Having struggled to think of a topic for the upcoming essay, I recently came across a flash of inspiration during a recent trip to Donlon books on Broadway Market, next to London Fields. I’ve always wanted to visit this shop, but this was my first time in there, and it’s a shame I’ve not got in before! They had a shelf full of books about sound art, and a great selection of books on other cultural subjects as well. Since I was looking for some inspiration for the essay, I had a browse through the titles on the shelf. There were plenty of books by John Cage, David Toop and many other authors, but the title that stuck out to me was ‘Stockhausen Serves Imperialism’, by Cornelius Cardew. I read the description on the back of the book and I was further intrigued.

I thought that a Marxist analysis of two of the main cis-white-male figureheads of sound art (Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage) that students are taught about at the start of the course at LCC sounded like a good springboard for ideas for me to find a topic from, so I bought the book and have been slowly making my way through it over the past few days (I find academic reading very challenging due to my ADHD making it hard for me to focus on it for long periods of time).

The book is a collection of essays, mainly by Cornelius Cardew but also by Rod Eley and John Tilbury, and it covers a few topics from critiques of Cage and Stockhausen, critiques of Cardew’s own earlier work (Cardew had previously served as an assistant to both Stockahusen and Cage before turning on their ideals), and the essay I have just finished now, which is Rod Eley’s ‘History of the Scratch Orchestra’. The Scratch Orchestra was a project led by Cardew from 1969 – 1974 that mainly relied on improvisation and graphic scores. The idea that anyone could join the orchestra, regardless of ability, is certainly an intriguing one, and one has to admire Cardew for following through with, and committing to, this concept.

Some parts of Eley’s essay can be a little excruciating – for instance, when he makes the claim that the orchestra were victims of the “same social and cultural oppression experienced daily by black people”, because a few critics from a class of society they weren’t even trying to make music for (the bourgeoisie) wrote bad reviews of their shows. This claim, in my opinion, is just downright racist and strange.

However, he does talk about some interesting ideas in the essay – the idea that sound reproduction and sound amplification are the enemies of the working musician as they take away jobs in scenarios that might have otherwise been filled by a band or small orchestra (such as weddings, restaurants, hotel lobbies) is thought-provoking. He also talks about the homogenisation of music culture through these technological developments – pop music is millions of people dancing and listening to the same few bands, and the job of musicians in live contexts is being taken away by DJs who play records instead – Eley calls them ‘machine minders’.

There are thought-provoking ideas in this essay that I might use to develop my topic for this unit, however I definitely do find parts of this book problematic – something to write about?