Cornelius Cardew's Four Principles on Ireland and Other Pieces (1974)

I'm intrigued by the ongoing saga of Cornelius Cardew in both his extraordinary short life and in how he has been perceived since his death in 1981. Cardew was an assistant to Stockhausen in the late 50s, then had a brilliant career as an avant-garde pianist through most of the 60s (he has been referred to as the British David Tudor). In the mid-60s he turned more to radical forms of composition and in 1969 formed the Scratch Orchestra, a People's orchestra fueled by Marxist thinking, that played extremely avant-garde music. By the early 70s, Cardew's passion for Marxism turned into a craze for Maoism; he renounced all his early radical compositions and began writing simple piano pieces and songs that anyone could understand, regardless of economic or educational background. In 1974, he wrote a book presciently entitled Stockhausen Serves Imperialism and also recorded this suite of piano pieces in Milan.

Formally, the works on this disc owe much to the early 20th-century composers who bathed their complex music in gorgeous simplicity?traces of Poulenc, Debussy, Bartok, Orff, Stravinsky and Satie mingle with Bach-like counterpoint. Satie's "Trois Gymnopedies," Stravinsky's "Three Easy Pieces" or Bartok's "Piano Pieces for Children" wouldn't be out of place on a bill with these works by Cardew. But even more than those composers, Cardew makes sure his pieces are knowable. Like pop songs or "The Internationale" (obviously the inspiration for this project), it's hard to walk away from this disc without taking the songs with you. But what appears to be simple is never reductive. Like the best of the modernists, there's always something that catches you by surprise, like an abrupt tempo change or unexpected offbeat chord thrown into what appears to be an idyllic musical environment.

So much Cardew has come our way lately: the Cortical Foundation has reissued a section of the Scratch Orchestra performing The Great Learning, a new recording of his graphically scored Treatise (1963-67) was met with great fanfare last year and a few years ago the British pianist John Tilbury recorded Cardew's radical piano works from the period 1959-1970. But rarely have any of his Maoist works been discussed, reissued or even heard; sadly, this period of his work has been written out of history. In 2001, these pieces sound not only like good old-fashioned workers' calls to action (think Hanns Eisler, Christian Wolff or Frederic Rzewski), but hold up as a probing and intelligent moment when classical music tried to go pop.