The Scratch Orchestra

The Scratch Orchestra was an experimental music ensemble founded in London in the spring of 1969 by Cornelius Cardew, Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton. It grew out of the Experimental Music class Cardew taught at Morley College, and was announced through a Draft Constitution published in The Musical Times in June 1969, which defined a scratch orchestra as a large number of enthusiasts pooling their resources for action, mainly music-making.

Membership was open to anyone, whatever their musical training, and trained and untrained musicians performed side by side. The Draft Constitution organised its work into Scratch Music, Popular Classics, Improvisation Rites, Compositions and Research Projects. Its scores were often graphic or verbal rather than conventional notation, such as the Nature Study Notes improvisation rites that launched the orchestra, and concerts were programmed by members in turn, by reverse seniority.

The orchestra held its first meeting on 1 July 1969 at St Katharine Docks and gave its first concert on 1 November 1969 at Hampstead Town Hall, programmed by Christopher Hobbs. Over the next few years it played in concert halls, including the Queen Elizabeth Hall and a BBC Promenade Concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1972, as well as in village halls and outdoor settings on tours of Cornwall, Anglesey, Dorset and the North East of England. It was closely associated with Cardew's The Great Learning, whose Paragraph 5 it performed at Cecil Sharp House in January 1972.

From 1971 onwards, tensions between musically trained and untrained members and a growing turn towards politics, which led Cardew and others to Maoism and a rejection of the avant-garde, transformed the orchestra's activities. By 1974 it had effectively stopped operating. Its writings and scores were collected in the book Scratch Music (1972), and it inspired similar groups abroad, notably a New Zealand Scratch Orchestra founded by Philip Dadson in 1970. Rondo DB