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CORNELIUS CARDEW (AND FRIENDS)

— AMM — The Scratch Orchestra —

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page 5 — 1969-1972

page 1 (1958-1961) — page 2 (1961-1966) — page 3 (1966 - AMM) — page 4 (1968-1969) — page 6 (1972-1981)

page 7 (list of works, references & concerts timeline)

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► 1969-1972 SCRATCH ORCHESTRA

1969-1972 SCRATCH ORCHESTRA(Edit)

																	My attitude is that the musical and the real worlds are one. Musicality is a dimension of perfectly ordinary reality. — (Cornelius Cardew, In "Towards an Ethic of Improvisation", 1971) [Cornelius Cardew hopes that the Scratch Orchestra will] shake the public out of its apathy [...] — (Cornelius Cardew, In London Magazine, Volume 11, 1971) For a history of the Scratch Orchestra (1969-1972), please read orchestra member Rod Eley's and Cornelius Cardew's reports : Stockhausen Serves Imperialism and pdf file
																	— In Michael Nyman, ‘’Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond’’, 1999. (Michael Nyman, "Music Scratch and Co.", In The Spectator, 12 DECEMBER 1969, p. 33) — [LARGE VIEW] AUDIO Cornelius Cardew — Cornelius Cardew talking about the Scratch Orchestra — (ca 4mn30) BBC Source : Ubu.com																		In an interview for the BBC first heard in 1972, Cardew discussed the genesis and philosophy of the Scratch Orchestra : C.C — The Scratch Orchestra came about in response to the demand of a lot of young people who weren’t trained musicians to get together to make what we called experimental music on a large scale. It has nothing in common with a conventional orchestra. BBC — ’’Nonetheless it is people capable of playing music in the ordinary way.’’ C.C. — Well, not at all. These people may be visual artists, they may be people interested in theatre, they may be perfectly ordinary office workers or students or what have you. They’re not necessarily trained in playing any instrument at all. Some of them would perform activities of one kind or another, not necessarily producing sound, because scratch music was really a composite of people making their own activities, so that some of these activities would involve people playing conventional instruments like saxophones or flutes or this, that and the other. And other things would simply involve making motions with a hand or arranging a scarf, or all kinds of activities which would not necessarily make sound. The only limitation was that it should be fairly low-key, so as to allow somebody who wanted to express a solo to be able to do it on top of several people playing scratch music. […] We don’t actually mean it as though it was a fully-composed piece of music, because the essence of scratch music is that people are asked to write accompaniments, so each person writes accompaniments and plays these accompaniments and everybody else plays their accompaniments together. So in fact this whole body of sound that makes up a lot of people playing scratch music could be used as a background for somebody playing a solo, and in fact we can go on talking. — (from Peter Paul Nash, interview with Howard Skempton and John Tilbury, ‘Music Weekly’, BBC Radio 3, 26 november 1991. A recording of this broadcast is held at the British Music Information Centre, London ; and reproduced in Timothy D. Taylor, 'Moving in Decency: The Music and Radical Politics of Cornelius Cardew', 1998)

Draft Constitution, May/June 1969(Edit)

Cornelius Cardew, Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton
In The Musical Times, Vol. 110, No. 1516, 125th Anniversary Issue. (Jun., 1969), pp. 617+619
version française

../files/articles/cardew/cardew60_draftconst_a.jpg

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Nature Study Notes, June 1969(Edit)

Nature Study Notes, collection of 'Improvisation Rites' published a few months after the 'Draft Constitution'.
From the very beginning the Scratch Orchestra took a conscious decision to make all their notations freely distributable, stating that the Scratch Music works were without copyright. One of their first collections of scores, published in 1969 and called Nature Study Notes: Improvisation Rites, replaced the conventional copyright notice with the following:

									No rights are reserved in this book of rites. They may be reproduced and performed freely. Anyone wishing to send contributions for a second set should address them to the editor: C.Cardew, 112 Elm Grove Road, London SW13. — Scratch Orchestra, Nature Study Notes: Improvisation Rites 1969, edited by Cornelius Cardew, London: Scratch Orchestra, 1969.

Whilst rejections of copyright restriction were nothing new, both the Situationists and the folk singer Woody Guthrie had placed anti-copyright notices on their works, it is notable that the Scratch Orchestra also encouraged others to modify and add to their scores, stating that these may be incorporated into the next version. The works in Nature Study Notes are all textual instruction pieces. Few of them describe ways of making sound however, and instead focus around various social interactions that construct and play with power relations amongst the performers. —Simon Yuill, "All Problems of Notation Will be Solved by the Masses: Free Open Form Performance, Free/Libre Open Source Software, and Distributive Practice"

Nature Study Notes is a collection of 152 written instructions or ‘scores’ that was published as a booklet by Cornelius Cardew at the beginning of the Scratch Orchestra in 1969. The scores are called ‘rites’ and were used in many of the early Scratch Orchestra concerts. In both the sense of limitation and of instigation, the Rites act, not as improvisations, but as frames for improvisation.
[download pdf Nature Study Notes score]

Nature Study Notes is a collection of notations, largely text scores described as ‘improvisation rites’ [the others categories are ‘Scratch Music’, ‘Popular Classics’, ‘Compositions’, and ‘Research Project’.], composed and collated by members of what we would now term a collective of artists, musicians, trouble-makers, and thinkers. By any objective analysis, a significant number of the notations that make up Nature Study Notes fail to “not attempt to influence the music that will be played”, but the importance of the “community of feeling” cannot be underestimated as the underlying motivation for the majority, if not all, of the notations. What fundamentally differed in the case of Nature Study Notes was that its preparation required the establishment of a number of small ensembles existing within the overall ensemble. many aspects of Nature Study Notes are clearly avant-garde:

the dissolution of individual identities (the Rites in Nature Study Notes are ordered numerically in the order in which they were composed, irrespective of the composer (although the identity of individual composers has been retained through the use of initials and the explanatory notes at the end), a process that Cardew was to take further in Scratch Music (Cardew 1972) with authorship only decipherable through a graphic index);
the necessity of the performer to interpret the notation and to invent the sounding (or non-sounding) result (thus dissolving the distinction between composer and sound-producer and thus art and life);
the dissolution between audience and performers (as related by Carole Chant as she recounted Scratch Orchestra performances in the 70s) (Chant 2014).

Lee Higgins’ (Higgins 2012) exploration of community music as a field outside of formal institutions (Higgins 2012, 5) (and, one assumes, profit-driven circumstances) opens up a second avenue of attack to Nature Study Notes. Although arguably the whole ethos of the Scratch Orchestra at the point of its founding was to dissolve leadership hierarchies, Cardew felt unable to resist his coronation as benign monarch (Tilbury 2008), and as a “skilled music leader”, facilitated the “group music-making experiences” (Higgins 2012, 5).
Arguably, much of Cardew’s work (especially if we consider the Scratch Orchestra as such) aims to do just this: educate performers to become not just better performers but better human beings. This aim was attenuated significantly when he discovered and was converted to the teachings of the Marxist-Leninist party but runs as a thread throughout much of his endeavours. For Higgins as for Cardew, music and working through music holds the key to preparing for the future (although Cardew was to lose faith in music’s ability to do anything as he busied himself in the work of the Party) and Higgins writes that “Activating a cultural democracy to come requires interstitial practices, one for which intervention, invention, dreaming, and faith form a backbone through which hospitality and friendship can emerge as a strategic praxis” (Higgins 2012, 173). This description could stand equally for the work of the Scratch Orchestra as for community music. —John Hails, "Performing the Scratch Orchestra’s Nature Study Notes: creating and exploring a third sphere through improvised communal action."

Documentation :

John Hails, "Performing the Scratch Orchestra’s Nature Study Notes: creating and exploring a third sphere through improvised communal action." http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/7657/1/Performing_the_Scratch_Orchestra.pdf
Carl Bergstrøm-Nielsen, "Words as Music Notation (1998/2012)" http://vbn.aau.dk/files/65612885/Words_as_Music_Notation_1998_2012.pdf
Michael Chant, "Music, Society and Progress" http://www.cornelius-cardew-concerts-trust.org.uk/papers/paper_02_chant.pdf
Simon Yuill, "All Problems of Notation Will be Solved by the Masses: Free Open Form Performance, Free/Libre Open Source Software, and Distributive Practice" http://www.lipparosa.org/essays/problemsofnotation.pdf
http://www.ewaeckerle.com/projectbox/Scratch-Orchestra/
https://szczelkuns.wordpress.com/2015/02/20/sunday-evening-at-cafe-oto-neo-scratch-orchestra-performance-based-on-nature-study-notes/ (with an audio radio programme by Carole Finer)
Lee Higgins, & Mantie, R. (2013). Improvisation as Ability, Culture, and Experience. Music Education Journal, 100(2), 38-44.
https://www.academia.edu/5372572/Higgins_L._and_Mantie_R._2013_._Improvisation_as_Ability_Culture_and_Experience._Music_Education_Journal_100_2_38-44
Lee Higgins. (2012). Community Music: In Theory and Practice. Oxford University Press.
Lee Higgins (2012). One-to-One Encounters: Facilitators, Participants, and Friendship. Theory into Practice, 51(3), 159-166.
https://www.academia.edu/3629833/Higgins_L._2012_._One-to-One_Encounters_Facilitators_Participants_and_Friendship._Theory_into_Practice_51_3_159-166
Lee Higgins (2008). Community Music and the Welcome. International Journal of Community Music, 1(3), 391-400.
https://www.academia.edu/3629900/Higgins_L._2008_._Community_Music_and_the_Welcome._International_Journal_of_Community_Music_1_3_391-400
Lee Higgins. (2006). Boundary-Walkers: Contexts and Concepts of Community Music. Ph.D. University of Limerick, Limerick.
https://leehigginscommunitymusic.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/boundary-walkers-lee-higgins-phd-2006.pdf
[download pdf Nature Study Notes score]

July 1, 1969(Edit)

An organizational meeting of the Scratch Orchestra takes place at St. Katherine’s Dock, London, led largely by Cornelius Cardew.

Sept. 30, 1969(Edit)

The first playing meeting of the Scratch Orchestra takes place at St. Katherine’s Dock, London organized by Cornelius Cardew.

Nov. 1, 1969(Edit)

The first performance of the Scratch Orchestra takes place in Hampstead Town Hall.
Had you attended a Scratch Orchestra concert you would have been reminded more of a workshop or schoolroom or market place or even farmyard than of a concert hall. The first concert in Hampstead Town Hall found a large number of participants spread generously over stage and floor engaged, mostly individually, in activities aural, visual and ambulatory. Sitting in your seat, you might have heard nothing but a recording of The Nun's Chorus' from Casanova (which because it was amplified tended, unfortunately, to colour everything else -otherwise their performances are blissfully free from electronics, from the at- titude which dictates that everything that sounds be amplified or ring-modulated). But had you wished to sample all the wares you would have found a very carefully prepared and executed performance of Cardew's The Great Digest Paragraph 6, early rock records and 'Teddy Bears Picnic', sound poetry from Bob Cobbing, a lone cello, toy instruments, home-made instruments, games of patience and many other things all happening independently and innocently of each other and structured according to the particular `scores' that the performers had chosen to realise. — (Michael Nyman, "Music Scratch and Co.", In The Spectator, 12 DECEMBER 1969, p. 33)
The first four Scratch Orchestra concerts took place in November 1969 at Hampstead, Islington, Chelsea and Ealing Town Halls on the 1, 8, 15, and 25 November respectively. — (In John Tilbury, "Cornelius Cardew, a life unfinished")

Nov. 8, 1969(Edit)

The second concert (Islington Town Hall) had a totally different flavour. There were more group activities—chanting remote cabbalistic rituals or playing in trios or quartets of oddly assorted instruments. There were also striking `solos'—especially Cardew's musical ponds, lined with manuscript paper, from which he fished, with magnets and balloons on lines, manuscript fish. — (Michael Nyman, "Music Scratch and Co.", In The Spectator, 12 DECEMBER 1969, p. 33)

Nov. 15, 1969, Journey of the Isle of Wight Westwards by Iceberg to Tokyo Bay(Edit)

The first Scratch Orchestra performance based on a Research Project takes place in Chelsea Town Hall.
On November the 15th 1969, Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra performed at Chelsea Town Hall Realization of the Journey of the Isle of Wight Westwards by Iceberg to Tokyo Bay, a piece based on Brecht's Translocations, in London. Other imagined moves included Cuba moving alongside Miami, and Iceland moving next to Spain.
The recording was made by Frank Regan and Roger Waight on a Uher portable.

Nov. 25, 1969(Edit)

The fourth concert (Ealing) was a more clear cut affair—the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor, a number of single events each simultaneously stretched over an hour (producing some remarkable slow-motion effects) and an adequate performance of Terry Riley's In C (a work which proves Stravinsky's dictum that there is still a lot of good music to be written in C major).
What then is the Scratch Orchestra, this seemingly anarchic organisation, intensely proud of its written constitution, whose origins arc by the English tradition of amateur music-making out of John Cage? It might be called a democratic musical commune whose repertoire, in the form of improvisation rites, accompaniments of any kind, popular classics and composed works, is both communally added to and selected (each member has to keep his own Scratch Book in which he notates and stores his personal contributions). In a format which imaginatively combines freedom and prescription, diverse talents seem happy to flourish to the extent of their abilities and needs.
Such an approach takes music-making down from the tight-rope it walks on the South Bank where the qualities of stress, permanence, competitiveness, ambition, originality, the need for a 'good notice' can smother any genuine creative impulse. The Scratch Orchestra is not concerned with these things. Its members are mostly not trained musicians, yet professionals like Cardew and John Tilbury play happily and comfortably, and if some of the activities seem a little aimless perhaps, you should remember that the plant is very young and tender but its growth is already strong and purposeful. — (Michael Nyman, "Music Scratch and Co.", In The Spectator, 12 DECEMBER 1969, p. 33)

(in progress)

Scratch Orchestra, Ealing Town Hall, 1970(Edit)

Scratch Orchestra, 1970(Edit)

																							— John Tilbury tied up in Hugh Shrapnel’s « Houdini Rite » with Bryn Harris (drums) and Alec Hill (saxophone), which featured performers bound together by ropes - struggled against the confines of the European concert tradition. The performer is instructed to bind himself in rope, and perform on an instrument of his choice. — from the television film "Journey to the North Pole", director Hanne Boenisch, 1971, 45’, 16mm. « In the Scratch Orchestra we had a piece called “Houdini Rite” where you’re all tied up with rope. For example, you could do Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with John Tilbury at the piano with his hands tied behind his back. » (actually, John Tilbury plays often the first movement of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No.1 along this performance) — (Keith Rowe, interview by Josh Ronsen, April 22, 2007)

Scratch Orchestra, 1971(Edit)

Scratch Orchestra circa 1971
Appearing in the photo are: Peter Ellison, Hugh Shrapnell, Bryn Harris, Stefan Szczelkun, Judith Euren, Keith Rowe, Chris May, Birgit Burkhardt, Micheal Chant, etc. (photo : Victor Schonfield).

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Alec Hill, Cornelius Cardew - Near Prudhoe, North East England, 1971.

Scratch Orchestra Van At Durham Castle 1971.

Scratch Orchestra poster 1971.

Scratch Orchestra, Germany, 1972(Edit)

Scratch Orchestra in Germany 1972.
Camping at Kloster Schäftlarn.

Scratch Orchestra in Germany 1972.
Catherine Williams and Carole Finer.

Scratch Orchestra in Germany 1972.
Cornelius Cardew, Jasper Tilbury, Penny Jordan and Carole Finer.

Scratch Orchestra in Germany 1972.
Dave Russell, Dave Smith, Frank Abbott, Cornelius Cardew, Hugh Shrapnel and Barbara Pearce - at Kloster Schäftlarn.

Scratch Orchestra in Germany 1972.
Lisa Major (foreground), Peter O'Sullivan (lying).

Scratch Orchestra in Germany 1972.
Lisa Major and Peter O'Sullivan.

Scratch Orchestra in Germany 1972.
Penny Jordan, Bryn Harris and Hugh Shrapnel.

Scratch Orchestra in Germany 1972.
Penny Jordan, Tim Mitchell and Ian Ward.

Scratch Orchestra in Germany 1972.
Bryn Harris (legs), Hugh Shrapnel, Waheed Pall, Dave Smith, Jenny Robbins, Alec Hill, Cornelius Cardew, John Tilbury, Carole Finer, Jasper Tilbury.