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The Scratch Orchestra and Visual Arts Michael Parsons The Scratch Orchestra and Visual Arts Michael Parsons Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 11, Not Necessarily "English Music": Britain's Second Golden Age. (2001), pp. 5-11. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0961-1215%282001%2911%3C5%3ATSOAVA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V Leonardo Music Journal is currently published by The MIT Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/mitpress.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Sat Sep 29 14:25:36 2007 The Scratch Orchestra and Visual Arts ' The Scratch Orchestra, formed In London in 1969 by Cornelius Cardew, Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton, included VI- sual and performance artists as Michael Parsons well as musicians and other partici- pants from diverse backgrounds, many of them without formal train- ing. This article deals primarily with the earller phase of the orchestra's activity, between 1969 and 1971. It describes the influ- ence of the work of John Cage and Fluxus artists, involving the dissolu- In his essay "Towards an Ethic of Improvisation," David Bedford and other musi- tion of boundaries between sonic written shortly before the formation of the scratch Orchestra, cians were regular visitors at art and vlsual elements in perfor- Cornelius Cardew said of performances of his graphic score colleges in and around London, mance and the use of everyday Treatise (1963-1966): "Ideally such music should be played by in Leeds, Liverpool, Maidstone, materials and activities as artistic resources. It assesses the conflict- a collection of musical innocents [people who had no formal Falmouth, Portsmouth and else- ing lmpulses of dlsclpline and musical training] ";he continued, "My most rewarding expe- where. They not only performed spontaneity in the work of the riences with Treatise have come through people who by some and discussed the new music but Scratch Orchestra and in the paral- fluke have (a) acquired a visual education, (b) escaped a mu- also involved students as active lel activity of the Portsmouth sical education and (c) have nevertheless become musicians, participants in works by John Sinfonia and other related groups. The emergence in the early 1970s i.e. play music to the full capacity of their beings" [I]. Cage, Christian Wolff, Morton of more controlled forms of com- The formation of the Scratch Orchestra in 1969 may be Feldman, Cardew, George positional activity, in reactlon seen as the culmination of Cardew's search for new types of Brecht, LaMonte Young, Toshi against anarchic and libertarian as- performer, from backgrounds other than that of a classical Ichiyanagi, Takehisa Kosugi and pects of the Scratch Orchestra's ethos, 1s also discussed. training. Performances of Treatise had taken place in art col- other Fluxus-related comDosers. leges &ring the 1960s, and more recent works such as his As a result there soon ar'ose an '- Schooltime Compositio7ts (1967) also offered opportunities- - for extended network of visually visual as well as musical interpretation. Cardew's own involve- aware performers, for whom the lack of conventional musical ment with the visual arts was close: during the 1960s he training was no obstacle to participation in experimental worked as a graphic designer, his wife Stella was a painter, and music; many of these were among the original members of his circle of friends and colleagues included conceptual and the Scratch Orchestra [3]. performance artists such as George Brecht and Robin Page Cardew's particular achievement at this time was to bring (both teaching at Leeds College of Art in the late 1960s), together visual artists and musicians froin diverse back- Mark Boyle, who was working with light projections, the grounds in situations to which all could contribute equally, painters Tom Phillips and Noel Forster and many others. regardless of skill or experience, with aural and visual aspects This was a period of far-reaching change and innovation in of performance coexisting in heterogeneous juxtaposition British art schools. The academic disciplines of life-drawing, and interaction with each other. This diversity is reflected in figurative- composition and illustration and the traditional the Draft Constitution. where Cardew notes: "The word mu- craft-based skills, which had been central to art education sic and its derivatives are here not understood to refer exclu- since the mid-nineteenth century, were being challenged by sively to sound and related phenomena (hearing, etc). What new attitudes and policies that reflected some of the more they do refer to is flexible and depends entirely on the mem- radical tendencies in twentieth-century art. Leading artist- bers of the Scratch Orchestra" [4j. educators such as Victor Pasmore and Harry Thubron intro- duced enquiry into fundamental aspects of perception and expression, structure and method, and students were encour- JOHN CAGE AND FLUXUS aged to experiment freely with materials of all kinds. Bound- The immediate precedent for such an open-ended definition aries between disciplines were questioned and redefined, and of music can of course be found in Cage's work of the 1950s there was a shift from the object-based practices of painting and 1960s, in his collaborations with Merce Cunningham, and sculpture to an emphasis on process and context, envi- Robert Rauschenberg and other artists, and in his idea of in- ronmental activity and time-based work in film, sound and determinacy. His "silent" piece 4"33"(1952) had demon- performance. These changes began to take effect in the early strated that silence was not merely the absence of intentional 1960s following- recommendations for the liberalization of art sounds: it created a framework and focus of attention in education included in the Coldstream Report [2]; a genera- which the listener is invited to redefine the significance of kt- tion of artists emerged whose work extended into new mate- sual as well as aural aspects of musical performance. It thus rial and conceptual areas. opened the way to an area of intermediate activity through which there is no clear separation between seeing and hear- ing: both are essential aspects of any live performance situa- VISUAL INFLUENCES The breaking down barriers between different Michael Parsons (composer, performer), 148 Fellows Road, Lolldon N11'3 3JH, U.K. and the growth of interest artists in sound and A slightlv different \ersion of this article dppeared under the title "44 Lacher und ~erforinancecreated a favorable climate for the develo~ment komlsches Gehen: Das Scratch Orcheqtl-a. Fluxus und die xisuellen Kiinste" in Poritiorturi of experimental muslc. Cornelius Cardew, John Tf'lbury, 45 dll"U'Jo"mber 2000 [pp 94381 and Februal, 2001 [~p40-431) O M~chaelParsons LEONARD0 MLTSICJOLTRNAL,Xrol. 11,pp. 5-11, 2001 5 tion. Cage's work of the 1950s and 1960s paradoxical title and its ambiguous sta- sic). Brecht's pieces operate in an inter- developed from the idea that different tus as either object or process (Ray ex- mediate zone between object and event. kinds of activity could coexist and inter- plained that it was the idea that was inde- Seeing and hearing are equally relevant penetrate without interference. A key structible, not the object itself, which to their interpretation: they may be real- occasion was that of the "untitled event" could be remade any number of times). ized as performances in any medium or that Cage organized in 1952 at Black Another relevant work by Man Ray is his they may be treated purely as obsei-va- Mountain College in North Carolina, Cadeau (1921), a flatiron with a row of tions or mental images. In the 1960s which included live and recorded music, tin tacks glued to its surface, perhaps in- Cardew and Tilbury often included in dance, poetry, painting, film and slide spired by Erik Satie. Just as the use of ev- recitals Brecht's Incidental Music (1961), projections and a lecture by Cage him- eryday objects and materials in the work a work that deals with the piano as a self. Each of these independent ele- of visual artists created shifts and trans- physical object rather than as a sound ments was assigned its own time-bracket formations of meaning, so in the activi- source. Various activities are specified, to within the total duration: Cage provided ties of Cage and Fluxus participants, tra- be performed in and around the piano; a rhythmic structure to indicate when ditional categories of music, sound and any sound that may arise from this activ- and for how long each element was to performance were subjected to radical ity is literally "incidental" [5]. take place, so that periods of activity and disruption and redefinition. In many respects, the all-inclusive inactivity combined and overlapped in The Japanese composers Kosugi and spirit of Fluxus can be seen to anticipate various ways.
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