Skip to content

Main Navigation

visibleproject
  • Fellowships
  • Stories
  • Streaming
  • Projects
  • Library
  • Parliaments
  • Who&What
    • What
    • Contributors
    • Yesterday-Today
    • Team and Steering Committee
    • Institutional network
    • About Visible
  • searchDiscover All

Cornelius Cardew: A Life Unfinished

Annotated by Andrea Phillips
Year

2008

Publisher

Copula

Author

John Tilbury

Topics
Social Design

Annotation

Musician, organiser and writer John Tilbury is a pianist and multi-instrumentalist, whose work has been core to the development of live prepared instrumentation techniques and, perhaps most importantly, the insistence of an ethic (or politic) of collective music-making. He played alongside Cornelius Cardew until the latter’s death in 1981 and was involved in the development of AMM, the ‘cryptic acronym under which the group still performs’ (p. 283) and the Scratch Orchestra. This book is the most intimate and detailed analysis of Cardew’s life and works. But also, within, Tilbury’s own ethics of listening and responding shines through, alongside his uneasy relationship with Cardew’s fame on the European contemporary music circuit in the 1970s and 80s. Tilbury writes as an historian, a friend and, most importantly as a musician. Describing Treatise, the 193-page graphic music score Cardew wrote between 1963 and 1967 he says: (see the quote below).
For me, this is like a political manifesto.

Andrea Phillips

To 'sight-read' through Treatise is an exhilarating experience … for there is no time to think, to imagine – or rather action and imagination coalesce to defy notational control, however subtle and persuasive. Thus, and here reservations surface, sight-reading through Treatise the sound is created less on the basis of notation, more on the basis of the player’s previous (playing) experience, the performance is thereby closer to improvisation. But as source material the past is always treacherous; it can turn the tables on the indulgent performer, hold him hostage; the bedrock of past experience is too easily accessible, too comforting, dissuades the performer from leaving the ground, from flying and discovering.

Related Contents

chevron_left chevron_right
Marinella Senatore
Marinella Senatore is a multi-disciplinary artist with a practice characterised by a strong collective and participatory dimension. Merging forms of resistance and local vernacular with popular culture, dance, music mass events and activism, her work rethinks the political nature of collective formations and presents an opportunity for the public to generate social change.
Discover more
Music for (prepared) Bicycles
Wanting to take John Cage to the streets, Music for (prepared) Bicycles finds ways to democratise the many makers—the conductor, the composer, the performer, the spectator, the on-looker, the bystander, the passer-by—as equals within a participatory score. A music made by everyone. Music for (prepared) Bicycles alters Cage’s ‘prepared piano’ into a sonic bicycle, like a moving
Discover more
Zilele Strimbe
Zilele Strimbe is a project about the rise and fall and rise of the National Dance Center Bucharest (CNDB), from 2005 – 2011, for the 2013 Visible Award proposal it will take two forms: a comic book and a musical. Both the comic book and the musical will be based on interviews that Alexandra Pirici
Discover more
Chicago Boys While We Were Singing They Were Dreaming
Chicago Boys is a 1970s revival band and neo-liberalism study group, assembled by Kurdish artist and musician Hiwa K, whose interests lie in different modes of informal knowledge. The band plays 1970s popular music songs from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, England, Bangladesh, Poland, the Netherlands, and Lebanon. The performances of the songs are alternated with associative
Discover more
Nasreddin on Mobile Discotheque
Nasreddin Hodja has poked fun at Emir Timur and the Khan of Bukhara, Russian colonialism, thieving collective farm chairmen and patriarchal mores in Central Asia and the Caucasus. With his resilient temper and sharp eye, we have great need of Nasreddin in today’s Russia. Can laughter make people forget, at least temporarily, what divides them?
Discover more
Oysi Cantos del agua
Chile is the only country in the world where water is privatized, with dire consequences for the environment and indigenous communities. In central Chile, agribusiness and mining interests have pumped the aquifer dry meaning that no water flows through the streams to indigenous and mestizo family farms. Local groups fighting to repeal the water privatization
Discover more
Sing for Her
Migrant workers are a global phenomenon. In Hong Kong alone, there are more than 100,000 women from Southeast Asia employed as domestic helpers. They remain voiceless and invisible. Sing for Her aims to create public installations where the public can learn songs from migrant worker communities by interacting with karaoke sculptures. It emphasizes learning, equality
Discover more
We are unable to show you a video, here.
Details
© Visible 2025. All images © of their respective owners.
  • Fellowships
  • Stories
  • Streaming
  • Projects
  • Library
  • Parliaments
  • Who&What
  • Discover All
  • Instagram
  • Facebook
  • Newsletter
© Visible 2025. All images © of their respective owners.
cached
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.OkPrivacy policy