CORNELIUS CARDEW CHOIR: "THE GREAT LEARNING"
PET THE TIGER featuring ERIC WILCOX
Composer/performer CORNELIUS CARDEW, a monumental figure in the lineage of English experimental music, set the first seven paragraphs of Confucius’s Analects as a score he titled, The Great Learning. The piece culminates in a magnificent ocean of choral sound in Paragraph 7. The text of that paragraph seems particularly relevant to the current political context in the U.S. and the world: “If the root be in confusion nothing will be well governed. The solid cannot be swept away as trivial and nor can trash be established as solid. It just does not happen. Mistake not cliff for morass and treacherous bramble.” Cardew notated this work using text specifying the words to be sung, the number of times each singer sings a given line, dynamics, and method for determining pitch. Brian Eno described it as the “perfect networked music.” It was performed first in London by The Scratch Orchestra in 1970.
The CORNELIUS CARDEW CHOIR had its initial organizing meeting on Mayday 2001 in Berkeley. Over 25 years, we have performed with Pauline Oliveros and the Deep Listening Band, at the Garden of Memory (our four hour version of Oliveros’ The Heart Chant), in various other venues and festivals. We regard our work together as modeling political economy in which creative contributions are honored and allow for the common good. We are a community-based volunteer ensemble of experienced and neophyte performers. If you are interested in participating, please email co-founder/director
Tom Bickley.
PET THE TIGER Instrument Inventors’ Collective is an ever shifting constellation of Bay Area performers who either build or deconstruct their own instruments. We explore free improvisation, deep timbre, extended technique and collaborative composition. PTT has been commissioned by most major museums in the Bay Area including the Asian Art Museum SF, the Oakland Museum of California, Stanford, CCRMA, and the Exploratorium; and played a number of local festivals like Thingamajigs, Composers in Performance and the West Oakland Sound Series. PTT was the house band for Psychobotanikon, a low dose mushroom tea concert series at New Mission Yoga and for the Turquoise yantra grotto, from 2013-2023. They will be performing new works for video tonight with Dan Gottwald (invented instruments), Stephen Parris (guitar, gamelan),
David Samas (voice and inventions); the Cornelius Cardew Choir; and Eric Wilcox, Baffon!
ERIC WILCOX is a San Francisco–based buffoon, mime, and performance artist with four decades of international work in grotesque physical theater. His practice uses mockery, exposure, and embodied absurdity to destabilize power, taste, and comfort. Tonight he appears as a live irritant—part jester, part wound—inside the sound.