EXPERIMENTAL SOUND MEETS MUSEUM
SPACE — WITH MIXED RESULTS

A well-intentioned immersion in Cardew’s radical score
undone by acoustics, logistics, and audience reality

On Saturday February 7, Wild Up performed The Great Learning, Paragraphs 2 and 7 by radical English composer Cornelius Cardew inside The Broad, in conjunction with the exhibition Robert Therrien: This is a Story.

The Great Learning, from 1969, is written for a mix of professional musicians and amateurs, and heavily relies on indeterminacy, set to seven paragraphs from Confucius, concerning individual discipline and good governance. A full performance runs five to seven hours, but Wild Up gave us a sample lasting about an hour. It’s explicitly political, with such lines as “IF THE ROOT BE IN CONFUSION NOTHING WILL BE WELL GOVERNED.” Timely, no? Though very different in sound, they are stylistically similar: groups of singers vocalize single notes for as long as their breaths last, while a leader, in the same note, sings a word or phrase. They repeat for a set number of repetitions, and then move on to the next note and phrase. Democratically informal, the singers are encouraged to play off each other and not worry about things like being in tune. Paragraph 2 uses percussion, while 7 is for voice only.

This is a Story covers 50 years of artist Robert Therrien’s career, covering his obsessions and unexpected diversions. He’s most famous for his large-scale works: bows, pots, plates, tables and chairs, but the exhibition highlights that, throughout his life, he was really concerned with exploring a core set of a few basic shapes and the meanings we attach to them, particularly in an autobiographical sense.

For percussion, the singers used kitchenware and boxes, but that’s about the most I could make of how Wild Up linked together Cardew and Therrien. Cardew was a political revolutionary, while Therrien’s art, as the intelligentsia tells us, is all about looking back to his childhood, and his large-scale works are meant to make us regress to a childlike state. Wild Up began the performance in the gallery, groups of six or so singers assigned to each room. Each group had one person banging on a pot or a pan with a kitchen spoon. Wild Up Artistic Director Christopher Rountree went from group to group, singing a line and having a blast. What he and his fellow leaders were saying was difficult, when not impossible, to make out. The live, reverberant acoustics made everything one big cacophonous mush. It was overwhelming and, dare I say, “immersive,” but mostly just loud.

Eventually, everybody moved to the museum’s lobby, where the performers sat and laid down on the ground, looking something like a die-in. When before, singers were all around us, now they were clustered in the center, putting an end to the music-all-around-us aspect, save for one lone singer lying near the main doors. Paragraph 2, where everyone was banging on cardboard boxes, which had been placed throughout the lobby, eventually turned into Paragraph 7, which is a more meditative piece, though similarly repetitive. Confucius recitations continued, but the concrete lobby’s terrible acoustics made it incomprehensible. There was limited seating, most of us in the audience had to stand or sit on the cold floor. Not a conducive way to listen to music that demands deep concentration. Kids were in visible agony. (Parents, why do you do this to your children?) Smartly-dressed people around me played brain-numbing cell phone games.

I’m all for difficult music that requires intense focus, but I had had enough in this uncomfortable space, so I went back into the gallery, which was gloriously empty. Free from self-absorbed people taking selfies, influencers, and know-it-alls, I had the space and calm to take in the art without distractions. Not as deeply as I would have liked — after all, I was supposed to be there for the music! Even so, the monotonous chanting drifted all throughout the gallery, never far away. That it really “activated” the art, I’m not convinced, but I loved seeing it all basically by myself. Among the few people who had the independence to break from the crowd was a considerate young family with two toddlers, who most definitely couldn’t handle the music, serenely enjoying Therrien’s art, without struggle. It was here that I found the real value of having pretentious music performance in conjunction with an art show: as a way to clear out a gallery in the way that UV zappers attract bugs.

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photos by Salvador Ceja Garcia courtesy of The Broad

The Great Learning
Wild Up
The Broad (Museum)
presented in conjunction with the exhibition Robert Therrien: This is a Story
reviewed on February 7, 2026
for more info, visit The Broad and Wild Up

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