<snip>
A (serious?) application of a
comparable notion was Brian Eno's Portsmouth Sinfonia: as an artistic
gesture, in a sense, it worked, in that (though obviously aided by Eno's
name) it attracted attention, but the succcess of having people who couldn't
play music playing it was, is, dependent on the existence of a corpus and
tradition being played by people who can. It works as a joke... [DB]
<snip>
The touched-by-stardust explanation isn't really fair. If I've got the
sequence right, the PF was formed in the late 60s and under the influence of
Cardew's Scratch Orchestra (in which Eno also played, I believe) by the
composer Gavin Bryars, then in the Fine Arts dept of Portsmouth College of
Art, later the founder of Leicester Poly's Music dept, along with John
Farley,. who couldn't play a note. In addition to Bryars, many able
musicians were involved: not only Michael Nyman and Michael Parsons, the
Scratch's co-founder, but also Steve Beresford, Alan Tomlinson et al. Plus
people from other disciplines, such as Barry Flanagan.
Whatever else these various groups were about, others might be the
Spontaneous Music Ensemble (John Stevens & Trevor Watts et al) or the People
Band (which included Johnny Dyani), and they were both of their period and
different one from another, they were also both not a joke and very far from
earnest. Recovering a sense of wonder might be part of it, I suppose. That
and the idea that proficiency should come about through need, as a response,
not through a priori imposition.
A brass band I heard struggling with Astor Piazzolla a few months ago in the
square of a small Italian town had an alien enchantment, which is a little
of what I mean. Eugene Chadbourne playing Bach on the banjo might be
relevant here as well.
CW
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I am always doing what I cannot do yet in order to learn how to do it
(van Gogh)
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