Scratch Orchestra

Formed in July 1969 by Cornelius Cardew with Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton, the Scratch Orchestra remains the most enigmatic and controversial of the experimental music ensembles of the time. Originally formed for the performance of Paragraph II of Cornelius Cardew’s play The Great Learning, the Scratch Orchestra consisted of a large number of enthusiasts who pooled their resources and gathered together for action, music, performance and edification. It grew out of a series of music composition courses at Morley College London, involving both avant-garde musicians and artists interested in the exploration of sound. The Scratch Orchestra combined a promiscuous and often irreverent musicality with a deep seriousness of purpose and a radical approach to social organisation. It characterised global postmodernism while celebrating a particularly British sensibility. The Scratch Orchestra’s combination of Fluxus, John Cage, free jazz, performance art, graphic scores, rituals, research projects and serious formal themes explodes with ideas – often contradictory – and draws equally on established avant-garde figures and amateur composition and pop cover versions provided the blueprint for much that followed.

The Scratch Orchestra, whose members drew on a variety of musical expertise, played its music from scratch, often based on written instructions and graphic scores. The orchestra played in town and village halls, universities, youth clubs, parks and theatres. Due to the regularity of performances during the Scratch Orchestra’s short lifespan (it was active until around 1974), it formed a kind of musical community: an intense experience of playing, travelling and living together.

Eventually, the tensions caused by Cardew’s unwarranted pre-eminence, tensions between musically trained and non-musically trained members, and a growing interest in political aesthetics led to a gradual change in the ensemble’s activities and then its outlook. It practically did not perform until 1974, but was later continued from time to time in new constellations. This included celebrations of 25 years of Scratch Music in 1994 and 50 years of Scratch Music in 2019.