I don't know if it's a masterpiece but it is a very good and interesting piece of music. I was listening to it (that old incomplete recording mentioned before on this message board) yesterday evening.

I'd be interested to know more about the process involving Cardew on this piece. He's undoubtedly done a very fine job, but there's no doubt in my mind that it's a Stockhausen work through and through.

Cardew's "Report on Stockhausen's Carré" was originally published in the October 1961 Musical Times and is reprinted in Cornelius Cardew: A Reader (Copula 2006) and goes into the process in some detail. The "Basic Score" Cardew was given to work on consisted of "a whole heap of more or less hieroglyphic notes... These I proceeded to realise, working daily chez Stockhausen from 3pm until dinnertime, aided, irritated, confused, encouraged, and sometimes even guided by his own eagle eye, or his voluminous notes, or his random narrations as he worked on his experiments for what later became Kontakte..."

Yes Richard, but that doesn't really go much further than what KS had to say in the notes that accompanied the original LP release. I am sort of hoping that JT may have something more to offer on the degree of compositional contrubution that might have been made by CC. I will dig out the Reader and look at that MT article again though.

I've now read the 2 parts of Cardew's report on Carré again. I must admit that I rather skimmed them when I first got the book. There's a real sense of loss that comes from the way he writes about his involvement, and what KS did with it when it came to the first performance. It set me to thinking about the comments Tom Phillips made about Gavin Bryars's version of "Irma", where Phillips was in Stockhausen's shoes, so to speak. I have a feeling that Stockhausen would have been even more out out than Phillips was re. Bryars being billed as the composer, should Carré ever have been described as "Stockhausen's Carré: music composed by Cornelius Cardew".

The undisputed leader of the pack to this day, IGI.

I had spent most of the evening doing schoolwork and ploughing through the Christmas card writing task - I hate 'round robin' newsletters, but felt I needed to write one this year and it took way longer than I'd anticipated. I needed a burst of Rachmaninov to unwind, so lit some candles and sat back to marvel again at that amazing choral sound!

Spinning in the classroom earlier:



which went down remarkably well with the children!