The Great Learning
Tickets on sale December
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Program
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Cornelius Cardew The Great Learning, Paragraph 2
- Intermission
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Cornelius Cardew The Great Learning, Paragraph 7
About
GRAMMY-nominated orchestral collective Wild Up presents Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning, Paragraphs 2 and 7, a collective ritual and practice of listening and gathering in community.
Wild Up members join with non-musician participants from the public to perform two sections of this monumental work. Voices and improvised percussion unfold through listening and response, creating a vast field of resonance and play. In advance of the performance, Wild Up musicians will teach the work to the public ensemble, learning through repetitions and echoes. Sprawling across The Broad’s lobby, sound becomes a shared space to embody Cardew’s ethos of collective creativity.
Composed between 1968 and 1971, The Great Learning spans nine hours in its entirety. The work sets words from Confucius, translated by Ezra Pound. Each of its seven paragraphs is distinct, ranging from text-based instructions and graphic notation to more traditional pitches and rhythms. Cardew designed it for a radically open ensemble that blurred lines between trained musicians and amateurs, grounding the piece in inclusivity, process, and duration.
Artists
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Cornelius Cardew
Cornelius Cardew (1936–1981) was an English composer, pianist, and political activist who helped shape experimental music in the 1960s and 70s. With The Great Learning, he sought to dissolve the boundaries between expert and amateur, and it remains a landmark of avant-garde music and a deeply political act of inclusion that continues to resonate today.
About Endless Season
Art in LA has long been about freedom and a rich rejection of history. With intersecting methods and intentions, it is humble yet aspirational, creating a city that appeals to the aesthete and mystic in all its citizens. Here, famous artists also double as street-side sign painters, our finest restaurants are located in strip malls, and our landmarks are more geographical than architectural or fleetingly experiential rather than permanent monuments to their lineages. Here, our religious and secular musics sound the same.
Endless Season revolves around these distinct West Coast traits. These programs mark a new chapter, focusing on sustainability and place, and investing in the artists and audiences who make our city vibrant. Together, we encourage, question, reinterpret, and challenge the past, modality, and genre. We hold a space for intersectionality and dialogue surrounding every aspect of our work.
About The Collective Orchestra
For years, we’ve dreamed of inviting the audience onto our side of the music stand. With The Collective Orchestra, we’re moving closer to that vision, opening our practice to the public as collaborators. One unified field of people creating together, dissolving the distinction between orchestra and audience, where learning itself becomes a creative act.
Join us and participate in performances, rehearsals, workshops, and an ongoing dialogue about music. We’ll bring historical repertoire, new commissions, and community-centered actions into unexpected venues across Los Angeles.
Endless Season 2025 - 2026
This season, our programming spans centuries and scenes, bridging devotional traditions with avant-garde experimentation, ancient mysticism with radical contemporary thought. We gather music from the margins, from outsiders, visionaries, and mystics to imagine new futures. Alongside these histories, we celebrate today’s artists who are building something shared, creating music that reckons with the past and fosters new forms of presence and connection.
Our work includes a new concert series at The Nimoy exploring the textures of ecstatic freedom, from improvisation to minimalism and beyond. We return to Sierra Madre Playhouse for our LA Composer series, and REDCAT for baroque new music and a concert of spiritual activism centering the work of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou with a new commission by M.A. Tiesinga. This year, we launch a new endeavor, The Collective Orchestra, with participatory and unexpected projects that transform the concept of orchestra into a communal social space of learning. This Spring marks our first-ever appearance at the legendary Big Ears Festival.
Join us for a year of exploring music as a spiritual inquiry and a burgeoning of collective imagination, shaping new rituals and ways of gathering together.