3 - Britten and Cardew

Summary

Howard Skempton was a close colleague of Cornelius Cardew, whose name will recur through this book. Skempton was a co-founder of The Scratch Orchestra in 1969 along with Cardew and Michael Parsons, and in this paper he discusses the radical aesthetic that was embodied in this project – and finds some intriguing symmetries between Cardew and Britten.

In his speech ‘On Receiving the First Aspen Award’ Benjamin Britten refers twice to ‘community’: once with the definite article, and once without. He states that any artist is entitled to demand that ‘he shall be accepted as a genuine practitioner of that art and consequently of value to the community’, and that the musician should be properly paid before taking on ‘the responsibility of answering society’s demands’. There are limits to this responsibility: Britten felt unable to write a memorial work in the months following the assassination of President Kennedy, requiring sufficient time and distance to ‘stand back and see it clear’.

So, the ivory tower (perhaps in the guise of The Old Mill, or The Red House) has its place, not least in offering protection from the ‘many dangers which hedge round the unfortunate composer’, including ‘pressure groups which demand true proletarian music’. Britten may have been remembering his own experience in the late thirties, the time of Ballad of Heroes. This piece has texts by Randall Swingler and W. H. Auden and was written in 1939 for Alan Bush’s Festival of Music for the People. A few months earlier, Britten had composed Advance Democracy (with words by Swingler). Writing his Aspen speech in 1964, he was yet to witness the advancing democracy of the late sixties. In 1969, he composed Children’s Crusade and dedicated it to Hans Werner Henze, who was much attracted to left-wing thought.

Britten was not impervious to left-wing sentiment but would have been unlikely to endorse Cornelius Cardew’s espousal of Marxism in the early seventies. Cardew’s notorious talk for the BBC entitled ‘Stockhausen Serves Imperialism’ was broadcast during the interval of an Aldeburgh Festival concert in June 1972, just before a live performance of Stockhausen’s Refrain. Cardew’s closing line was – ‘You are about to listen to Refrain.