Improvisation Rites: from John Cage's 'Song Books' to the Scratch Orchestra's 'Nature Study Notes'. Collective practices 2011 - 2017

An account of an intergenerational project that used my experience of The Scratch Orchestra (1969 - 72) to work with a younger generation of people. We started by doing two performances of John Cage's magnum opus 'Song Books'. Then we worked with the improvisation rites in Cornelius Cardew's collective work 'Nature Study Notes'. This book documents the collective process and the performances. It also includes assessment by the participants and an afterglow in which Carole Finer and I were i...