I entered a large room at the Place near Euston station in central London some time early in 1969. I found a space to sit on the floor leaning against the wall. The lights were switched off and we were left in complete darkness. Sounds began to percolate from all around and the darkness heightened my attention. I hadn’t experienced listening in darkness before; apart from listening to stereo LPs with my eyes closed. The sounds increased in intensity and in the complexity of their relations. My being felt consumed by music in a way I had never experienced.

At the end I wanted to be a part of this! I spoke to one of the players, Cornelius Cardew, and he said the group, called AMM, was not open but he was forming a ‘Scratch Orchestra’ soon and did I want to come along?

The improvisation in AMM was dense, highly articulate and multilayered. Although five or six people can’t speak at once they can play simultaneously, both with and against each other, without following scores. The Scratch Orchestra turned out to be quite different, often with 50 or more people, and not necessarily people of a like mind. At one end of the spectrum were classically trained musicians and members of AMM, and at the other end were Cage inspired visual artists who wanted the immediacy of a performance platform. But can 50 diverse people coherently produce music without prior arrangements, scores, or being conducted? The solution Cardew offered was the Nature Study Notes collection of 152 ‘improvisation rites’, a rite being defined (in the 1969 “Draft Constitution Of A Scratch Orchestra”) as “not a musical composition; it does not attempt to influence the music being played; at most it may establish a community of feeling, or communal starting place, through ritual”.

A large part of the early Orchestra contributed to these rites, sometimes not adhering strictly to the definition but providing instructions – verbal scores. Cardew knew that selection and exclusion were killers of community and so the collection was not disciplined to meet his initial suggestion.

Cardew had been studying Confucius and rites were the lynch pins of social order in the Celestial Empire. According to National Geographic, Confucian rites are referred to as “acts of social unification”, or as being “designed to bring about a respectful attitude and create a sense of community within a group”.

A broader category of ‘Scratch Music’ was also defined by Cardew in that draft constitution as any undefined improvised accompaniment for any ‘solo’ should it arise. Such playing could be guided by rites or compositions or be ‘free’ to emanate from the consciousness of the player in that time and place.

Most of the entries in the Nature Study Notes booklet are short verbal compositions. Such verbal pieces had been produced before by artists in the Fluxus group. But to gather them in such numbers from an open invitation and then put them at the core of an orchestral scale of communal play was new. How, then, were they used in the making of a concert?

Rather than starting with a composer an individual was chosen (youngest members first!) who designed a concert using these rites and other short compositions – some by well-known composers such as La Monte Young. But there was never a conductor during the performance, the group had to find its own dynamics through intense listening, a practice it shared with AMM. Sometimes it did this more successfully than at others, but when it worked it was a thrilling thing to be part of.

This listening in a large group was a lot like the way culture evolves in a democratic society. People hear the ‘statements’ around them and take up certain conversations or simply amplify and repeat phrases they like, ignoring others. Out of this apparent tumult language and values evolve and change.

Among the Scratch structure there was a lot of freedom for spontaneous or prepared rule breaking that was quite apart from the items in the concert programme. An example might be Peter Ellison bringing his Triumph motorbike into the Queen Elizabeth Hall in central London and revving it up. This allowed for quite an element of surprise, and with a group of players who were resilient to provocation such actions often provided strong dynamics to a background of Scratch Music or a small scale string quartet earnestly playing a popular classic.

So what of AMM? John Tilbury and Keith Rowe I remember as central players in The Scratch Orchestra. Tilbury enjoyed the chance for theatrical expression and Rowe was firstly a visual artist. AMM was exploring what a small group of like minds could compose on the hoof, accepting the breakthroughs of jazz but attracted more to the kinds of sounds made possible in high art by things like musique concrète or, in retrospect at least, by such everyday forms as Rough Music or gamelan. Five or six people was perhaps the limit at which a group of humans can simultaneously produce coherent music in this way. The Scratch Orchestra on the other hand was experimenting with what a larger more open cultural form might achieve by repurposing some ancient modus operandi like rites, and forms like the European orchestra, to direct people’s conscious efforts in order to allow a more intuitive mode to subtly co-ordinate aesthetic choices of a concerted whole.

The Scratch Orchestra could be as big and diverse as a town square on market day.

In spite of the radical inclusiveness, political worries of high art irrelevance were valid enough to produce the 1972 ‘Discontents’ meetings and subsequently the end of the Orchestra. Propagation of the form could not have happened without state art agencies stepping in and in the process undermining efforts to generate an anti-hierarchical cultural will formation. For anything like this to succeed it would have to have arisen from a popular insurgency rather than from a poncey modern art outfit.

But still, a potential was shown that lingers tantalisingly in the historic record and that will be grasped at some point. Cardew’s gift to the future, the 1972 Scratch Music book, sets the stage of ambition and provides the scale and methodology for realising town scale performances, which could be made up of scores made in creative workshops among the local population. My experience of the continuing relevance and accessibility of the rites after 50 years was documented in my book, Improvisation Rites: From John Cage’s Song Books To The Scratch Orchestra’s Nature Study Notes. In the present day, the Scratch Music book could be strictly adhered to in its published form but that might be overly pedantic, whereas if new rites and compositions of Scratch Music were made, it would be more malleable to the time and place, and be owned by the population in which it was performed. It might be useful, however, in making a new book to follow the graphic layout of the original.

It’s likely that such changes could incorporate local cultural forms such as the marching band, carnival float or rap battle. Contemporary popular forms might have to be formally included if Scratch Music is to be realised on a town scale. It is such a renewal of Scratch Music that would excite me, rather than a heritage driven re-enactment. However, I am amazed that no one has taken the opportunity to perform the 26 page openings of the Scratch Music book for the last 50 years, either as an enormously long concert, or in a concert series over 26 weeks. If it is not done soon, there will be no living Scratch Music writers left to witness it.

Stefan Szczelkun takes part in the Scratch Orchestra Revisited event as part of The Wire 40 @ The Cube, Bristol, 3 July.