Journey to the North Pole

About this title

Journey to the North Pole was the first film to be made about Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra. Cardew was an experimental English composer who founded the Scratch Orchestra in order to liberate avant-garde music from the control of the bourgeoisie.The orchestra had no restrictions to its membership and was an anarchic mix of amateurs, students, workers, professional musicians and composers. They wrote and performed graphic scores, group improvisations and deconstructed versions of the popular classics. Cardew sought, idealistically, to take the orchestra to the masses, and this tour captures them performing, predominantly outdoors, in North-East England.