Performing the Scratch Orchestra’s Nature Study Notes: creating and

exploring a third sphere through improvised communal action.

John Hails. Edinburgh Napier University.
j.hails@napier.ac.uk
Abstract

In June 2014, a disparate group of trained and untrained performers gathered

together at the Chisenhale Dance Space to perform items from the Scratch
Orchestra’s 1969 Nature Study Notes. The performance was not a nostalgic
recreation of past practice, but was something new, growing from the practice of the
group itself, and one which posed an interesting balance between individual and
communal responsibilities and participations, indicative of a powerful engagement
with contemporary and relevant practices that activate and negotiate individual and
communal concepts of identity. This paper explores how we might theorise such an
arena, situating this performance somewhere between community music and a
manifestation of avant-garde art.

Biography

John Hails (b1978) is a composer, improviser, and lecturer based in Edinburgh, UK.
Within his research, ethnomusicology, aesthetics, and music psychology form a
symbiotic relationship with compositional and performative activities to produce new
avenues of investigation. He is currently Senior Lecturer: Reader in Music at
Edinburgh Napier University, and the director of the Applied Music Research Centre.

Keywords: identity, community, improvisation, ritual

Community is not something to be magically recovered but a goal to be

struggled for. It is not something to be manufactured by outside professionals
but emerges out of collaboration and shared commitment and expression.
Cultural work is an effective tool in the formation of community, it is a tool for
activism. This definition does not see community in purely regional or
geographic terms, it allows for the idea of communities of interest. It is also
dynamic and accounts for the possibility of cultural practice being one of the
processes whereby alliances form and cohere. (Hawkins 1993, 21)

The performers came to the front of the stage and burst into song. Or rather
songs. Each singer sang their own song, a repertoire that included UK top 40 chart
songs, children’s songs, folk songs, ‘Any Old Irons’, and an Ode Machine written by
Cornelius Cardew. The gesture was at once communal and individual, serious and
comic, musical and noise.
This was the final gesture in a performance of the Scratch Orchestra’s 1969
Nature Study Notes (Cardew ed. 1969) put on at the Chisenhale Dance Space in
London. Nature Study Notes is a collection of notations, largely text scores
described as ‘improvisation rites’, composed and collated by members of what we
would now term a collective of artists, musicians, trouble-makers, and thinkers.
According to Cornelius Cardew’s A Scratch Orchestra: Draft Constitution, “An
improvisation rite is not a musical composition; it does not attempt to influence the
music that will be played; at most it may establish a community of feeling, or a
communal starting point, through ritual.” (Prévost 2006, 91). 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.
The Improvisation Rites were one of five elements1 of “repertory categories”
(Prévost 2006, 90) envisaged for the Scratch Orchestra, a collective which brought
together trained and untrained musicians to create music, and the Rites were
principally used as ‘warm-ups’ at meetings as members arrived and before the
‘business’ of the meetings began (Cardew 1972, 9)2. The idea of performing a
concert made up solely of Rites was alien to their conception (Finer 2014) and so the
revival of these notations in this context (spearheaded by Stefan Szczelkun, who in
the days of the Scratch Orchestra was a member of the subgroup of ‘Slippery
Merchants’ that acted as an internal ‘irritant’ and provocation to continuously
question concepts of authority, mission, and consensus) could be seen as
inauthentic at best, and disrespectful at worst. Without wishing to minimise the
importance of the historically informed discussion to be had on this topic, the
evidence of the performance itself (which can be heard in full at
http://soundcloud.com/nethersage/nss-140628-simple-stereo-mixdown) and of the
participation of and approval of former original Scratch Orchestra members points
towards a successful adaptation which grew directly out of the notations themselves

1
The others categories are ‘Scratch Music’, ‘Popular Classics’, ‘Compositions’, and ‘Research
Project’.
2
In the context quoted here, Cardew is describing Scratch Music as a genre separate from
Improvisation Rites, although Carole Chant has confirmed that Rites were frequently used for this
purpose (and indeed, from casual comparison between pages of Scratch Music and the Nature Study
Notes, it seems clear that the boundaries between the two categories were porous at best).
and the performers rather than in an attempt to slavishly imitate an unrecoverable
ideal of a performance practice3.
At the core of the performance were the interplay of individual and communal
responsibilities and participations. Many of the performers who prepared the
notations had performed John Cage’s Song Books at Café Oto in 2013, a work in
which each performer is required to pursue their own interpretation of the score
independently of everyone else (an anarchic musical community)4. 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. The idea of selecting specific Rites to be interpreted by the entire
ensemble in turn was rejected by a (not unanimous) majority at an early stage of
proceedings in favour of a more flexible approach. This approach proved challenging
for a rather diasporic group of busy performers, particularly since all meetings prior
to the performance itself comprised of discussion rather than rehearsal, but I believe
that it opened up a fascinating approach to the construction of a musical community
that, rather than relying on established performance practice or managerial
hierarchies and without falling back on the brilliance of individual performers divorced
from contingencies of ensemble, instead drew the mechanics of its functioning from
seemingly spontaneous alliances and their dissolution. Individuals selected Rites
that they wanted to perform, and then these were shared in meetings and on Google
Docs, and, with negotiation, a structure of a performance emerged.
If we take Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (Bürger 1984) as a re-
constitution of the garde as society itself rather than the institution of art or music
(which, metaphorically speaking, wishes to establish a garrison, complete with
corner shops and branches of McDonalds), with the avant-garde forming a

3
My notes from a ‘debriefing meeting’ held after the performance record Carole Chant reflecting on
the difference in the collaborative aspects between original performances and the Chisenhale
incarnation, before questioning if those earlier forms of collaboration could ever or should ever be
recovered.
4
It should probably be noted here that the very nature of the individual Songs within the Song Books,
especially when taken in conjunction with the performance practice of Cage scores in general suggest
themselves an awareness of the other activities taking place in the space (a nuance arguably not
present in Cage’s entire output – see Piekut 2011), and the preparation of a performance does not
necessarily rule out strategy for the management of forces and materials and, indeed, Cage’s own
reaction to previous performances of the work suggest that this might in fact be desirable (Kotik
1993).
community of artists attempting to progress the cause of society5, I believe that we
can posit the Chisenhale performance as a manifestation of avant-garde sound art.
Bürger characterises one element of the avant-garde practice as dissolving the
distinction between art as produced artefact and the production of that artefact, as
well as dissolving the distinction between artist and audience (Bürger 1984, 51-53)
and mentions Tzara’s and Breton’s work as attempting this dissolution (“But such
production is not to be understood as artistic production, but as part of a liberating
life praxis” (Bürger 1984, 53)). In this context, 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). In the context of
the Chisenhale performance, Szczelkun actively resisted the temptations of
leadership and left the structuring of the event provocatively open. Despite the slight
feeling of panic that this engendered in some participants at the start of the project,
5
I am not unaware of the unproblematic way I have phrased this, with Bürger’s intent seemingly
contradicted by his own writings and by those of others (e.g. Iddon 2008).
the lack of a ‘skilled music leader’ intervening in the process arguably created the
energy that drove the performance. So, hardly a textbook example of community
music, but it is worth pursuing this line of thought further.
Higgins discusses the interaction between schools and community musicians
later in his book, when he raises the importance of community music in inculcating
democratization, citizenship, human rights, and tolerance in school children (Higgins
2012, 116). 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.
Many writings on choral music designed for directors (rather than
ethnographical studies) focus on the practicalities of preparing a choir to sing
repertory from the First World art music tradition and do not touch so much on the
motivations for coming together. In Pragmatic Choral Procedures (Hammar 1984),
Russell A Hammar proposes a number of ‘drives’ that he describes as “derived
drives”: “1. Desire to be with other persons; 2. Desire for attention from other
persons; 3. Desire for praise and approval; 4. Desire to be a cause; 5. Desire for
mastery” (Hammar 1984, 33-7). While the desire to be with other persons, musically
if not physically, is something that drives most musicians drawn to ensemble
scenarios (otherwise I imagine that we would be performing solo), in many ways the
notations of the Nature Study Notes largely undermine the fulfilment of the other
drives listed: one must share the attention derived; praise and approval are relative
in a scenario where any wholehearted application to the notation is attempted; the
individual should submit to the collective in terms of a cause; that which is to be
mastered is elusive and evaporates as soon as it is apparently mastered. A
performer coming to Nature Study Notes may well be motivated by these drives, but
part of the process of discussion around the notations and the group’s intentions for
the performance exposed the pointlessness of pursuing them in this context.
Hammar identifies two further drives: “drive towards success” and “drive
towards the familiar” (Hammar 1984, 34) which are perhaps more apposite in this
scenario. Success rather than mastery of the notations reduces the dominant
position of a performer implied in the latter, and success in this context can be
interpreted as rendering the notations themselves irrelevant, thus fulfilling their own
evaporation as necessary temporary facilitators of action (“the player…can rise
above the notation if he works through the notation….; this grasped, he may slough
off the rules” (Prévost 2006, 18)). The drive towards the familiar is not neglected
either and performers are encouraged to draw from their experience of the every-day
by the notations, and to call upon the familiar as a springboard to construct the
unfamiliar (a perfect example being provided by the diverse songs simultaneously
sung at the close of the performance). Finally, Hammar suggests that a powerful
incentive towards choral singing is the need for individual aesthetic expression:
“Expressing oneself in music via the group dynamic acts as an integrating and
socialising agency” (Hammar 1984, 34). It is this drive that I find the most appealing
and appropriate in light of the Chisenhale performance containing within it the
solitary discipline and interaction made possible by the adoption of individual
notations and the formation of sub-groups to perform shared interpretations.
I would characterise a further drive towards choral singing as that of
transcendence, of becoming part of something larger than oneself, and of trance. In
a scenario where attention and approval are inevitably shared, and being ‘noticed’
within a choral texture is an act of transgression, one’s aspirations inevitably become
collective aspiration towards success. We surrender our inadequacies and strengths
to the larger cause and escape from the limitations inherent in individual expression.
Ruth Herbert characterises trance as “a decreased orientation to consensual reality,
a decreased critical faculty, a selective internal or external focus, together with a
changed sensory awareness and – potentially – a changed sense of self” (Herbert
2011, 5). Within a choral performance, the execution of the score and sublimation
within the larger body becomes an all-consuming focus. Afterwards, a performer may
be left elated, dispirited, and with a sense of being changed. The qualities of both
transcendence and trance were present in the Chisenhale performance, and I felt
myself released and able to improvise in the last moments in a way that I did not feel
able to without the crutch of notation – if one is realising a specific notation,
improvisation outside of this notation can be a difficult door to find without
transforming that performance into something that might violate communal
ownership (and be ascribed as motivated by the “desire for attention”).
The Chisenhale performance of Nature Study Notes as an expression of
nationalism is a more problematic construction. Performers came from a variety of
ethnicities and nationalities, and although the score is frequently considered a work
of ‘English Experimentalism’, consideration in the context of this conference reveals
questions about what it means to be a citizen of the UK and the ways in which a
performance of this notation may articulate this citizenship. We are far from the 19th
century conception of successful individualism being rooted in a national identity
(Dahlhaus 1992, 37), and we seem closer than ever to any sense of nationalism
being truly an imaginary and yet arguably the performance manifested a strong
sense of place and community that at least resembles nationalism, even though it
points not towards a set of physical boundaries, but towards a shared ethical and
performative landscape that could comprise a Third Space, beyond home and work,
within a Fourth World (scattered and virtual) community.
This community could be described, employing Habermas’ writings, as a
lifeworld comprising social interaction rather than abstract physical fact and location
(Sitton 2003, 62). The lifeworld is constituted by a shared consensus regarding
culture, society and personality, and Habermas regards its “emergence [as] part of
human speciation itself” (Sitton 2003, 64). What makes this societal vision so
attractive for me is the way in which he characterises the disintegration of a lifeworld:
“Collectivities maintain their identities only to the extent that the ideas members have
of their lifeworld overlap sufficiently and condense into unproblematic background
convictions” (Habermas 1987, 136-7). In the Chisenhale performance, collectivities
came and went dependent on the overlap of shared consensus regarding notations
and ways to proceed. Performers came together in a process of shared recognition
and interaction, and then went their separate ways when the underlying structure of
the notation expired. At the same time, the performers were linked together in a
shared lifeworld of the performance concept itself. The audience too were a part of
this lifeworld, although as stationary participants. A series of worlds as soap bubbles
forming and dissolving within the orbit of a larger bubble, itself part of a larger
bubble, and so on.
 The difficulty of discussing a musical work or performance as a reified object
is well established (e.g. Goehr 2007), and this difficulty is intensified when dealing
with a performance of a series of text scores with indeterminate outcome never
intended to be performed as an independent work by the original creators. To
discuss our realisation of these texts as a lifeworld rather than as the performance of
a work brings together pleasingly many of the ideas of this paper. Whether we
consider the performance of Nature Study Notes in Chisenhale as a manifestation of
avant-garde art, or as an act of community music, or as something else, the shared
imaginaries discovered and created by those onstage demonstrated the possibility of
a multiplicity of interpenetrating definitions and identities.

“The fluid relationships and community-forming engendered by tonight’s

performance can be seen as a rehearsal for the peaceful coexistence and
non-judgemental acceptance needed to supercede the competitive anxiety
that characterises current financialised interrelations” (England 2014)
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Recording
The Scratch Orchestra. 2014. Nature Study Notes. Online resource:
http://soundcloud.com/nethersage/nss-140628 [accessed 30/10/2014]