"I consider myself to be a member of long-lived tribe, the tribe of music makers. We have existed as long as the human race (and probably longer). Respectful as I am of my predecessors, I don’t consider the traditions of our tribe to be formal and limiting. The truest traditions of music are innovation and discovery. It is the quest of every musician to develop their own relationship to the universe of sound. We all do this in our own peculiar ways. No one who directs the efforts of their life to making sound is to be dismissed or devalued."
In late 1999 I was working as a welder/metal sculptor in Providence and having a series of conversations about music with Mike Rinaldi. On New Year’s Eve 2000 we were at Fort Thunder and he suggested that we make some instruments. Over the next two months we made a pair of xylophones and several kalimbas using formulas and suggestions from Sound Designs by Reinhold Banek and Jon Scoville. I left Providence at the end of February and moved to Chilmark. I got hold of Bart Hopkin’s book Musical Instrument Design and began working on Dubass and Pedal Guitar. The idea for the pedal operated capo-fret came from a street performer, Eric Royer, I’d seen in Harvard Square a few years before, who’d had an ingenious one-man-band set-up. My idea at that time was to integrate homemade instruments with standard ones to allow percussionists to contribute tonally, i.e., replace bassists and rhythm guitarists with drummers. A year later, in addition to Dubass and Pedal Guitar, I had made La Bas, Pilon, Thump, Paired, Lamellop, Harp, Bish-Bosh, Pig, E3W, Croon, Chant, Sir Gamelan, and the two bowed instruments that eventually became Bosco."

The results, which I eventually named Rumor, changed my mind. I realized that the instruments worked well together and formed a band in and of themselves.

That summer the instruments were included in a series of local performance/shows called Cafe Mobius and were played simultaneously for the first time by a group.

On August 22, 2002 the instruments were played by a large group of people under the name Anarchestra for the first time."
Whether we choose the contexts in which we work or they choose us, we go forward, impelled by our various levels of interest to discover, to understand, to achieve techniques, to make our noise and put our stains upon the silences."

Anarchestra is an orchestra of over two hundred unique musical instruments built (with a few exceptions) by Alex Ferris (1954-) an American musician, composer, and theorist, to explore alternative timbres, tunings, and methods of playing.

 

Anarchestra includes instruments from the four basic classifications:

 

Percussion, Drums, Strings, and Winds

 

Most of the percussion and strings are equipped with magnetic pickups designed and made by Ferris.

 

“I want people to participate.  To me, that’s the real meaning of folk music, is folks playing music, together, y’know, tribal, village, whatever sense you want to call it, a community, making music together. . . .  I want everybody to join in and do it and have fun.  And play and feel enabled and empowered and take some responsibility for how it comes out.” (documentary “Um . . . yeah, so I did this”, 2013, YouTube)

Since 2001, several hundred people have played the instruments in W. Tisbury (Ma), Santa Fe, Tucson, Boston, Providence, several towns in Massachusetts  and Vermont, New York City, and “some commune in Virginia”.

 

Several of the live shows have been recorded and released on CD.

 

Ferris (alone and with collaborators) has recorded the instruments extensively in studio.

Beginning in 2001, Ferris began recording the instruments, intending at that point to use them as suppliments to conventional instruments, but “… realized that conventional instruments would just be superfluous, that they could only impoverish the autonomous soundworld I was beginning to explore and develop” (Anarchestra: Rumor 2001, liner notes).

Working fully outside of equal temperament for the first time “dislocated me from the most basic assumptions underlying the theories those instruments had been designed and built to execute .  . . .  What I’d taken for granted before as good sound and intonation just seemed trite and commonplace all of a sudden.  . . . I was particularly intrigued by the way general tonalities tended to emerge from the ensemble by its own consensus ”. (Anarchestra: Rumor 2001, liner notes)

“There’s nothing wrong with the equal temperament system.  A lot of wonderful music of great diversity has been made with it.  As one system out of many, it has much to recommend it. . . .  But we cheat ourselves at a very basic human level when we narrow our choices of available pitch relationships to its confines.”  (Tangents, unpublished manuscript, 2015)

While recording 4-04 (April, 2004), Ferris “wanted to get away from using the phrase structures I’d become habituated to, to play without being able to take the meter for granted.” (Anarchestra: 4-04, liner notes)  He was “fascinated by the music of Moondog around that time.  I felt an affinity to his elegant and simple radicalisms, the way his music responds to its own curiosity.  He had said he didn’t want to die in 4/4 time . . . I didn’t want to die that way either.” (Anarchestra: 4-04, liner notes)  “(Longer) odd signatures allowed both “fourness” and “threeness” to coexist in the same piece of music without forcing either of them to sound inevitable.  That ambiguity encouraged the spontaneity of shaping phrases I had felt was impossible in the conventional meters.” (Anarchestra: notes on recordings)

Aside from two CDs (Endurzbo, Un Coeur Simple, both 2006) that used his recorded heartbeat (3/4) as a drum track, none of the pieces (studies) he has recorded by himself since 2004 have been in either 4/4, 3/4 or any permutation of them.