Cornelius Cardew & Hardial Bains

In a bizarre episode at the end of 1979, he went with half a dozen composers from Britain on a tour of Canada, sponsored by the ineffable Bains. Their principal task was to set to music texts that Bains had written – texts ‘of an unsurpassable political and literary crassness’, Tilbury writes. One was called ‘Workers of Ontario’:

We are the workers of Ontario,
We work for the rich of the United States,
We work for the rich of Canada,
We work under the yoke of wage slavery
Hauling the riches out of the earth,
Manufacturing commodities for the rich to sell.
We are the workers of Ontario,
A mighty section of the Canadian working class...

The great learning. Paragraph 7