What is it about objec­tive­ly ter­ri­ble works of art that so cap­ti­vates? Cults form around Tom­my Wiseau’s The Room, the “Cit­i­zen Kane of bad movies,” or ama­teur girl-group The Shag­gs, “the best—or worst—band of all time.” Such utter art­less­ness can­not be faked, but it can, com­pos­er Gavin Bryars found, be delib­er­ate­ly orches­trat­ed, to quite enjoy­ably ter­ri­ble effect. In 1970, Bryars staged a three-day tal­ent show at the Portsmouth School of Art, with come­di­ans, ven­tril­o­quists, musi­cians, etc. His own entry was the Portsmouth Sin­fo­nia, now right­ly known as the “world’s worst orches­tra.” The Sin­fo­nia, writes Dan­ger­ous Minds, “wel­comed musi­cians and non-musi­cians alike, though peo­ple of tal­ent were expect­ed to play instru­ments on which they were not pro­fi­cient.” The first iter­a­tion of the group con­sist­ed of 13 stu­dents who could hard­ly play at all.

Lat­er ensem­bles fea­tured more dra­mat­ic dis­par­i­ties in tal­ent. But no mat­ter their lev­el of abil­i­ty, “all mem­bers were expect­ed to play the reper­toire to the best of their abil­i­ties. The result was a spe­cial kind of cacoph­o­ny: every famil­iar theme (Also sprach Zarathus­tra, the William Tell Over­ture, Beethoven’s Fifth), though played as inept­ly as pos­si­ble, was approached with respect and even care. You will instant­ly rec­og­nize every tune they attempt, and you will prob­a­bly bust a gut,” adds Dan­ger­ous Minds.

Maybe it’s the earnest­ness that gets us, the best of inten­tions pro­duc­ing the most ridicu­lous of results. Though formed as a “one-off joke,” Atlas Obscu­ra notes, the Sin­fo­nia con­tin­ued after an “out­pour­ing of enthu­si­asm,” and even attract­ed Bri­an Eno, who joined on clar­inet, an instru­ment he’d nev­er played, and pro­duced and record­ed with the group on their debut 1974 album, Portsmouth Sin­fo­nia Plays the Pop­u­lar Clas­sics.

The group’s num­bers swelled by the mid-sev­en­ties to include, Eno wrote in the album’s lin­er notes, “a mem­ber­ship of about fifty.” He lets us know in his dead­pan intro­duc­tion that the Sin­fo­nia took its work seri­ous­ly. The orches­tra “tends to gen­er­ate an extra-ordi­nary and unique musi­cal sit­u­a­tion where the inevitable errors must be con­sid­ered as a cru­cial, if inad­ver­tent, ele­ment of the music.”

It is impor­tant to stress the main char­ac­ter­is­tic of the orches­tra: that all mem­bers of the Sin­fo­nia share the desire to play the pieces as accu­rate­ly as pos­si­ble. One sup­pos­es that the pos­si­bil­i­ty of pro­fes­sion­al accu­ra­cy will for­ev­er elude us since there is a con­stant influx of new mem­bers and a con­tin­u­al desire to attempt more ambi­tious pieces from the realms of the pop­u­lar clas­sics.

This is dif­fi­cult to read with a straight face, but Bryars “was adamant,” the blog Clas­si­cal Music Reimag­ined explains, “that the musi­cians shouldn’t play for laughs – they hon­est­ly had to play to the best of their abil­i­ty, and atten­dance at rehearsal was manda­to­ry. Footage of the orches­tra in action shows an incred­i­ble lev­el of con­cen­tra­tion and focus (if not results).” A few mem­bers do seem be hav­ing fun with Han­del’s Mes­si­ah in the short clip of a live per­for­mance below, fea­tur­ing a seri­ous Eno. But most of them are gen­uine­ly giv­ing it their all.

Exper­i­men­tal the­ater, con­cep­tu­al art, or prac­ti­cal joke, it makes no dif­fer­ence. There is tru­ly some­thing “extra-ordi­nary and unique” about this “musi­cal sit­u­a­tion,” you must agree. The so-bad-it’s‑goodness of the Sin­fo­nia comes not only from their lack of tal­ent, but also from the enor­mous gap between inten­tions and results—a uni­ver­sal­ly rec­og­niz­able con­di­tion of the human com­e­dy. We cel­e­brate the excep­tions, those whose great efforts tru­ly pro­duce great­ness. But in the Sin­fo­nia, we may encounter the less-great parts of our­selves, enno­bled in their inep­ti­tude by the fool­har­di­ness of this tragi­com­ic dar­ing.

via Atlas Obscu­ra +  Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Exper­i­men­tal Piano Jazz Album by Come­di­an H. Jon Ben­jamin — Who Can’t Play Piano

The 15 Worst Cov­ers of Bea­t­les Songs: William Shat­ner, Bill Cos­by, Tiny Tim, Sean Con­nery & Your Excel­lent Picks

Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Out­er Space: “The Worst Movie Ever Made,” “The Ulti­mate Cult Flick,” or Both?

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

It real­ly is impos­si­ble to over­state the fact that most of the music around us sounds the way it does today because of an elec­tron­ic rev­o­lu­tion that hap­pened pri­mar­i­ly in the 1960s and 70s (with roots stretch­ing back to the turn of the cen­tu­ry). While folk and rock and roll solid­i­fied the sound of the present on home hi-fis and cof­fee shop and fes­ti­val stages, the sound of the future was craft­ed behind stu­dio doors and in sci­en­tif­ic lab­o­ra­to­ries. What the Future Sound­ed Like, the short doc­u­men­tary above, trans­ports us back to that time, specif­i­cal­ly in Britain, where some of the finest record­ing tech­nol­o­gy devel­oped to meet the increas­ing demands of bands like the Bea­t­les and Pink Floyd.

Much less well-known are enti­ties like the BBC’s Radio­phon­ic Work­shop, whose crew of engi­neers and audio sci­en­tists made what sound­ed like mag­ic to the ears of radio and tele­vi­sion audi­ences. “Think of a sound, now make it,” says Peter Zinovi­eff “any sound is now pos­si­ble, any com­bi­na­tion of sounds is now pos­si­ble.” Zinovi­eff, Lon­don-born son of an émi­gré Russ­ian princess and inven­tor of the huge­ly influ­en­tial VCS3 syn­the­siz­er in 1969, opens the documentary—fittingly, since his tech­nol­o­gy helped pow­er the futur­is­tic sound of pro­gres­sive rock, and since, togeth­er with the Radio­phon­ic Workshop’s Delia Der­byshire and Bri­an Hodg­son, he ran Unit Delta Plus, a stu­dio group that cre­at­ed and pro­mot­ed elec­tron­ic music.

Also appear­ing in the doc­u­men­tary is Tris­tram Cary, who, with Zinovi­eff, found­ed Elec­tron­ic Music Stu­dios, one of four mak­ers of com­mer­cial syn­the­siz­ers in the late six­ties, along with ARP, Buch­la, and Moog. Zinovi­eff and Carey are not house­hold names in part because they didn’t par­tic­u­lar­ly strive to be, pre­fer­ring to work behind the scenes on exper­i­men­tal forms and eschew­ing pop­u­lar music even as their tech­nol­o­gy gave birth to so much of it. The aris­to­crat­ic Zinovi­eff and pipe-smok­ing, pro­fes­so­r­i­al Carey hard­ly fit in with the crowd of rock and pop stars they inspired.

In hind­sight, how­ev­er, Zinovi­eff desires more recog­ni­tion for their work. “One thing which is odd, is that there’s a miss­ing chap­ter, which is EMS, in all the books about elec­tron­ic music. Peo­ple do not know what incred­i­ble mechan­i­cal adven­tures we were up to.” Those adven­tures includ­ed not only cre­at­ing new tech­nol­o­gy, but com­pos­ing nev­er-before-heard music. Both Zinovi­eff and Carey con­tin­ue to cre­ate elec­tron­ic scores, and Carey hap­pens to be one of the first adopters in Britain of musique con­crète, the pro­to-elec­tron­ic music pio­neered in the 1940s using tape machines, micro­phones, fil­ters, and oth­er record­ing devices, along with found sounds, field record­ings, and ad hoc instru­ments made from non-instru­ment objects. (See exam­ples of these tech­niques in the clip above from the 1979 BBC doc­u­men­tary The New Sound of Music.)

Many of the sounds that emerged from Britain’s elec­tron­ic music founders came out of the detri­tus of World War II. Carey’s first seri­ous stu­dio design, he says, “coin­cid­ed with the post-war appear­ance of an enor­mous amount of junk from the army, navy, and air force. For some­one who knew what to do, and could han­dle a sol­der­ing iron, and could design audio equip­ment, even if you only had 30 shillings in your pock­et, you could get some­thing.” With their knowl­edge of elec­tron­ics and hodge-podge of tech­nol­o­gy, Carey and his com­pa­tri­ots were design­ing an avant-garde elec­tron­ic “high moder­ni­ty,” author Trevor Pinch declares. “I think you can think of peo­ple like Tris­tan Carey as dream­ing of a future sound­scape of Lon­don.” Nowa­days, those sounds are as famil­iar to us as the music piped over the speak­ers in restau­rants and shops. One won­ders what the future after the future these pio­neers designed will sound like?

What the Future Sound­ed Like will be added to our col­lec­tion of Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Doc­u­men­taries Intro­duce Delia Der­byshire, the Pio­neer in Elec­tron­ic Music

Meet Four Women Who Pio­neered Elec­tron­ic Music: Daphne Oram, Lau­rie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue & Pauline Oliv­eros

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music Visu­al­ized on a Cir­cuit Dia­gram of a 1950s Theremin: 200 Inven­tors, Com­posers & Musi­cians

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

In the fall of 1968, Eric Clap­ton was 23 years old and at the height of his cre­ative pow­ers. His band, Cream, was on its farewell tour of Amer­i­ca when a film crew from the BBC caught up with the group and asked the young gui­tar vir­tu­oso to show how he cre­at­ed his dis­tinc­tive sound.

The result is a fas­ci­nat­ing four-minute tour of Clapton’s tech­nique. He begins by demon­strat­ing the wide range of tones he could achieve by vary­ing the set­tings on his psy­che­del­i­cal­ly paint­ed 1964 Gib­son SG Stan­dard gui­tar. His wah-wah ped­al (an ear­ly Vox mod­el) was crit­i­cal to the sound of so many Cream clas­sics, like “Tales of Brave Ulysses.” In the film, Clap­ton real­ly has to stomp on it to get it work­ing.

One of the most dif­fi­cult skills to mas­ter, Clap­ton says, is the vibra­to. In a 1970 inter­view with Gui­tar Play­er mag­a­zine he goes into more detail: “When I stretch strings,” he says, “I hook my thumb around the neck of the gui­tar. A lot of gui­tarists stretch strings with just their hand free. The only way I can do it is if I have my whole hand around the neck—actually grip­ping onto it with my thumb. That some­how gives me more of a rock­ing action with my hand and wrist.” If you watch the BBC clip close­ly you will see this in action.

The inter­view was con­duct­ed with Clap­ton seat­ed in front of his famous stack of Mar­shall ampli­fiers. In the Gui­tar Play­er inter­view, how­ev­er, he admits he rarely used both at the same time. “I always had two Mar­shalls set up to play through,” he says, “but I think it was just so I could have one as a spare. I usu­al­ly used only one 100-watt amp.”

Clapton’s demon­stra­tion (along with inter­views of bassist Jack Bruce and drum­mer Gin­ger Bak­er) was incor­po­rat­ed into Tony Palmer’s film of Cream’s Farewell Con­cert, which took place on Novem­ber 21, 1968 at the Roy­al Albert Hall in Lon­don.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Eric Clapton’s Iso­lat­ed Gui­tar Track From the Bea­t­les’ ‘While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps’ (1968)

Eric Clap­ton Tries Out Gui­tars at Home and Talks About the Bea­t­les, Cream, and His Musi­cal Roots

Hear the Nev­er Released Ver­sion of The Stones’ “Brown Sug­ar,” With Eric Clap­ton on Slide Gui­tar