LEARNING by Slow Reading Club and Charlie Usher

LEARNING is a cover version of Cornelius Cardew’s choral piece Paragraph 7, from The Great Learning (1971). It is performed with text from The Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto (2008), by Aaron Swartz. LEARNING was rehearsed by a choir of amateur singers at KASK school of the arts in Ghent, Belgium - as part of a collaborative exhibition of Slow Reading Club and composer Charlie Usher, that took place at BOEKS, Ghent, in spring 2024.

The Great Learning was one of Cardew‘s most important works. It was a series of seven “paragraphs” with text from the writings of Confucius and scored for large numbers of both trained and untrained performers. It is a critical Marxist thought piece on the rehearsal and the interaction between individual longings and collective decision-making.

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From the exhibition text: The score calls for amateur singers. It functions as an open set of rules and relations between singers, both spatially and vocally. Rhythm is defined by the breath lengths of the singers and harmony is a result of each person adjusting to their neighbours. There is no requirement to read music notation or to be able to accurately sustain a pitch. The rehearsal of Paragraph 7 is not secondary to the piece; the act of gathering to speak and collectively negotiate the score is the piece more so than any specific sound image produced by singing. Sometimes the principal value of a public performance is that it produces the need for rehearsal.

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At the core of the rehearsal, was the seminal The Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto by Aaron Swartz. Swartz argued for transgressive approaches to achieving the goals of the open access movement through civil disobedience. He took a stand against copyright and contracts that restrict redistribution of knowledge.

Disc one of this edition holds the recording of the choir in the hallway leading to the school library. The long architecture of the space moves the singers into specific positions, creating unexpected clusters of tones. Disc two is a work by composer Charlie Usher. In 44 radical edits, the composer shuffles moments from the process that led to Disc One—samples of rehearsal bits, location recordings, practice instructions, et al. In this magical story we find ourselves in scenes that could come from Fellini’s Prova d’orchestra, and in random events surrounding the rehearsals.

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From the exhibition text: In many ways, rehearsing the piece became for us an exercise in getting comfortable with dissonance. It served as a continual reminder that it is possible to sustain an intensified being together without arriving at (even by avoiding) resolution and consensus. How this acceptance unfolds through rehearsal, in relation to the score, might be said to constitute the politics of the piece.

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The discs come inside a fold-out poster with notes by composer and writer Bill Dietz, and visual elements by Slow Reading Club.

Slow Reading Club is a semi-fictional reading group initiated dancer and choreographer Bryana Fritz (USA) and artist and composer Henry Andersen (AUS) in late 2016. The group deals in constructed situations for collective reading. They do not aim at deconstruction or even comprehension of the texts in hands, but at the production of a kind of excess: to temporarily suspend criticality for intimacy and to negotiate agencies with the text.

Charlie Usher (UK) is a composer working with cultural samples, found recordings, static and rotary speaker installations, and live musicians, his work using structural and formal protocols to interrogate ways we relate to information we hear. Usher mentored with Hanna Hartman, Tom Johnson, Antoine Beuger and David Horne, among others.

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