condition (book): EX

8"x7" softbound 128-page book illustrated throughout.

The essential documentary companion to one of the most radical experiments in British musical life - and a publication that remains, half a century after its appearance from Latimer New Directions, a genuinely indispensable artifact of the period. Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Music is the record of the Scratch Orchestra, the ensemble Cardew founded in 1969 with the explicit goal of creating a democratic, non-hierarchical collective music-making practice open to anyone, trained or untrained, musician or non-musician.

What the book contains - scores, texts, essays, diaristic accounts, graphic notations, proposals, debates, minutes of meetings, accounts of performances and conflicts - documents a collective experiment whose ambitions reached well beyond music into the very organization of social life. The Scratch Orchestra was simultaneously a musical ensemble, a political organization, and a community under continuous self-examination, and Scratch Music is the closest thing to a complete record of what that meant in practice. Cardew's own theoretical contributions, alongside those of the other members, illuminate the intellectual climate of the early 1970s British avant-garde with a directness that no retrospective account could replicate. Latimer New Directions. Book.