Stockhausen serves imperialism pdf

The choice of instrumentalists, the. Also, although there was some discussion and struggle. Our aim should have been, with the aid of this music, to bring these ideological and, political lines out into the open. By not presenting the music strongly enough we failed to generate that sense of community basis of all music-making in which a meaningful discussion could have taken place - i.

The reaction to the criticism of Cage and Stockhausen often took. Maybe such critics hoped I would feel obliged to defend my own music and thus inevitably return to the straight and narrow path of servile ideologist of the bourgeoisie.

The fact is that everything is involved in the process of change, including my ideas,. October I participated in the symposium quite militantly,. The furnishings were plush in the extreme: individual armchairs fitted with headphones providing simultaneous translation into four languages. My own contribution took the form of a talk on my composition Treatise, a page. There is no problem in. On the other hand there are musical problems cre-.

However, it is probable that the inspiration of modern composers cannot escape the influence of the conven-. I feel obliged to study these diseases on my own body, in my own work, rather. One reason for this is that I can diagnose them with far greater certainty in the context of my own devel-. In my output I was preoccupied for several years with a largescale manifestation of this second disease, the graphic.

Then, as in medicine, the correct method is to devise a strategy for eliminating the root causes of a disease and tactics for dealing with its symptoms until such time as they disappear.

A result of this is the conflict between progressive forces, which and reactionary forces, which oppose change. This conflict is fought out in the realm of politics. The decisive thing is: who holds political power? But bourgeois society is now in. Does the fact that the roots of all our cultural ills lie in society absolve the individual artist. Certainly not. Happily for my peace of mind Treatise has not been so successful, and I am treating it merely as a test case.

Rather than waste time on a systemat-. Ideas are right or wrong in proportion as they reflect truly or disthe forces that are most active in the world today. The most active forces in the. Now everybody knows not only Marxists and farmers that a stone, no matter how.

And yet in. This transformation is carried out. In graphic music a string of visual symbols is transformed into sound. True, there is a distinction between the Cage example and the other examples. Cage consciously. HPSCHD creates an image of society as a jumble of sense stimuli, flashing lights and tinkling sounds, in which the individual is reduced to the position of a mere spectator. These negative, pes-. Summer changes to winter, iron ore is changed into steel, a sequence of notes can be changed into a melody, but a tree can never be changed into a saucer of milk.

Not in the real world. But in avant. It is quite incorrect to say that music is a world of its own, developing according to its own internal laws. Anyway, in Treatise the effect of these devices is as minimal. Treatise I was studying the work of Frege Quite right. It represents bourgeois ideology with its back to the wall.

In this they reflect an attitude that is rife amongst composers the tendency to become preoccupied with form to the exclusion of content. But what the talk brought out was that no progress has been made, only. Music cannot be understood except in its social context. Many records are made without benefit of anything written. However, all pop records are transcribed, something is written down, because this is the only way the musicians can establish copyright, can assert their private ownership of the music.

So we find under section 4. To what is the rest of his. There are two points to be made here. Firstly, it is good to change the subject from something unimportant to something important. And in dealing with. This conference is an problems are secondary to social and political problems.

As one of the organis-. People like Kurt Stone 58 would like to do something to improve it. But with little chance of success, because. Bad performances are so commonplace it is impossible for the composer any longer to imagine that this situation somehow has nothing to do with him, that he is innocent. Even conventionally notated pieces fail to do this; performances are lifeless. So this problem is not specific to graphic music.

What is needed is for each person to take a sober look at his own activity in the context of the world political situation, and also in the context of his. Nattiez 60 is the opposite he is fascinated by the possibility that music in common. He experiences a kind of scientific ecstasy in thinking about this. Many composers also seem to feel this way about their work. However each single person has these two lines in himself, some-.

We must learn that if we become good children and serve our governments faithfully, we are definitely acting against the interest of the vast. In balancing the individual and the collective we must become conscious of which collective, which class, it is whose interests we. We must take our stand on the side of the working and oppressed people, the class that is in direct opposition to the ruling class.

The next question is: what role? It is too soon, to answer this, but for a start we should take a general look at the vast field of musical production and realise that the avant garde is just a tiny pocket in that. An objective view of. We must put our ideas and our music in such a way that they spread and grow elsewhere in the vast arena of musical production. At this conference there has been a struggle:. Obviously such scientists could not be called to a symposium on notation.

So we see that the decisive factor was the. It would gratify me to sell the manuscript to a sleepy. I decided to accept the engagement with the proviso that I would write a relatively comprehensive article describing the nature of the piece and what I thought about it, and distribute this article to the concert audience and. In this way the reactionary composition can be used not only as an arena for ideological struggle but also as a carrier pigeon for revolutionary ideas.

This year. This will be dealt with first. But a body does not consist only of backbone; the flesh and blood of The Great Learning is sounding musical forms. Though these. These forms are the product of historical development and are created for performers to play. They are couched in contemporary musical language and embody ideas reflecting presentday reality, reflecting aspects of the.

This being the case, the question arises: if I am genuinely adopting this standpoint, why do I allow the work to continue in use? In this way, wherever the work is played its class character and its ideological content will be brought to light and criticised, and the consciousness of the. The Great Learning is thought to have been written by a pupil of Mencius about BC, the first chapter on which my work is based being attributed to Confucius himself.

On the other side were the Legalists, a. Shang Yang d. Their legal system was devised to promote agricultural production and military strength. The fact remains that, after centuries of internal strife, when the Prince of Chin put legalist proposals. Dynasty was shortlived, but it finally established the feudal system. Later, during the Han Dynasty, the doctrines of Confucius were reintroduced to consolidate the autocratic rule of the feudal lords and lend it a more humanitarian and.

The May 4th Movement of 65 propagated the slogan:. The present movement to criticise Confucius and Lin Piao homes in on. Just as in his own day Confucius tried to prop up a decadent and dying. With the downfall of Confucius he sees his own final defeat approaching. Yes, if it were the desire of the Chinese people to restore capitalism. Just as in the West, it is not the exploited and oppressed. Indeed all these reactionaries seem to have one thing in common: they want to recreate Confucius in their own sugared pill image.

Who promotes Confucius in the West and what for? In the West he has provided similar opportunities. The early missionary. He supported Oswald Mosley in England and publicly supported Mussolini before and.

The political principles of the Great Learning never were put into practice and never will be; they function better in the ideo-. Christian theology is a. To think it through, to reduce it to some semblance of order, there is no better axe than the Ta Hio.

Hence the need for Confucius, and specifically of the Ta Hio, and more specifically of the first chapter of the Ta Hio, which you may treat as a. How the musical Great Learning came into existence Like many other miseducated products of a bourgeois upbringing, it was to. So in setting the first paragraph I fol-. An attempt to reform the first two paragraphs of The Great.

A literal translation of the first two paragraphs yields:. Being calm one can have peace. Having peace one can lay plans. Laying plans In class society there is no literature or philosophy above classes, and we. The imperialists stockpile armaments and murder. Taking as our guideline. BBC, who also censored the programme note to remove all political statements except such as were smuggled into the translation.

The Great Learning is rooted in love for the broad masses of the people. The target of The Great Learning is justice and equality, the highest good for all. Our aim being set we can appraise the situation. We appraise the situation and so we are relaxed and.

MarxismLeninism we were obliged to stand on our heads, and from such a contorted position one can perform no useful service to the revolution. Capitalism cannot be reformed, it must be overthrown. Bourgeois ideology cannot be. In rejecting intellectual complexity we landed ourselves in situations of brutal chaos in which mystical introspection supervened as a method of selfpreservation.

And in releasing the initiative of the performers we slipped into the cult of individualism. Hippy communes,. In the case of social workers, etc. Actually such people are carrying out the wishes of the ruling class, of the bourgeoisie. They are the more often than not deluded servants of the bour-. The very life of the oppressing and exploiting classes depends on their ability to conceal and mystify their true character. This ability is now wearing very thin.

The oppressed and exploited classes are learning in great numbers. They are learning that only through building their own organisations, the. In the context of this learning, the mystical delights of The Great Learning are just butterflies in a blastfurnace.

No longer do I want to conceal the facts about bourgeois society, I point of the working class. For the working class The Great Learning is or would. In contravening this principle by disengaging the audience I had set myself the job of launching a sizeable lead balloon. I accomplished this quite successfully and it was a worried little. This disturbed me; I wished I had had something better to offer, something which we could have united around. Then I reflected. Later I realised the cause of these depressions: I was clinging very tenaciously to the role of the.

Shortly after the concert, Peking Review brought out a further article on the subject of criticising Confucius, this one by an old professor who had previously espoused. What he wrote inspired me greatly. This struggle may be invigorating or painful or both by turns. On the personal level it brings about important changes: it gradually breaks down all complacency, all loneliness in the process of integrating with the working people, joining the fight to change the world and shatter the.

In this fight there is, besides hardship and sacrifice, great companionship and great happiness. After his lecture denouncing Confucius he said:. I should join with. As I worked on the speech, my misgivings gradually disappeared. In the concluding portion of the speech I said:. It makes me very happy to be able to live to see this revolution, and to take part in it was a great encouragement to me.

Morley, there was no question of any working class orientation in my class, or in the college as a whole. The class ran for five years with up to 20 or 30 people. The principal, Barry Till, closed the class on fatuous grounds late payment of fees, alleged failure to conform to the advertised syllabus, etc. Beethoven and others benefited to a certain extent from the new relations of production and gave artistic expression to the new ideology. England after the war a market for avant garde music had simply not been developed, as opposed to Germany, where the market had been developed quite energetically through such institutions as the Darmstadt Summer School for New.

Music and the radio stations. However, an English avant garde market was slowly developing about the time the Scratch Orchestra was founded characters like.

Cage and Stockhausen who had hitherto been ridiculed by the musical press were thenceforth quite seriously promoted , and composers such as Peter Maxwell. Davies and Harrison Birtwistle were beginning to compete relatively successfully on this market, at least to the extent of earning a livelihood from their music.

The statistics to back up this statement have not been consistently. The devaluation of musical skills by mechanical reproduction methods can be seen in the. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wagelabourers.

Marx one can point to the specific contradiction between the educational system and the changed economic and social conditions. Fundamentally the British. That is to say, the public schools, the old grammar schools and the universities. The national bourgeoisie learnt the wrong lessons from their. Industrial Revolution with regard to educational policy. Since most of the inventions which helped bring about the revolution were made by amateurs, eccentric geniuses, ordinary working men actually in industry, and pure scientists who put.

Even by the end of the century the result of this neglect for practical education, or vocational education, could be seen in the rapid advance of. Germany and USA in the technological field. But there has been consistent sluggishness to keep up ever since. Today the British Empire does not exist, but the.

Now that the decay of British national capitalism becomes clear this can no longer continue. Now the Tory government is pledged to cut it back. This amounts to official recognition that many bureaucrats hold little. TV documentaries bewail the unhappy lot of managers and executives on the dole actually cushioned by socialist earningsrelated benefits. The bolthole of higher education for alienated bourgeois intellectuals and artists universities and colleges is now choked with the 30yearolds who got their sinecures in the bonanza period of expansion a few years ago.

So many students graduating today are faced with unemployment. Those going through. Some science departments now fail to fill their quota of places through lack of applications. Many students opt for the social science field in search,. But they do. Hoffmann, Bobby Scale were three of the defendants were charged with conspiracy, incitement to riot, and contempt of court in the wake of events during the.

See note 6 and note 32 below. A few members had experienced this even more forcefully a few weeks. When it. This disciplined. All four wrote compositions for the group some were long and used systematic processes e.

Another subgroup was the pop group CUM. Inner Ear, the Heart and the Stomach. Each member had to plan his own journey and find ways of documenting it musically. The resulting freeforall was loosely. She wanted to know what social significance we thought our work had, and how we saw it developing in the future. Some members cooperated only halfheartedly, but the more conscious members grappled with her.

Her presence, and the presence of her crew, were an important additional factor in breaking down the discussion taboo.

That is what is meant by a change in feelings, a. Without such a change, without such remoulding, they can do nothing well and will be misfits. The idea and its speedy realisation were stimulated by a large prize offered by an Italian organisation for such a work. Sweet F. Chairman Mao gave the opening and closing speeches, pointing out the general line that the forum should take and summing up the. It should cause no surprise that the Chinese Communist Party could find the time in the.

Mao put. Revolution not because of any magical properties but because of their firm proletarian line and their sharp dialectical materialist analysis. These qualities are vital in the struggle of the working class to exercise leadership in all fields and prevent the bourgeoisie from staging a comeback by usurping positions of authority in.

By the time the 30th anniversary of the Talks came round , artists the world over were tackling the problems of applying the. We should tie the. This was hearsay from a source I had and have no reason to doubt.

In the sixties he became interested in light music and dropped out of the avant garde, earning his livelihood as an orchestral hornplayer in Vienna. Stockhausen and a number of other composers. In recent years he has virtually abandoned piano playing to devote himself to live electronic performance.

For instance: freedom for the working class can only consist in recognising the historical necessity of overthrowing capitalism and actually doing so. The capitalist say, the grainhoarder in India will not supply. At his boldest he might say that he wanted his music to make people free.

Its effect is the opposite: entangling people. From the proletarian point of view, the main victims were the Communist artists Brecht. The German capitalists brought the fascists to power as a last resort, a desperate gamble to stave off collapse.

On the cultural front their attack was. Possibly the main advantage the. Nazis derived from their racist antisemitic line on the ideological front was that it enabled them to outlaw Marxism Communism not because it was proletarian, but because Marx was a Jew! Darmstadt propagated the socalled Second Viennese School. Schdnberg, Berg and Webern and offered encouragement to young composers Boulez, Stockhausen and Nono became the leading names to proceed further along the road of serial music.

What they turned out was a kind of atomised. In the. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. Despite the restrictive relations of. Genuine artistic achievements on a grand scale are of course not possible under the dictatorship of a degenerate bourgeois ideology.

John Cage, Defence of Satie. A lecture delivered at Black Mountain. However, at the present time large numbers including some of those that enjoy bourgeois music of these nonmanual workers civil servants, teachers, etc.

For instance, they go on strike. In proportion as this becomes the general trend the. More often than not they are not only distorting the truth, they are deliberately spreading metaphysical or even fascist ideas. This rising was brutally suppressed by the bourgeoisie.

He participated in the rising and as a result spent the. He spent 13 years in prison for his part in the rising and resolutely refused to sue for pardon or renege on his views.

Banished from Belgium early in , he made his way to Cologne via Paris. In Cologne he edited the Neue Rheinische Zeitung for almost a year. During this time he was put on trial, but was acquitted in February In May he was. The reason he was thus hounded was that the theses set out in the Communist Manifesto, drawn up by Marx and Engels early in , were consistently borne out by the historic events of that year, and Marx was.

This is onesided. Primarily, capitalists regard the people as labour power. Part of this surplus value goes to expand production, and expanding production sends the. By no stretch of the imagination can your right to vote once every five. Its aim is to hamper the development of socialism. This dictatorship is the dictatorship of the proletariat, which deprives the bourgeoisie and other exploiting classes of all political rights.

Only under such a dictatorship can socialism be built. This goes for both economic affairs and cultural affairs.

Hence the need for any socialist. This is its first law in the field of art and it is a political law. The same applies in a socialist country like China. True, after liberation the business of rescuing the economy from the ravages of war took precedence over cultural matters, and despite a healthy. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution set the course for rectifying this contradictory state of affairs, and now if works by Chinese artists show.

August By these means they lulled the workers with sweet dreams instead of arming them with correct theory to guide them in their battles in the real world. But with the great majority of the German bourgeois converts that is not the case.

Neither the Zukunft [Future] nor the Neue Gesellschaft [New Society] have contributed anything which could advance the movement one step further. Here there is an absolute lack of real cultural material, whether concrete or theoretical.

In its place we get attempts to bring superficially adopted socialist ideas into harmony with the most varied theoretical standpoints which these gentlemen have brought with them from the university or elsewhere, and of which, owing to the process of decomposition in which the remnants of German philosophy are at present involved, each is more confused than the last.

Instead of thoroughly studying the new science themselves to begin with, each of them preferred to trim it to fit the point of view he had already, made a private science of his own without more ado and at once came forward with the claim that he was ready to teach it. Hence there are about as many points of view among these gentry as there are heads; instead of producing clarity in a single case they have only produced desperate confusion — fortunately almost exclusively among themselves.

Cultural elements whose first principle is to teach what they have not learnt can be very well dispensed with by the Party. If people of this kind from other classes join the proletarian movement, the first condition is that they should not bring any remnants of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, etc. But these gentlemen, as has been proved, are stuffed and crammed with bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideas. In such a petty-bourgeois country as Germany these ideas certainly have their own justification.

If these gentlemen form themselves into a Social-Democratic Petty-Bourgeois Party they have a perfect right to do so; one could then negotiate with them, form a bloc according to circumstances, etc.

If reasons exist for tolerating them there for the moment, it is also a duty only to tolerate them, to allow them no influence in the Party leadership and to remain aware that a break with them is only a matter of time. The time, moreover, seems to have come. How the Party can tolerate the authors of this article in its midst any longer is to us incomprehensible. Feb 07, Grace rated it it was ok Recommends it for: maoists, classical music nerds.

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Be the first to start one ». Readers also enjoyed. About Cornelius Cardew. Cornelius Cardew. Cornelius Cardew was an English experimental music composer, and founder with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons of the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental performing ensemble. He later rejected experimental music, explaining why he had "discontinued composing in an avant-garde idiom" in his own programme notes to his piano album Four Principles on Ireland and Other Pieces in favour of a Cornelius Cardew was an English experimental music composer, and founder with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons of the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental performing ensemble.

He later rejected experimental music, explaining why he had "discontinued composing in an avant-garde idiom" in his own programme notes to his piano album Four Principles on Ireland and Other Pieces in favour of a politically motivated People's Liberation Music. Publishers D. Preview our SPRING catalog, featuring more than new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture. Originally published in , Stockhausen Serves Imperialism is a collection of essays by the English avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew that provides a Marxist and class critique of two of the more revered composers of the postwar era: Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage.

Cardew considers the role of these composers and their works within the development of the 20th-century avant-garde, which he saw as reinforcing an imperialist order rather than spotlighting the struggles of the working class or spurring revolution against bourgeois oppression.

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