I listened to a fair amount of Stockhausen while writing my recent Anthony Braxton feature [pdf]. Now that he has died, I want to vent on an obscure political detail likely to be left out of most of the obits. No, not the notorious 9/11 comment.
I’m speaking of Cornelius Cardew’s 1974 essay Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, largely and very deservedly forgotten, but given a weirdly forgiving treatment back in 2003 by Kyle Gann.
In plain English: Cardew was a gifted avant-garde composer mentored by Stockhausen and deeply influenced by John Cage. In the early ’70s Cardew renounced his former activities, became a doctrinaire Maoist and set about stabbing his former teachers in the back. His Maoist writings on Stockhausen and Cage bear the sensibility of the rat who is eager to give up his friends and family to the secret police, then flatter himself that he’s done a noble thing.
Of course, Cardew did not live in a police state, but rather in Britain, where his words were just words. The conclusion one might draw is that Cardew had oppression envy: he was missing out on the murderous Cultural Revolution in China, which he lavished with unqualified praise. So he behaved as though he were there, at his own show trial, taking part in History. He engaged in “self-criticism” and spoke of his earlier music like a devout Catholic speaks to a priest about adultery. And he propounded views on the interaction of art and society that are simply noxious.
“No art drops from the sky; all art bears the imprint of the real world,” wrote Cardew — a banal insight, close to the Mao quote that Gann uses as an epigraph to his series: “There is no such thing as Art for Art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics.” One can accept this without believing that the vanguard party therefore has the right to trample artistic autonomy, and all individual liberty, underfoot. But Cardew did in fact believe that. The paramount goal, for artists and everyone else, was to “establish and clear and unanimous line in the class struggle.” Cardew gloated that…
…revolutionary students boycott Cage’s concerts at American universities, informing those entering the concert hall of the complete irrelevance of the music to the various liberation struggles raging in the world. And if it does not support those struggles, then it is opposing them and serving the cause of exploitation and oppression. There is no middle course.
Gann, to be fair, calls Stockhausen Serves Imperialism “a savage little book,” though he also calls the book “somewhat arrogant,” which is like calling Nixon somewhat corrupt. Sounding not unlike a mafia boss, Cardew spelled out what he saw as required of even the world’s most inimitable artists:
… I see no dilemma for [John] Cage. It may not all be plain sailing, but there’s no reason why he can’t shuffle his feet over to the side of the people and learn to write music which will serve their struggles.
In declaring that Cardew was “[a]s brutally honest with himself as with others,” Gann grants the composer a moral credence that is undeserved, to put it mildly.
Gann also opines that Cardew’s book “has retained its staying power,” despite its containing statements like this one:
The favourable conditions for the victory of the working class — well, they are so plentiful it is hard to know where to begin. They range from the bankruptcy of imperialist culture and economic problems of imperialism to the shining examples of socialist China and Albania and the worldwide upsurge of revolutionary theory and practice.
Not terribly prescient, shall we say. And of all the miserable Soviet satellites to single out for praise, Cardew picked Albania, one of the absolute worst.
The obvious rejoinder to Stockhausen Serves Imperialism is that Cardew Served Totalitarianism, and I’m not sure why Gann can’t bring himself to say so. Cardew believed artists should be hounded and harassed into conformity. He did not explicitly say they should be killed, but he applauded regimes that executed thought criminals on a large scale, and his prose is peppered with statements like “liberation requires violence” and “life cannot flourish without death.”
“Cage serves imperialism and will go under, with imperialism,” wrote Cardew, and luckily for us and the culture at large, he was spectacularly wrong. Cage and Stockhausen did not go under; their influence only grew and grew. The ideology that Cardew embraced went under, but only after the deaths of millions.
Postscript to the postscript
Gann writes: “In light of Cardew’s role in England’s Marxist-Leninist party, it is believed that his death—a hit-and-run on December 13, 1981—was probably a political assassination.” Um, it is believed that Cardew was killed by a drunk driver. It is believed by conspiracy theorists that he was assassinated. Britain has a substantial number of Marxist-Leninists operating freely to this day, and there’s been no shadowy campaign to bump them off.
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