This year’s Proms season offers plenty of interesting premieres. But none has aroused such puzzled curiosity as Bun No 1, which is being performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra next Friday. Titles normally offer some clue, but what on earth would a musical bun be like? Sweet and sticky, perhaps, or circular? Its composer Cornelius Cardew offered a few clues. “It’s filling but not substantial … it’s a stone bun soaked in milk … I thought of it as a nice present to an orchestra, the way one gives a bun to an elephant.”
This might suggest Cardew was one of those amiable musical jokers like Gerard Hoffnung, but far from it. Cardew had a sharp sense of humour, but it’s hard to think of any composer more serious and piercingly self-critical. He was a kind of Wittgenstein of music, constantly setting out reasons in his diary for acting in a certain way, testing his convictions against reality, and then adjusting or even rejecting them outright.
That intimidating poise and total self-possession showed itself young. By the mid-Fifties, when he was a student at the Royal College of Music, Cardew was already alarming his professors with his passion for European avant-garde composers such as Stockhausen. He was phenomenally gifted musically, and once learnt the guitar from scratch in two weeks so he could take part in the UK premiere of Pierre Boulez’s Le Marteau san Maître, which has one of the hardest guitar parts ever written. Then an encounter with the more freewheeling avant-gardism of American composers sent him off in a new direction. He spent much of the early Sixties working on a vast graphic score entitled Treatise, as beautiful to look at as it is puzzling to hear (graphic art was another of Cardew’s talents, which provided him with a living for several years).
But even before he finished Treatise, Cardew was chaffing at the self-enclosed, airless quality of modernism, and hankering for a form of music-making that would be more communal and democratic. With a few comrades-in-arms he founded the Scratch Orchestra, a determinedly amateur group dedicated to creating its own repertoire and ethos, often through improvisation. Cardew’s biggest piece for the group was The Great Learning, a large-scale setting for chorus and players of writings by Confucius.
It was The Great Learning that led to Cardew’s first encounter with the Proms. It was not a happy one. In 1972 he and the Scratch Orchestra were invited by William Glock, a great champion of the avant-garde, to perform part of The Great Learning in that year’s Prom season.
Glock naturally imagined he was going to get the original version, but Cardew had moved on yet again. He was now a convinced Maoist, with a scorn for anything that smacked of bourgeois individualism. He’d drastically revised The Great Learning, spicing the Confucian sentiments of the original with new slogans, such as “Revolution is the Great Learning of the present. A revolution is not a dinner party; it is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another”.
Glock politely declined the new version and asked for the original, but Cardew refused point-bank. Eventually a compromise was reached. But the episode was a turning point for Cardew. From then until his untimely death (caused by a hit-and-run driver in 1981) he turned his back on the “normal” musical world and devoted himself to writing revolutionary songs and organising political rallies.
So which Cardew will we hear in Bun No 1? The free-form graphic composer or the advocate of democratic improvisation? Bun No 1 dates from 1965, a period when Cardew was still in thrall to European modernism. According to Cardew’s biographer John Tilbury, it’s well worth reviving. “The piece was written in Rome when Cardew was studying orchestration,” he says, “and there’s never a dull moment. It’s like a series of very strong, vivid images, not connected to each other, and it has a strong granitic quality, with piercing woodwind lines somewhat like Varese.” So not sweet and sticky, but not insubstantial either.
Cornelius Cardew’s Bun No 1 will be performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ilan Volkov, with music by John Cage, Howard Skempton and Morton Feldman, at the BBC Proms on August 20 at the Royal Albert Hall and on BBC Radio 3
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