25 years from Scratch.
ICA Sunday 20th November 1994.
"In music it was hopeless to think in terms of the
old structure (tonality), to do things following old methods (counterpoint,
harmony), to use the old materials (orchestral instruments). We started from
scratch: sound, silence, time, activity. In society, no amount of doctoring up
economics/politics will help. Begin again, assuming abundance, unemployment, a
field situation, multiplicity, unpredictability, immediacy, the possibility of
participation." John Cage, 1967, p.11.
INTENTION: To look at this event as a representation of
the historical existence of The Scratch Orchestra between 1969 and 1971. The
S.O. was a very prolific group of around 50 people which was defined as "a
large number of enthusiasts pooling their resources (not primarily material
resources) and assembling for action (music making, performance,
edification)".(Musical Times, 1969).
I want to spend some time contextualising the group both
from a wide historical view and from a somewhat narrower focus of music history
and theory.
A conclusion will analyse the problems of representing
such complex collective time-based cultural activity and try to assess what the
ICA event achieved.
WHAT WAS THE SCRATCH ORCHESTRA?
The quality of the S.O. experience was so alien to our
normal cultural experiences I feel that it would be insufficient to simply
describe its history in outline so I have illustrated my brief history with
quotations from ex-members of the orchestra.
The S.O. came out of a series of music composition
classes held by Cornelius Cardew at Morely College just south of Waterloo in
South London in 1968. These classes drew some of the more interesting
experimental classical musicians of the time, particularly Michael Parsons and Howard
Skempton. Morely College is an extracurricular independent arts college and
this context along with a variety of contextual reasons, which will become
clear, the classes were also attended by artists who were enthusiastic about
music. A 'draft constitution' was drawn up and published in The Musical Times
June 1969. The inaugural meeting was then held at St Katharines Dock next to
Tower Bridge, then a complex of cheap studio spaces for upcoming artists, on
the 1st July 1969. The first concert had already been arranged by Victor
Schonfield for November in the same year. From then on the S.O. took off like a
whirlwind. A high level of excitement, commitment and an extra-ordinary mixture
of skills allowed the orchestra to grow quickly and be putting on almost weekly
concerts with 40 to 60 participants within a short while.
"There were seven concerts from November to January,
six during April - May and one in June plus a BBC studio recording of paragraph
2 of Cardew's 'Great Learning'. The culmination of this period was the two week
tour, 27th July to7th August 1970 playing to country audiences in village halls
etc." p.17 Rod Eley in (CARDEW 1974)
(For a full list of performances in 1970 see appendix 1.)
The list of venues was varied and due to the status of Cardew
and some of the other musicians ranged from the Queen Elisabeth Hall to Village
Halls, from Alley Palley to Richmond Park. Each member was invited to design a
concert starting from the youngest. This concert programme was meant to be
selected from elements which were listed in the constitution and had already
been developed in the classes at Morely and elsewhere. These were;
Scratch music, a collection of accompaniments, which
everyone was urged to compose. These were within the style which might later be
seen to be that of the Fluxus movement.
Popular Classics. Arrangements of particles from the
established concert classics arranged for playing by everyone whatever their
level of skill. These included such as Beethovens Pastoral, Schoenberg Pierrot
Lunaire and even John Cages 'Piano Concert'.
"the 'classics' which pretend (at least on some
levels) to be manifestations of perfect, absolute, universal form and
truth." (McCLARY 1987-92 P.19.)
Improvisation rites (Nature Study Notes) Rituals which
aimed to give a community of feeling or a communal starting point but which
should not attempt to influence the music that will be played. eg 'Each player
divides himself into three equal
parts' or; 'At some point in an improvisation let the absence of something
strike you. Set to detecting its hidden presence and exposing it (drawing it
out).'
Compositions. The constitution offered that anybodys
composition would be tried. Cardews own massive 'The Great Learning', based on
Confusian classics, stood head and shoulders above any other composition.
Another important composition was 'Burdocks' by Christian Wolff which was a
centre-piece of the ICA event.
Research Project. Defined in the draft constitution in
the following manner "The universe is regarded from the viewpoint of
travel. This means that an infinite number of research vectors are regarded as
hypothetically travellable. Travels may be undertaken in many dimensions eg
temporal spatial, intellectual, spiritual emotional." This very specific
formulation of 'research' did indeed inspire some very concrete results such as
George Brechts project to translocate England nearer to the equator by
"freeing the landmass from its sub strata". "Translocation might
be accomplished by undercutting the land mass to form a hollow beneath into
which air is injected." (orig. Brecht 8-9-69 in LMC 1994)
Such projects occasionally formed the basis of whole
concerts or sections of concerts.
The constitution was a montage of contemporary practices
which were intuitively articulated into a formula by Cardew. Some people
adhered to them more closely than others but it seems a precise and detailed
'constitution' gave a clear sense of where the orchestra stood in terms of
cultural practice.
Within this there was space for more mainstream
contemporary music sub groups and at the other extreme a band of mobile
performance orientated artists who took on the name Slippery Merchants and did
more interventionist public actions and life quality works.(for more on
Slippery Merchants see CARDEW 1974).
At the time there was an antipathy to documentation of
almost any sort but the level of family snaps and momentos. It was thought that
the work should have an effect directly and not through myths generated by
slick documentation. Documentation was seen as a prime cause of inauthenticity
of the conceptual art world of the time, a sort of cop-out from facing the
force and effectiveness of the work itself. The idea was that our environmental
work should have a direct effect on the environment rather than a cultural
effect via documentation presented in the art world. Any art directed towards
establishment approbation would simply be absorbed, filtered and drained of
power.
See Appendix 2 for a description of The Richmond Journey
a concert co-ordinated by Stefan Szczelkun.
This gives some bare bones to the thing which I will now
flesh out with a few description by the participants themselves selected from
the ICA catalogue;
"I suppose my most intense recollections are the
tours; the camp sites in particular: the slow grace and calm with which people
went about their business, accompanied by the occasional musical sound emitting
from within a tent, or beyond in a field - like a Merce Cunningham
ballet." John Tilbury.
"This feeling (of a second childhood) is not merely
due to such Scratch phenomena as a craze for snake whistles, but the emphasis
on doing without bothering about the how or why. Everything - a sound, a sight,
an action, no matter how 'ordinary' - was held with child like wonder, to be an
amazing experience, tapping on floorboards, a fire burning, a popular melody.
(Some things really were amazing such as actual snow pouring onto the stage
from an opened stage door during a scratch orchestra performance in a London
theatre)." Hugh Shrapnel
"My proposal was for a whole concert based on George
Brecht's 'Gap Event', the instructions for which are; missing lettersign;
between two sounds; coming together. This concert took place in a tent in
Bedford Square during the 'Book Bang' Festival in May 1970." Tim Mitchell.
"Whether delicate, soft and languorous in its quiet
moments or amorphous, impenetrable and violent in its (more frequent) loud
ones, Scratch Music, once experienced, was never to be forgotten."
Christopher Hobbs. (All LMC 1994)
After two years or so of extraordinary activity there was
a gathering increase in political consciousness. In fact I had myself been
agitating for more 'political' perspective on what we were doing which seemed
to me to be lacking in the more revolutionary perspectives of cultural activity
I had been engaged in. However the politicisation, when it came to a head in
the summer of 1971, was more of a wedge of hard-line Maoism which gradually
throttled any activity which did not have clear and explicit political
objectives and content. This Marxist splinter was lead by Cardew and it is a
measure of our dependence on him that we could not collectively split from this
relatively small group and keep the orchestra going.
"What was beginning to be an authentic search for
musical expression based on the industrial state and urban life, turned into
the totalitarianism of political theories and the notion that music could serve
those theories" Psi Ellison (LMC 1994)
The Event at the ICA November 1994.
For some time there had been yearly get togethers often
at The Place, near Euston station, organised by Brigid Scott-Baker. As the
twenty five year anniversary loomed there was a flurry of plans and ideas most
of which came to nothing. The ICA event had a busy period of preparation and rehearsal
at places like Community Music in Farringdon which, in all, involved over 100
participants of which about 30 were original Scratchers. There were 25 separate
ensemble performances with well over 50 works. The admission price of £12
excluded some people who could have only attended for a couple of hours.
Most significantly there were no reviews of this unique
occasion and if Ed Baxter and Michael Parsons had not put in many hours of free
labour there would have been no catalogue. The ICA gave the event minimal
support and no promotion.
THE BROAD HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The point at which the S.O. existed was not arbitrary. I
doubt even that there could have been two such entities. The whole process, in
retrospect seems determined by history.
The sixties had been a time when the whole Enlightenment
Project had gone into a terminal crisis... Increasing expectations of
democracy, expansion of knowledge beyond the compass of any genius individual,
a prodigious technological productivity, the dislocations and mass trauma of
the second world war, the institutionalisation of the avante guarde, the end of
the British Empire, Black immigration, US Global Hegemony through film and
video etc.
The trickle-down effect which had provided the stability
for bourgeois hegemony collapsed and was replaced by a bubble-up effect. A
temporary surplus of earnings by working class youth fuelled a font of
expressivity and youth culture. The semiotic challenge of the Mods to the
dominance of Haute Couture signalled a western world youth rebellion.
The high modernism of the early C20th, which had at first
been associated with a critique of the establishment centered in Paris, was
high-jacked by the CIA, institutionalised and re-centered in New York. The
avante guarde had become part of the establishment. Modern abstract art was
used as a cypher of the freedom of the West in contrast to the formulaic
realism of the totalitarian East.
In the stifling atmosphere of the increasing
institutionalisation and commodification of modern art, young rebels wriggled
out of the new orthodoxy. John Cage and Merce Cunningham were teaching at Black
Mountain College from the early '50s and it became a centre of a new
radicalism. It was here that he met Christian Wolff who was later to be a
central part of Fluxus.
Fluxus was a group of 'immaterial' artists who were
organised into an ad hoc movement by George Maciunas. They existed both in the
USA, Europe and Japan and communicated with mail art. Their fascination with
performance, the ephemeral and the multiple and their contempt for the unique
great artwork developed into what was a style in itself.
"It was concerned (amongst other things) with a kind
of art which would merge almost imperceptibly with everyday life: with
redefining perception of ordinary objects and events, and with reassessing the
value of common materials, activities and situations. There was a prevailing
interest in the use of chance, in games, puzzles and paradoxes, in inversions
of conventional use and value which owed something to Dada and Surrealism, in
particular to the work of Kurt Schwitters, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp."
(PARSONS 1995)
In Britain the change towards a post industrial society
had brought a need for intellectually trained workers. There was a massive
expansion of tertiary education on the model of the old tradition of
universities which was backed up a total state grant system to support those
who could not afford to pay. This led to a massive influx of students from the
lower echelons of society. Admitedly probably more from the 'respectable
working class', which had internalised values of art and good taste, than the
proletarian. The new expansion also included many Art Colleges even though
there were no jobs for the graduates.
"Even today after two decades of pruning and
rationalisation, there are still more art schools in Britain per head of
population than anywhere else."(FRITH & HORNE 1987).
This was remarkable enough but was followed by a further
wave of internal liberalisation (marked by the Coldstream Report in 1960) which
put "an emphasis on process and content, environment and conceptual
activity and time-based work in film, sound and performance." (Parsons
1995)
It may have been that society was moving rapidly towards
a world suffused with images and that it was seen to be necessary to train
1000's to get a few genius's. The increasing speed with which commodities
needed to be redesigned, reinvented and readvertised demanded a highly talented
and 'creative' workforce which in turn relied on the ideas generated in avante
guarde art circles.
At any rate the majority of working class graduates were
sacrificed in the process... but with
the new welfare and dole allowed many of these people to live poorly on
this subsistence and provide an unofficial cultural opposition. Unfortunately
the ritual of sacrifice required them to give up their previous class identity
and adopt a shallow and ill-fitting middle class label.(As the oppressor
definition of working class was of someone without intellect then those with a degree
could therefore non longer 'logically' be part of this group!)
It was from the ranks of these would be sacrificial art
lambs that many of the non-musician Scratchers came.
"Cornelius enabled us to achieve this unbelievable
dream with the Scratch Orchestra.
John Cages's notion that all noises, and all silences, can be music was
the underlying inspiration. ANYONE who wanted could play and compose
music." Carole Finer
"Passionate about modern music and art, I joined the
orchestra in 1969 and soon found myself thrown into an energetic environment
where to my surprise my musical ideas, however tentative, would be taken
seriously and would actually get realised." David Jackman. (both ICA 1994)
People brought the surface needs for cultural capital
offered by membership of an 'orchestra' but also brought deeper resonances from
a working class oral past. Not that everyone had a working class background but
a large proportion did and this is significant considering what a leading
position we were in.
"A kind of collective confidence grew out of the
common activity of work together." Rod Eley (CARDEW 1974 p.20)
The urban classes had suffered a long period of cultural
oppression. Starved of resources for an autonomous cultural formation, derided
for what they did do and pummelled with the propaganda of Good Taste.(see
SZCZELKUN 1993)
Working class song had been avidly collected by gentlemen
throughout the C19th and was bowdlerised and reduced to piano notation in the
process of collecting and publication. It was filtered through the silk hose of
good taste. The music in the published collections had been gutted. This
process culminated in the figure of Cecil Sharp in whose hands the musical
tradition of the people became a tool for the creation of a modern national social
identity. He and his cronies campaigned against autonomous working class music
whilst feeding their sanitised versions into the educational troughs of the new
state schooling system.
By the 1950s working class tradition of singing together
had been largely destroyed amongst those in cities and suburbs. Active
participatory culture was being replaced by the passive commodity audience but
this gave 'no satisfaction' and there was a longing to remake a culture of
active engagement. This was realised in the ubiquitous three chord four man
rock band but there was still a need for a more contemporary expression which
was freer in its reformulation of sound. Freer to respond to the massively
changed social and technological conditions in which we found ourselves without
the burden of traditional cultural inertia.
WESTERN MUSIC
Between 1600 and 1900 the music of the Western high
culture was systematised with a 'functional tonality' (SALZMAN 1974 p.4). This
was to create an aesthetic which could be controlled, written and elaborated by
the rational mind. In this way the Enlightenment dream of universal standards
of excellence could be achieved.(RAMEAU Treatise on Harmony,1722)
The banishment of dissonance and noise was part of the
Enlightenment myth of civilisation as progressing to a heavenly state of serene
grace and beauty. A harmony which served to mask the cruel realities
perpetrated by such civilisations in the course of their rape of the earth and
its peoples.
But in the process the music lost it social connection in
two ways: First local accents accruing to music were wiped out. The music was
no longer in flux and could not respond to changing conditions. It became inert
and bound up with a romantic bourgeois identity. Secondly, as the Aesthetic was
elaborated it required increasing technical skill to perform which required a
highly trained professional musicians. Music production was therefore dissected
from social life and moved to State academies. The aesthetic concept of musical
excellence moved out of the realm of common experience.
From 1900 there was a reaction to the rigidity of this
formalisation by bourgeois composers themselves as 'functional tonality' began
to strangle the intuitive aspects of bourgeois music as well as become
increasingly divorced from the centre of gravity of social power (which was
itself shifting). Both these things threatened the dominance of high culture.
Debussy, Schoenberg and Stravinsky began to stretch and bend these rigid
conventions which were finally to be shattered by John Cage.
" Art instead of an object made by one person is a
process set in motion by a group of people. Art is socialised. It isn't someone
saying something, but people doing things, giving everyone (including those
involved) the opportunity to have experiences that they otherwise would not
have had." (Cage 1967).
Although there has also persisted a more stuffy musical
orthodoxy which saw western music as a pinnacle of development from a primitive
past. The orthodoxy also continued within the new electronic music. The key
European practitioner here was Stockhausen. "Stockhausen argued for the
controlled use of multiple realisations as a new conception of performed music,
and he argued that such new technologies were in themselves new forms"
(SALZMAN 1974 p.172.) Stockhausen was more 'dangerous' as he represented
innovation but was hanging onto the old precepts.
John Cage had been born in Los Angeles in 1912. In the
year of his birth his father had achieved a world record for staying underwater
with a submarine he had invented.
In 1934 he began to study with Schoenberg. He studied
until 1937 in which year he met Merce Cunningham the choreographer. In the
early '40s he met the Dadaists including Marcel Duchamp and had invented the
prepared piano for which he became well-known. In 1946 he began his studies of
Eastern religions, especially Zen Buddhism.
His relationship with Black Mountain College began in
1950 and it was here that he met Morton Feldman, David Tudor and Christian
Wolff. In 1954 Cage toured Europe with David Tudor and in 1958 returned to
teach at the influential Darmstadt Summer School.
But it was in 1961 - 2 with his lecture series and
subsequent book 'Silence' that his world wide influence was truly established.
With this and subsequent publications he, along with Buckminster Fuller, had a
profoundly uplifting effect many of the key experimental artists of the 1960s.
"We need a society in which every man may live in a
manner freely determined by himself. I am not the first person to say so - I am
only repeating Buckminster Fuller." (KIAD document source not known)
Any hermetic designation of music was entirely delimited
and the relationships of music to everything else were up for debate and
experiment.
Cornelius Cardew was seen as the great British hope to
topple Stockhausen off his throne. He was born in 1936 and educated as a
chorister in the choir school of Canterbury Cathedral from 1943 to 1950 from
which he progressed to Kings College public school in Canterbury . He then
attended the Royal Academy of Music between 1958 and 1960 from were he went on
to study under Stockhausen for two years. On returning to England he took a
graphic arts course and this provided a source of income over the following
years.
"Cardew, Tilbury and other musicians became regular
visitors to art colleges in and around London, in Leeds, Liverpool, Maidstone,
Falmouth, Portsmouth and elsewhere. They performed and discussed the new music
and involved students as active participants in works by Cage, Wolff, Feldman, Cardew,
Brecht, Young, Ichiyanagi and other Fluxus-related composers." (Parsons
1995)
By 1967 he had been appointed to the prestigious position
of Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music.
He was, at the time, playing with jazz musicians in the
'AMM' a free improvising group. The other members were Lou Gare, Eddie Prevost
and Kieth Rowe. The AMM was a cauldron in which musical knowledge of great
profundity could be arise and be exchanged. The sound of the AMM was like being
invited into another dimension in the heart of some organic machine at times
quiet and delicate and at others roaring with sound like a volcano.
Performances were often in total darkness which heightened the effect. The
power of such spontaneously generated unstructured noise was important in
opening up the possibility of a Scratch Orchestra.
"A composer is simply someone who tells other people
what to do. I find this an unattractive way of getting things done. I'd like
our activities to be more social, and anarchically so." John Cage (undated
KIAD library)
Of course Cardew was influenced by Cage but he brought
his own upper class English leadership and European experience to bear with a
force and sensitivity that gave the S.O. a character of its own and avoided
creating a sub-set of Fluxus.
The other influence of importance was his graphic skill
which he brought to greatest coherence in his monumental graphic score
'Treatise' (1970). There had been a lot of experiment with concrete poetry in
the '60's and graphic scores(see CAGE(ed)1969). but Treatise was like a graphic
symphony and achieved a new level of grandeur. To understand the significance
of this I must digress into the history of notation.
The Importance of the Score to Western Classical
Music.
Music scores are about 3000 years old but the Western
score convention started in the C9th with a single line stave. This was
developed by the same monks who were developing the art of the illuminated
manuscript. They were practically the sole keepers and publishers of knowledge.
Other staves in different colours were gradually added.
These scores were often decorative and graphically inventive.
"Standardisation was encouraged by the church, in
musical notation and in other areas of activity, as a way of extending its
influence." Hugh Davies in (EYE MUSIC 1986)
With the development of printing from 1540 the score was
democratised & secularised along with all written forms of knowledge. The
new scientific thought was applied to music and the notation became codified in
a standard form. The piano was central in its visual elaboration of this code
of tonality in the most unequivocal graphic terms. It stood squarely at the
centre of this music.
"Cardew and Tilbury both used to include in their
recitals in the 1960s Brecht's 'Incidental Music', a set five pieces dealing
with the piano as a physical object rather than a sound source, in the
performance of which any sounds which may occur are literally
'incidental'" (PARSONS 1995).
The formalisation of music parallels the literary development
of writing which is seen as rational and 'above' the 'lower' oral forms of
expression and communication which are seen as uncouth.
The graphic score of the 1960s was therefore a gesture
designed to make the representation of music more flexible; to re-evaluate
convention; to suggest it might have a visual life of its own. This is in line
with contemporary theories of writing which recognise writing as having a life
and meaning of its own and was not just a transparent representation of spoken
language.(HARRIS 1986)
The question here is to what extent Cardew was conscious
of his gesture. In the published notes on Treatise he speaks of simple 'looking
for the next mountain'. It seems he was responding to the zytgeist with great
skill but without a profound grasp of where he was going. He was a gifted
leader who was capable of taking a trend, as yet poorly formed, to its rational
conclusion.
I have tried to show some of the main dynamics that
informed the Scratch Orchestra. I also recognise that this is a partial and
simplistic view and that to build a more complete picture much more research
would be required. I say this because it is my thesis that such collective
cultural phenomena are very difficult to represent and historicise using the
extant methodology.
Conclusion.
First a few considerations from music theory.
"The notion that Art - at least great art -
transcends the social, the political and the everyday has been under attack for
fifteen years or so, in a concerted development of work across a number of
disciplines." Janet Wolff in (LEPPERT & McCLARY 1987-92. P.1.)
She goes on to suggest that our analysis of the sociology
of music is hindered by a literary mind set which forefronts narrative critique
and textual semiotics. This approach does not work well for music. The idea
that music can exist apart from the way it is produced, disseminated and
consumed is persistent within music orthodoxy. That it's aesthetic value is not
contingent on all these things.
Theodor Adorno (1948 & '52) saw music as arising from
social conditions but then escaping from its social tutelage and becoming
aesthetically autonomous. In Marxist terms the base was enunciating the
superstructure.
Jaques Attali's book 'Noise' (1977,1985.) gives an
opposite theory, that music can anticipate the base. That in the cultural
organisation of noise there are two prophetic indicators of social change.
These are; Methods of composition and Modes of production, distribution and
consumption. He talks of the mistake of trying to understand our world by just
looking. We must also listen. He suggests that conceptualisation of a future
social order through our composition of noise should be more widely recognised.
"Music can stand for and offer the immediate
experience of collective identity." (Simon Frith in LEPPERT & McLARY
1987)
This seems to be all that goes on if we do not take on
the problem of composition in Atallis terms. It seems that composition was
offered in the S.O. but within the limited terms of the tradition I have
described. We should understand that the organisation of noise that prefigures
music is also that part of a continuum which produces language. James Kelman
recently pointed out how oral language communicates as music. Vocalised
thoughts and feelings are carriers of our emotions. It is the contagion of
thought and feeling through these 'musical' perceptions which allow
intelligence to become social and possibly apart from or prior to any
verbalised rational discourse. This is the way a crowd can think as a
community. To a subtle degree sounds also carry the force of what we wish to
say. A sensotovoty to such perceptions is knocked out of us in the course of
oppressor conditioning.
This was a level of practice and breadth to the meaning
of composition that we could barely
perceive in the S.O. Although some of these ideas were latent in the S.O. even
if theoretically unformulated. When political ideology was applied to the
situation it was a heavy handed imported formula which was stifling and
retrogressive. The theoretical and historical perspective I have briefly
outline here were present in the S.O.. on the level of semantic nuance although
the practical approach to 'composition', with its high degree of accessibility
and improvisation, was much better articulated. There was an aesthetic of
democratic indeterminacy which defied a linear notation or literary critique.
The ICA event did give the opportunity for a younger
generation, and people who missed the S.O.. for other reasons, to be in direct
vocal contact with the original members. In this it achieved more than a
documentary representation and more that a historical treatise.
Such phenomena are complex because of the level field of
democratic cultural practice: the possibility that any individual can, if
encouraged and facilitated, influence the social whole. Leadership must be
responsive - acutely listening. Often the participants in such contemporary
groups do not share deep cultural commonalities due to the fractures and
displacements of life, so complex interactions are underway in all dimensions.
In the S.O. the activities and groupings were also not constant.
This complexity is both technically and ideologically
difficult for critics and historians to deal with. There were no reviews after
the ICA event and no history of the S.O. has appeared since the internally
generated 'Stockhausen Serves Imperialism' in 1974 which was basically Cardew's
public apology for his bourgeois past!
Perhaps
there is no more effective way to represent such complex collective efforts at
resistance than word of mouth and noise of hand. On the other hand we could
also consider developing methods of analysis and historical representation
which can more fully accept the aporia and complexity of cultural phenomena
which are collective.
I would argue that this is in fact necessary for the
development of a fully democratic society in which all humans can live
dignified lives.
Stefan Szczelkun
November 1995.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ATTALI, Jaques. Noise, The Political Economy of Music
Manchester University Press 1985 (orig.1977)
CAGE, John. Diary: How to Improve the World (You will
only Make Matters Worse) continued, Part Three (1967) Something Else Press 1967
CAGE, John. Notations Something Else Press 1969
CARDEW, Cornelius (ed). Stockhausen Serves Imperialism
Latimer 1974
DAVIES, Hugh and Griffiths, Paul. Eye Music, The Graphic
Art of New Musical Notation Arts
Council 1986
FRITH, Simon and Horne, Howard. Art into Pop Routledge
1987-89
HARRIS, Roy. The Origin Of Writing Duckworth 1986
LEPPERT,Richard and McCLARY, Susan. Music and Society,
the Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception University of Cambridge
1987-92.
PARSONS, Michael. 25 Years from Scratch London Musicians Collective 1994.
PARSONS, Michael. The Scratch Orchestra and Visual
Arts M/s 1995
SALZMANN, Eric. Twentieth Century Music: An Introduction
Prentice Hall 1967/74.
SZCZELKUN, Stefan. The Conspiracy of Good Taste Working Press 1993.