The Great Learning
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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 The Great Learning, Paragraphs 2 and 7 by Cornelius Cardew. A ritual of gathering in community through sound, Wild Up members and an ensemble of 30 pre-appointed non-musicians perform two sections of this monumental work in which voices and percussion unfold through listening and response. Creating a vast field of resonance and play, Wild Up musicians will teach the work to a public ensemble, learning through repetitions and echoes, culminating in a performance where music becomes a shared space to embody collective creativity. Composed between 1968 and 1971, Cardew designed The Great Learning for a radically open ensemble that blurred lines between trained musicians and amateurs, grounding the piece in inclusivity, process, and duration.
Presented in conjunction with the special exhibition, Robert Therrien: This is a Story, The Great Learning touches on themes both intimate and monumental, plays with scale to change how we perceive the world, and collapses the distance between the personal and the epic. Therrien’s large-scale sculptures can evoke childlike awe; Cardew’s music sparks collective joy in making something bigger than ourselves. Both artists reveal how ordinary materials—wood, metal, voice, breath—can hold memory and become extraordinary.
Know Before You Go
Some seating, including designated accessible seating, is available. The audience is invited to move freely throughout the Lobby and First Floor Gallery spaces as the performance progresses.
Tickets to this event include access to Robert Therrien: This is a Story during the event.
To learn more and plan your trip, visit Know Before You Go & FAQ. Visitor policies are subject to change.
Artists
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Cornelius Cardew
Cornelius Cardew (1936 – 1981) was born in Gloucestershire, England in 1936. He was a charismatic and controversial figure whose contributions in the areas of musical notation, improvisation and political music are widely recognized.
In the mid-fifties he worked with Stockhausen, collaborating on Carre, and introduced the music of the American composers John Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, Terry, and particularly LaMonte Young to European audiences. His experiments in musical notation culminated in two mammoth works – Treatise and The Great Learning – both of which, in different ways, bear witness to his astonishing invention and originality in this field. The spontaneity and improvisatory quality of his own music and music-making set him apart from both the American and the European avant-garde.
In the sixties Cardew became a focal figure, attracting around him a variety of musicians, including non-professionals, fine artists and jazz performers, and he turned principally to collaborative music-making – in the AMM free improvisation group and in the unique London-based Scratch Orchestra which he founded with Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton in 1969.
By the early seventies the social aspect of his musical activity, so far libertarian and anarchist, took on a more precise, political definition with his opposition to U.S. and Soviet Imperialism and to British rule in Ireland. As a communist he now repudiated as politically regressive much of the avant- garde of which he had been part. During the last ten years of his life, a period of intense political activity, he wrote music based on traditional and political songs, mostly for piano, in a romantic-realist style, aiming it towards a wider audience and within a political context.
On December 13th, 1981, in suspicious circumstances, he was killed by a hit-and-run driver, who was never apprehended, near his home in Leyton, London.
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.