the Tiger Award for best short at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2009. She is currently working on a new film commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery and Camden Council. John Levack Drever is a sonic artist and soundscape researcher. He is head of the Unit for Sound Practice Research at Goldsmiths, University of London, and was the final chair of Sonic Arts Network. Much of his work is collaborative in particular working with the sound poet Lawrence Upton and with Blind Ditch. Kate Macfarlane is a curator and Co-Founder and Co-Director of The Drawing Room, London, a non-profit organisation that explores ideas around contemporary drawing and makes them visible in the public domain. The Otolith Group was formed in 2002 by London-based artists Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar. Their works include the films 'Otolith I' (2003), 'Otolith II' (2007), 'Nervus Rerum' (2008), the thirteen monitor installation 'Inner Time of Television' (2007), the curation of the exhibition 'The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of The Black Audio Collective', exhibited at FACT, Liverpool and Arnolfini, Bristol in 2007 and the co-curation of 'Three Early Films: Harun Farocki' at Cubitt (2009) and 'Against What? Against Whom?' (2009) in collaboration with Tate Modern and Raven Row (2009). Dr Andrea Phillips is Reader in Fine Art, Director, Curating Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research interests focus on contemporary art, architecture and current socio-political thought; movement, mobility and fluidity in contemporary art and political philosophy; connections between curating and socio-political activities of constructing, organising, and caring for transnational space; concepts of distribution in art, architecture and politics. Adrian Rifkin is a professor of Art Writing at Goldsmiths. On first coming to London in the late 60s he hung out with the New Music crowd and, while never a musician, acquired some of their habits of taking chance combined with quixotic rigour and militancy, both political and quietist. See gai-savoir.net Frances Rifkin is artistic director of Utopia Arts. As director of Recreation Ground Theatre Company, in the 1970s she worked with Cardew and People's Liberation Music in the context of contemporary political and anti-fascist movements. In the 1980s as director of Banner Theatre, Birmingham, she worked with audio recorded actuality to create performance and song in the Labour Movement. Currently works across diverse communities using theatre arts and as theatre director. She was P/t lecturer, Warwick University, 1992-5; lecturer, Lancaster University:1995-7; theatre consultant for the Public Policy Research Unit at QMUL1999-2001. Currently chairs Equity's Independent Theatre Arts Committee. Frederic Rzewski was born in Westfield, Massachusetts in 1938. Close ties with Christian Wolff, David Behrman, John Cage and David Tudor strongly influenced his development in both composition and performance. In the mid 60s he formed the MEV (Musica Elettronica Viva) group with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum, which quickly became known for its pioneering work in live electronics and improvisation and informed his compositions of the late 60s and early 70s. During the 70s he experimented further with forms in which style and language are treated as structural elements (e.g. The People United Will Never Be Defeated!). A freer, more spontaneous approach to writing can be found in more recent work (Whangdoodles, Sonata). Rzewski's largest-scale work to date is The Road, an eight-hour "novel" for solo piano. The Scratch Symphony for orchestra was performed at the Donaueschingen festival in October, 1997 Dave Smith is a pianist, brass-player, percussionist, conductor and composer who was a member of the Scratch Orchestra and founder member of the English Gamelan Orchestra and Liria and has been a member of the Gavin Bryars Ensemble since its inception. Performances have included British or world premieres of works by Carla Bley, Harold Budd, Howard Burrell, Cornelius Cardew, Ornette Coleman, Philip Glass, Christopher Hobbs, Ladislav Kupkovic, Michael Nyman and Christian Wolff. Rob Stone writes on the delphic histories of sound and architectural space, and the aesthetics of modern urban sociability. He completed his doctorate on the impact of suburbanization on Modernist cultural theory in Britain in 1998, and has since curated exhibitions in art museums around Europe. Previously of the Department of Visual Cultures and the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, he is currently Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Art at Middlesex University, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia. He lives in London and Vancouver. His book, Auditions: Architecture and Aurality will be published by MIT Press soon. Marcel Swiboda teaches in cultural theory, media and film at the University of Leeds and Leeds College of Art and Design. His research currently focuses mainly on technological embodiments of image and sound as inscriptions of time, memory and history, in a range of audio-visual media and in relation to musical and sound-based improvisational practices. He co-edited ‘Deleuze and Music’ with Ian Buchanan, Edinburgh University Press (2004). John Tilbury is a British pianist and considered one of the foremost interpreters of Morton Feldman’s music. He was closely associated with Cornelius Cardew with whom he first performed in January 1960 and was a prominent member of the Scratch Orchestra. He wrote ‘Cornelius Cardew: A Life Unfinished’ (2008). His numerous recordings include works by John Cage, Morton Feldman, Howard Skempton, Christian Wolff and Cornelius Cardew. Ultra Red was founded in 1994 by two AIDS activists in Los Angeles, Ultra-red conduct sound investigations in collaboration with social justice movements where sound is the medium and the site of inquiry. With nine members located in North American and Europe, the collective produce recordings, performances, workshops, radio broadcasts, and installations. Ultra-red's investigations have been hosted by institutions such as Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Art Gallery of Ontario, Tate Britain and Serpentine Gallery, London. School Of Echoes was organised by Ultra-red during their residency at Raven Row, London, in Spring 2009. The ten-week residency was accompanied by a five-session workshop on the practice of sound art and organising with sixteen participants, among them artists, activists, musicians, students, curators, and political organisers. Grant Watson is curator at MuHKA, Antwerp. Recent exhibitions include ‘Textiles: Art and the Social Fabric’, MuHKA, (2009); Nasreen Mohamedi: Reflections on Indian Modernism’ curated with Suman Gopinath, (2009) Office for Contemporary Art, Norway, Milton Keynes Gallery, Lunds Konsthall, Sweden….’Santhal Family: Positions around an Indian Sculpture’, MuHKA, (2008).
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