Cardew’s Lessons: The Scratch Orchestra’s Amateur Democracy (1967–1973)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Between 1967 and 1973 Cornelius Cardew taught at three different London institutions—a traditional music conservatory (the Royal Academy of Music), an adult education college (Morley College), and a politically radical free school (the Antiuniversity of London). These schools introduced Cardew to a wide range of technical musical abilities and profoundly affected the composer’s works and pedagogy, culminating in a new musical organization: the Scratch Orchestra. This essay details the political implications of Cardew’s teaching philosophy within the Scratch Orchestra and the lessons to be gleaned from the Orchestra’s successes and failures, particularly the fundamental necessity of disagreement in egalitarian musical classrooms and improvisatory collaborations. To amplify these lessons, I analyse how the musical structures of ‘Paragraph 2’ of Cardew’s The Great Learning belie the composer’s own politics by prescribing distinctly hierarchical performance roles.