Slow Reading Club, Charlie Usher

*280 copies limited edition* 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.