HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO CORNELIUS CARDEW
Wikipedia offers this information on Cornelius Cardew (for more hit the link)
Cornelius Cardew (May 7, 1936 – London, December 13, 1981) was an English avant-garde composer, and founder (with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons) of the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental performing ensemble. He later rejected the avant-garde in favour of a politically motivated “people’s liberation music”.
Cardew died on 13th December 1981, the victim of a hit-and-run car accident near his London home in Leytonstone.
GROVE MUSIC ONLINE has this information on Cornelius Cardew:
(b Winchcombe, Glos., 7 May 1936; d London, 13 Dec 1981). English composer and performer. He received his musical education as a boy chorister at Canterbury Cathedral (1943–50) and at the RAM (1953–7), where his teachers included Howard Ferguson (composition) and Percy Waller (piano). In 1957 he went to Cologne to study with Stockhausen, who employed Cardew as his assistant (1958–60) specifically to collaborate with him in the composition of Carré. Cardew returned to London in 1961, where he took a course in graphic design; he worked intermittently in this field until his death. In 1964 he received an Italian government scholarship to study with Petrassi in Rome. He was elected FRAM in 1966, and in 1967 was appointed professor of composition at the RAM. He was killed in suspicious circumstances near his home in Leyton, East London, by a hit-and-run driver.
One of my favorite free internet sites, UBUWEB, offers music and information about Cornelius Cardew.
Cornelius Cardew
1. 
BBC Documentary on Cornelius Cardew
Cornelius Cardew Memorial Concert (1985)
1. First Movement for String Quartet
2. Octet ‘71
3. Treatise
4. Paragraph 1 of the Great Learning
Cornelius Cardew: Making Marx in the Music
by Kyle Gann (from New Music Box)
No other 20th-century composer so vividly inhabited the overlap of music and politics as England’s Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981). Though killed 22 years ago, he had a tremendous impact on many colleagues in contemporary music, and his influence still determines much of how new music is seen in the context of the world political situation.
From 1958-60, the young Cardew worked as an assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen in preparation of the latter’s score Carre, and in so doing met and fell under the spell of John Cage. Cardew’s magna opera to this day are two large, Cage-influenced indeterminate scores from the 1960s, Treatise (inspired by Wittgenstein’s Tractatus) and The Great Learning, based on the teachings of Confucius. Another claim to fame is that Cardew was a founding member of both the Scratch Orchestra — a wrangling, obstreperous collective of the 1970s that gave concerts devoted to conceptual art, improvisation, and scores of experimental and even bizarre notation — and also the smaller, tighter improvisation group AMM, formed with Eddie Prevost, Lou Gare, and Keith Rowe.
Here at the J. Paul Leonard Library you can also find materials that will help you learn more about Cornelius Cardew. Some suggestions, below:
We sing for the future [sound recording] ; Thälmann variations / Cornelius Cardew.
Four works / Cornelius Cardew.
February pieces : Octet ‘61 for Jasper Johns [for piano] / Cornelius Cardew.
Music of the twentieth-century avant-garde : a biocritical sourcebook / edited by Larry Sitsky
Audio culture : readings in modern music / edited by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner.
The Bay Area also has its own Cornelius Cardew Choir
