I had a couple of friends in college who both underwent huge personality changes during the time I knew them, both after encountering some philosophical concept that fundamentally changed their understanding of the world around them; one, unfortunately encountered Ayn Rand, and immediately embraced her — I don’t want to dignify it by calling it a philosophy, because “fuck you got mine” doesn’t really strike me as a fully formed one, but sure, philosophy. He actually went to the philosophy department (despite being an engineering major) and demanded to know why there was no class on Ayn Rand.
The other encountered “leftism” and went from having a George Bush campaign sign hanging in his dorm (Bush Sr., by the way. Fuck I am old.) to interrupting me mid-coitus to inform me that he and the students for socialism (or whatever they were called) were “taking it to the streets” to protest Desert Storm, and while I was sympathetic to the cause, I wasn’t particularly thrilled to be sympathetic to the cause with my pants down. They both, to some extent, remained friends during my time at college, but we have since lost track of each other— though I kept in sporadic touch with the leftist, until his untimely death a few years back.
Most of us undergo personality shifts as we journey though life; I have undergone various degrees of religiosity and may undergo further ones. The last one that ‘stuck’ was Orthodox Christian, which, well, it’s complicated, but we’re not seeing each other at the moment. But sudden, seismic ones are something I fear and not just because they have the potential to interrupt awkward college sex.
The biography of Cornelius Cardew, written over a period of twenty years by his friend, musical contemporary, and colleague John Tilbury, is, at is core, a book about the consequences of such a shift. Cardew was one of the avant-garde, working in a variety of ways, though ultimately most famous for “Treatise”, a graphical score of some length which I have covered here in relation to Wittgenstein (and indeed, I became more deeply interested in Cardew while learning about Wittgenstein). He also became interested in improvisation, and played with avant-improvisers AMM (Tilbury was also a member) for a time. And during that time, he became a member of the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) and then the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), which should not, according to their wikipedia page, be confused with the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) or the Revolutionary Communist Party.
He repudiated his past work and associations, writing a collection of essays called “Stockhausen Serves Imperialism”, calling The Clash “reactionaries”, and turned to writing melodic music with a revolutionary bent., most of which I think is fairly awful. Here, listen to “Smash the Social Contract” (great title, tho) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnauDrzdOiQ. He was killed in a hit and run incident, at the age of 45.
The book about his life, “Cornelius Cardew : A Life Unfinished” is a mammoth thing, clocking in at just over 1000 pages, and is out of print. I had to order from a book dealer, and my copy came from a university library, where it had been checked out twice, leading me to wonder if the people who did so were interested in Cardew’s music, his connection to Wittgenstein, or his revolutionary period. It’s one of those things that’s tough to recommend unless you are into one of those three things, but I found it fascinating— Tilbury does not try and dive into the psychology of Cardew’s sudden shift in outlook, but the consequences of it are apparent, and scattered throughout the second half is the notion of what might have been. Cardew is a fairly obscure composer these days— would he be remembered as we do say, Cage or Stockhausen had he not abandoned his work? Did his ‘revolutionary’ activity ruin his legacy, in some sense?
And does that matter? While at least to me, the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninst) appears more like a cult than a political movement (though I should note they were very active in anti-racist actions, so they did have some outside impact), Cardew appeared to have been happy with his life in the party, though sometimes overworked by it. We tend to think of artists as possessing a gift; a thing that should be shared with the world, and people who walk away from that as somehow wrong for doing so. This can be further bound up in the notion that people who receive recognition in the arts somehow occupy a space that is reserved; it’s a silly notion to me as art isn’t a zero-sum game, but it is often treated as such. We rarely consider their own personal happiness in it all.
My original intent in reading the book was to further my knowledge about Cardew’s connection to Wittgenstein, and indeed the book does deliver on that front. Cardew apparently continued to read Wittgenstein throughout his life, even after embracing revolutionary politics; something I find interesting and will likely continue to explore. Wittgenstein’s influence on art is an interesting topic, and lead me down the path of reading this book in the first place, but what I took away was perhaps more interesting than what I came to it with. It was a solid, interesting read, and one wishes it was a little easier to find.
The Lithole 
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