From boy chorister to a death reputedly at the hands of MI5, English experimental music composer Cornelius Cardew lived a life that might stand as an example of the adage, "Truth is stranger than fiction."

His story certainly intrigued multimedia designer, artist and writer Adrian Self who has collaborated with his friend, the artistic director of The Song Company, Antony Pitts, to create Accidental Plans, a program that will be presented by the ensemble at The Street Theatre on Friday, February 17.

Self says, "We first talked about this project about a year and a half ago, just before Antony moved to Australia. After that our communication was mainly by Skype and email. The Song Company actually did a piece of mine in their program last August - an instructional piece called I believe I can fly – the name both of the program and my piece".

Self was fascinated by Cardew's life story and the fact that he was involved with so many important composers of post-World War II classical music. The music of three of them – John Cage, La Monte Young and Karlheinz Stockhausen – will be included in the program together with works and excerpts by Cardew: Treatise, The Great Learning, Smash the Social Contract and Revolution is the Main Trend in the World Today.

"Cardew was on a journey of what it meant to be a composer, I think," Self says. "He started out very strictly working Stockhausen who really wanted musicians to act like machines so they could reproduce very difficult, very mathematically complicated music but in the end Cardew moved much more toward group improvisation and working with non-musicians and graphic scores before really being gripped by the idea of political change and seeing music as a force for that."

Cardew threw himself into the projects in which he believed. In 1957 when no professional guitar player was available for the British premiere of Pierre Boulez's Le marteau sans maitre (The hammer without a master) he quickly taught himself to play the instrument gaining Boulez's great respect and leading to his appointment as Boulez's assistant.

Boulez wrote: "As a musician he was outstanding because he was not only a good pianist but also a good improviser ... He was one of the best examples that you can find among musicians because he was well informed about the latest theories of composition as well as being a performer."

In 1958 Cardew was influenced by a series of concerts performed in Cologne by John Cage. These convinced him to abandon serial composition and develop his own experimental scores including Treatise and The Great Learning, the latter leading him to form the Scratch Orchestra. By 1972, however, Cardew had come to see the orchestra as elitist in its attempts to create socially accessible music. As he became more directly involved in left-wing politics, avant-garde music no longer interested him and he began a period of song-writing, setting exhortations such as Smash the Social Contract and There Is Only One Lie, There Is Only One Truth to traditional English folk music. His attitude towards the avant-garde is presented in his book, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism.

Was Cardew's death in 1981 as a hit-and-run victim accidental? Musician John Tilbury believes that it could have been a ruthless act by MI5 to silence Cardew because of his Marxist-Leninist leanings.

"It's never been proven," Self says. "But what's interesting is that we can even consider this as a possibility – that a musician would be assassinated. Cardew, just before the end of his life, thought that there was going to be a dawning of a new era of communism but, in fact, it was the complete sunset of those ideas. We've been living with neo-conservative politics ever since."

Self is still not sure how Cage's 4'33 will be staged, "but it will be the full period of silence and Antony will be at the piano".

Composition 1960 # 7 by La Monte Young "will be featured as a kind of backdrop work to our own pieces". And Stockhausen's Choral?

"That's interesting – it's a choral piece but it's going to be staged as if the ensemble is rehearsing," he says.

"I enjoy doing different things," Self says. "I hope that it will be possible to project graphics as a backdrop to the performance. That will depend on the venue. (The Street has the facilities for projection) The whole show is going to be quite a challenge for the audience, but hopefully an enjoyable one. It will be very diverse and will be questioning lots of things. But it's not purely serious. It's playful and there are points of humour."