Cornelius Cardew was an English experimental music composer, and founder of the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental performing ensemble. He later rejected experimental music, explaining why he had "discontinued composing in an avantgarde idiom" in his own programme notes to his Piano Album 1973.
AMM was a British free improvisation group that was founded in London, England, in 1965. The group was initially composed of Keith Rowe on guitar, Lou Gare on saxophone, and Eddie Prévost on drums. The three men shared an interest in exploring music beyond the boundaries of conventional jazz, as in free jazz and free improvisation. AMM never achieved widespread popularity, but have been influential in improvised music. Most of their albums have been released by Matchless Recordings, which is run by Eddie Prévost. In a 2001 interview, Keith Rowe was asked if "AMM" was an abbreviation. He replied, "The letters AMM stand for something, but as you probably know it's a secret!"
Howard While Skempton is an English composer, pianist, and accordionist.
John Tilbury is a British pianist. He is considered one of the foremost interpreters of Morton Feldman's music, and since 1980 has been a member of the free improvisation group AMM.
Michael Chant is an English composer and political activist. Born in 1945, he became politically active in the 1960s while associated with another composer, Cornelius Cardew.
The Scratch Orchestra was an experimental musical ensemble founded in the spring of 1969 by Cornelius Cardew, Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton.
John White was an English experimental composer and musical performer. He invented the early British form of minimalism known as systems music, with his early Machines.
Michael Blake is a South African contemporary classical music composer and performer. He studied in Johannesburg in the 1970s and was associated with conceptual art and the emergence of an indigenous experimental music aesthetic. In 1976 he embarked on 'African Journal', a series of pieces for Western instruments that drew on his studies of traditional African music and aesthetics, which continued to expand during two decades in London until he returned to South Africa in 1998. From around 2000 African music becomes less explicit on the surface of his compositions, but elements of rhythm and repetition remain as part of a more postcolonial engagement with material and form. He works in a range of styles including minimalism and collage, and now also forages for source material from the entire musical canon.
Promenade Theatre Orchestra (PTO) was an English quartet founded by John White in 1969 and consisted of the composer/performers White, Christopher Hobbs, Alec Hill, and Hugh Shrapnel. Although not one of the Scratch Orchestra's so-called 'sub-groups', the PTO often shared concerts and tours with the Scratch Orchestra as a distinct ensemble.
Dave Smith is an English composer, arranger and musical performer. Since 1971 he has been associated with the English school of experimental music.
Christopher Hobbs is an English experimental composer, best known as a pioneer of British systems music.
Indeterminacy is a composing approach in which some aspects of a musical work are left open to chance or to the interpreter's free choice. John Cage, a pioneer of indeterminacy, defined it as "the ability of a piece to be performed in substantially different ways".
Experimental music is a general label for any music or music genre that pushes existing boundaries and genre definitions. Experimental compositional practice is defined broadly by exploratory sensibilities radically opposed to, and questioning of, institutionalized compositional, performing, and aesthetic conventions in music. Elements of experimental music include indeterminacy, in which the composer introduces the elements of chance or unpredictability with regard to either the composition or its performance. Artists may approach a hybrid of disparate styles or incorporate unorthodox and unique elements.
Hugh Shrapnel is an English composer of contemporary classical music.
Source: Music of the Avant-Garde – also known and hereafter referred to as Source Magazine – was an independent, not-for-profit musical and artistic magazine published between 1967 and 1973 by teachers and students of the University of California, Davis, California. It emerged from the flourishing Californian musical experimentalism of the late 1950s-early 1960s, at UC-Davis and Mills College. The 11 issues document new music practices of the period like indeterminacy, performance, graphic scores, electronic music and intermedia arts.
The Experimental Music Catalogue was founded in 1968 by Christopher Hobbs in order to provide an outlet for new music by composers of the English experimental movement, Publications appeared mainly as generic anthologies, such as the Verbal Anthology, String Anthology, Rhythmic Anthology and the Scratch Anthology of Compositions. These anthologies featured music by British composers such as Cornelius Cardew, Hugh Shrapnel, Howard Skempton, Gavin Bryars, John White, and other experimental composers, including those in the Scratch Orchestra, but also others, including Robert Ashley and Terry Jennings.
David Anthony Ahern was an Australian composer and music critic, who became a prominent artist in the avant-garde genre after his best-known work, Ned Kelly Music was released and performed at the Sydney Proms music series.
Howard Dunster Snell was born in Wollaston, Northamptonshire, England.
Laurie Scott Baker was a British composer and musician of Experimental and Electronic music. He was a pioneer of live electronics and graphic scores from the 1960s.
Carole Finer was an English radio presenter, artist and art teacher. She was a founder member of the Scratch Orchestra.
