This is not an orchestra: Super Critical
Mass making the invisible visible
CHARI LARSSON
Definition: A Scratch Orchestra is a large number of enthusiasts pooling
their resources (not primarily material resources) and assembling for
action (music-making, performance, edification).
Note: The word music and its derivatives are here not understood to
refer exclusively to sound and related phenomena (hearing etc).
What they do refer to is flexible and depends entirely on the
members of the Scratch Orchestra.
The Scratch Orchestra intends to function in the public sphere, and
this function will be expressed in the form of – for lack of
a better word – concerts.1
Written shortly before the formation of the Scratch Orchestra in 1969,
English composer Cornelius Cardew officially announced ‘A Scratch
Orchestra: Draft Constitution’ in the June edition of the Musical Times.
Perhaps one of the last great manifestos in the history of the twentieth
century avant-garde, Cardew described his early vision for the Scratch
Orchestra as a collective consisting of ‘enthusiasts… assembling for
action.’ Working immediately in the wake of European Fluxus, and
its oppositional impulse to tradition and professionalism in the arts,
Cardew and his associates were deeply committed to breaking down
the traditional hierarchies between musicians and non-musicians.
Membership was open to everyone, regardless of skill and ability. In
an interview for the BBC first broadcast in 1972, Cardew discussed the
philosophy of the Scratch Orchestra:
These people may be visual artists, they may be people interested in
theatre, they may be perfectly ordinary office workers or students or
what have you. They’re not necessarily trained in playing any instrument
at all. Some of them would perform activities of one kind or another,
not necessarily producing sound, because scratch music was really a
composite of people making their own activities, so that some of these
activities would involve people playing conventional instruments like
saxophones or flutes or this, that and the other.2
There is something of Cardew’s spirit of institutional critique and
democratic collaboration that leaves a fertile legacy for contemporary
composers and musicians, and provides an ideal entry point for a
discussion of the Australian collective that is Super Critical Mass. It
was the egalitarian potential of sound that initially brought the group
together in 2007. Occupying the porous intersection of performance,
sound and participatory art, Super Critical Mass is currently in the final
stages of preparation for its latest initiative at Queensland Art Gallery’s
flagship event, the Asia Pacific Triennial. Extending over the duration of the
triennial in a series of workshops, video installations and performances,
the project promises to be the most ambitious commission undertaken
by the group to date.
Super Critical Mass co-directors Julian Day and Luke Jaaniste’s
approach to participatory-based sound projects is influenced by
their formal education as classical composers. Refuting the barriers
to entry imposed by a traditional orchestra, Day declared the goal
was ‘to construct a form of orchestra that sidestepped many of the
negative trappings of orchestras.’3 Orchestras tend to rigidly defined
communities. Roles are clearly demarcated, and the hierarchical
delineations between the conductor, performers and audience are firmly
entrenched. The musicians perform to a set score and the audience sits
in silence, passively listening; the architecture of the performance space
serves to reinforce such hierarchies; the orchestra performs on a stage,
and is physically separated from the audience. Finally, the performance
takes place in a ‘special’ space, deliberately severed from the everyday.
From its inception in 2007, the collective’s core premise has remained
consistent: to create sonic works in a range of heterogeneous spaces,
using multiples of the same type of instruments or sound sources.
The participants are issued with a single instruction or directive. What
unfolds is an extremely pared down, minimalist experience. The goal
is to create an immediate, direct engagement between spectators,
performers and the physical environment.
The authorial role of the composer-as-God is destabilised as individual
variables alternate and change with each new performance. Far from
producing a predictable outcome, performances are subjected to a
fluctuating array of factors; from the selection of the sound source,
through to the number of participants involved, every update to the
practice is unique. Once outside regular performance spaces, the
acoustics become site specific and present a new set of contingencies.
Unlike the clearly defined spaces between audience and ensemble
performances, the participants are free to move around. The space
is understood not in terms of reinforcing hierarchies, but as a fluid
response to the site’s architecture.
What ensues is a highly process-driven approach to the creative act that
is both iterative and cumulative. The in situ research feeds back into the
development of the project, as it unfolds through a series of workshops.
Often, the performance will take place after months of site visits, where
the acoustics of the individual site are closely studied. Preliminary ideas
are workshopped with volunteers in a process that Day describes as the
‘circular flow of information.’4 By directly involving the participants,
the process of production becomes a two-way interactive exchange.
Super Critical Mass inhabits the other to the concert hall and the
tightly controlled management of the acoustic experience: repurposed
industrial sites such as Eveleigh’s Carriageworks, recreational and
exhibition spaces, and ‘non-places’ or locations that are often overlooked
or neglected.5 By moving out of the performance space of the concert
hall, the practice is able to draw attention to the ambient sound of
the architectural space. Looking ahead to the next iteration at the Asia
Pacific Triennial, we are alerted to how sound loves space. This reflects
co-director Luke Jaaniste’s long-term theoretical and practical interest
in ambient sound. Exhibition spaces are highly invested in the visual.
The sound source, however, can interact and mingle with the ambient
background noise of the gallery. Sound is able to shift, move and inhabit
other spaces in unforeseen and unplanned ways. This is, of course,
entirely the point. Sound can destabilise the hierarchy between the
visual and aural that is privileged and reinforced by the architecture of
Summer 2015 | BROADSHEET | 15
Julian Day and Luke Jaaniste, Super Critical Mass, Together We Breathe, 2013.
Courtesy of the artists, and Library of Birmingham, UK.
Photograph: Gethin Thomas.
the gallery. This allows for a redrawing of visual spaces along invisible
territories of sound.
With performances taking place in both Australia and internationally,
Super Critical Mass is raising important questions pertaining to
community-based collaborative projects. How might communities be
understood as possible sites of resistance? Each new iteration of the
practice is committed to a notion of equality that is active and handson. Again, this reminds us of the barriers to entry and the cultural
capital that remains inscribed in conventional orchestral practice. Less
concerned with musical instruments, the project is trending towards the
use of common, everyday objects. From the simplicity of collectively
scrunching pieces of paper, to the humility of the hum, no prior
education or highly trained expertise is required as a pre-requisite
for participation. It is here where Super Critical Mass moves closest
to Cardew’s legacy and his ambition of musicians and non-musicians
coming together to perform in the public sphere.
Rethinking the limits of what an orchestra can possibly be is an implicitly
politicised gesture. This is not a matter of simplifying the practice to a
non-orchestra, or even the negation of orchestra. Instead, the egalitarian
impulse informing Super Critical Mass must be understood in political
terms. French philosopher Jacques Rancière is helpful here. As part of
his ongoing discussion of the nature of visual images and their political
efficacy, Rancière offers us an opportunity to rethink participatorybased performance practices in respect to equality. As is well known,
equality is a core operative principle in Rancière’s vocabulary, since he
conceives of equality in terms of a process of disruption to the ‘natural’
16 | BROADSHEET | Summer 2015
hierarchy or order. By reminding us of the barriers to traditional
ensemble performances, Super Critical Mass creates a mode of address
that simultaneously speaks to these highly encoded cultural conventions,
as well as destabilising them.
Working against institutional ‘top down’ theorisations of equality,
Rancière moves in the opposite direction, from the ‘bottom up.’ Equality
is entwined with the political, in what Rancière calls the ‘police’, or
the systematic ordering, which establishes conformity and reinforces
inequitable configurations of power. Politics occur when the police and
the processes of equality intersect. Equality is therefore understood as
making visible invisible power structures. Rancière is concerned with
the individual’s ability to think beyond the homogeneity of the ‘police.’
He writes: ‘Emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition
between viewing and acting… It begins when we understand that
viewing is also an action that confirms or transforms this distribution
of positions.’8
This is more than the mixing of high and low. It is the act of making
visible pre-existing hierarchies by those who are excluded by those very
organisations of entrenched power. As Rancière argues in Dis-agreement:
‘Politics exists when the natural order of domination is interrupted by
the institution of a part of those who have no part.’9 The passive role
accorded to the spectator in conventional orchestra has no place in
Rancière’s schema. He observes: ‘To be a spectator is to be separated
from both the capacity to know and the power to act.’10 Against this,
and as Jaaniste and Day are careful to emphasise, participants are able
to determine their own individual responses to the initial directive.
Moreover, as spectators move throughout the gallery spaces, they are
alerted to the promiscuous intermingling of the source sound and the
ambient background sounds of the gallery. With the goal of heightening
the phenomenological engagement with the acoustics of the individual
site, this demands a shift from passive to active spectatorship.
The distinction between spectating and participation becomes unstable,
bringing the practice directly into dialogue with Rancière’s unique
formulation of equality. The notion of active spectatorship came to
the fore in a 2014 performance at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary
Art.11 The brief was simple: an hour-long performance throughout the
MCA’s gallery spaces. The selected sound source was voice. Visually
indistinguishable from the regular gallery visiting public, the ensemble
moved through the gallery spaces, emanating one of the simplest of
sounds, the hum. The distance between spectators and performers
collapsed, as members of the public adopted the sound source,
mimicking the ensemble. Against the silence demanded from the
audience by traditional ensemble, the ambient, background noise of
the gallery became the subject of the spectator’s experience.
It is from this vantage point that Super Critical Mass redirects our gaze
back to Cornelius Cardew’s ambitions for the Scratch Orchestra and
prompts a reassessment of the legacy of the historical avant-garde.
Far from fading into impotence, Cardew demonstrated that sound
is a medium, which contains political agency. Sound can temporally
bring together diverse, heterogeneous communities that are otherwise
precluded from direct engagement. This reminds us of Rancière’s
insight that equality is active and interrupts the status quo. Equality
happens at the fractious points of disruption.
ENDNOTES
1. Cornelius Cardew, ‘A Scratch Orchestra: Draft Constitution’, The Musical Times 110, no. 1516
(1969): 617.
2. Quoted in Timothy D. Taylor, ‘Moving in Decency: The Music and Radical Politics of Cornelius
Cardew’, Music & Letters 79, no. 4, 1998.
3. Interview with Julian Day and Luke Jaaniste, September 2015.
4. ibid.
5. The term is Marc Augé’s. See Marc Augé, Non-places, trans. John Howe, London and New York:
Verso, 1995.
6. Luke Jaaniste, ‘The Ambience of Ambience’, M/C Journal 13, no. 2, 2010, http://journal.mediaculture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/238.
7. On policing, see Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999: 29.
8. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott, London and New York: Verso,
2009.
9. Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, 1999: 11.
10. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 2009: 2.
11. Untitled (2014) was part of Sonic Social, curated by Performance Space.