Rough Music was developed as part of my Embedded Composer residency at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, it explores Deeply rooted traditions interlinking noise and social control; creating bronze musical meat-cleavers with Swordsmith Neil Burridge.
The cleavers themselves have been incorporated into the instrument collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum, and used by The Globe Theatre in a run of A Winters Tale.
The music and the cleaver-instrument making is just the tip of the iceberg of a body of research which has uncovered a largely forgotten history of using meat cleavers to create noise music.
I’ve compiled a list of the most interesting historical references and prints, spanning nearly 400 years, which serves to illustrate the cultural significance of this lost tradition. All the signs suggest that the sound of the meat cleaver was an important part of London’s sonic, social and political past. It was so common that is regularly ridiculed by the middle classes (whose thoughts remain in print), and I’ve even found evidence that in the 1700s prominent Whig politician Charles Fox actively tried to co-opt butcher bands in his campaigning to gain the popular vote – I think that says it all.
There are many intriguing threads here, but fundamentally this was a deeply working-class form of noise and music-making which for a long time was central to weddings and protests and an important part of London’s cultural identity (source suggest mainly, London, but I have found reference to further afield, Norwich etc).
The most recent reference I have found to cleaver use at weddings is in 1919…
inviting the tantalising possibility that some centenarian may well have living memory of it…
Meat Cleaver Music Videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLeCaJhRmK0
Making Of: https://vimeo.com/89692620
BBC Radio Documentary:
Pursuit of Beauty: Dead Rats and Meat Cleavers (BBC Radio 4)
Producer: Sara Jane Hall
The sounds of casting, chiming, singing and clanging are fused together to make a magical sound track to the story of how meat cleavers have been used as musical instruments for over 300 years.. Growing up in Suffolk, Nathaniel Mann, heard stories passed down by his grandma about a tradition of the village Rough Band, made up of pots and pans, iron and metal implements, including meat cleavers – delivering a sort of sonic warning to anyone stepping out of line, committing adultery or behaving in way considered unacceptable. As part of the Avant-Folk trio ‘Dead Rat Orchestra’, Mann, a singer and composer, has long been playing music with strange percussive instruments. Coming across an old meat cleaver in his dad’s garage he was inspired to make a set of cleavers to play music on – so turned to a bronze bladesmith to help turn meat cleavers into musical gold. In a chance discovery, he discovered the idea wasn’t new – and so he sought out Jeremy Barlow, author of “The Enraged Musician”, to find out the coded messages of Hogarth’s musical prints, including marrow bones and meat cleavers. He also visits BathIRON 2018, as a new bandstand is being cast for the city of Bath, and gets the chance to conduct and sing with an orchestra of master smiths. The freshly cast meat cleaver is finally used in one of the Nest Collective’s Campfire Concerts, where the Dead Rat Orchestra join a trio of female folk musicians from Poland – Sutari – who have developed their own parallel world of Rough Music. A joyful celebration, some nail biting forging, and some entrancing music. You’ve never heard cleavers like this before….