'The Edinburgh Festival may be one of the world’s great arts fixtures, but its Fringe festival has always operated like a national freak show, opening nonjudgmental arms to anything that could be said to pass as entertainment. Proust on Rollerblades, Ibsen in drag, your favorite Wagner moments whistled by a chorus in gorilla suits: old-timers will have seen and usually passed by it all. And being passed by is the shared experience of Fringe events. They tend to play obscurely, in church halls and basement rooms to audiences of 16, barely noticed, instantly forgotten.

That said, the Fringe does have its star acts that either get seized on by TV talent scouts or at least acquire cult status and return year after year. One of the most spectacular of the cult items, not quite ready for prime time but expectant, will be playing Edinburgh’s sizable Canongate Church next Sunday. All seats are sold, and lines for returns will undoubtedly stretch around the block.

This hottest of hot tickets is an Edinburgh band called the Really Terrible Orchestra. And were you to ask what it does, the answer would be that with true Scottish candor it lives up to its name, or rather down to it: an orchestra that plays terribly.

“We are indeed quite bad,” the principal bassoonist admitted. The standard varies from player to player, he added, noting that he himself had passed Grade IV, the British examination level normally taken by schoolchildren around age 12.

“But I have trouble with C sharps — a design fault of the instrument, I think — which means I don’t play them,” he said. “And some of our members are really very challenged. We have one dire cellist who has the names of the strings written on his bridge. Otherwise he can’t remember what they are.”

The fascinating thing about the Really Terrible Orchestra, though, is that its appalling players are in fact eminent in other walks of life. They are politicians, bankers, judges, surgeons, senior academics. And the principal bassoonist who doesn’t play C sharps happens to be the polymath law professor and best-selling writer Alexander McCall Smith, the author of (among many other things) the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books, which are now being filmed for international release.

A genial, donnish figure who lives in the most genteel of Edinburgh suburbs and now ranks among the most popular literary figures in Britain, Mr. McCall Smith was one of the founders of the orchestra eight years ago. He likes to say that it was set up with no other reason than to give hopeless amateurs a chance.

“There were a number of us with children in school orchestras who fantasized about being in an orchestra ourselves,” he said. “And as there was no likelihood of ever being accepted into an existing ensemble, we decided to create our own. There’s a concept of asylum in the R.T.O. It’s therapy.”

It’s also something that could easily have turned into a standard amateur ensemble like a thousand others. But where standard amateurs may be incidentally bad, the Really Terrible Orchestra is fundamentally bad. Its random ability to play the right notes at the right time, or at all, is part of what the orchestra chairman, the lousy clarinetist Peter Stevenson, calls “our entertainment package.”

“We knew there was no market for a good amateur orchestra, because a poor professional one would always be better,” Mr. Stevenson said. “But there is a market for the R.T.O. And that our concerts sell out in advance, to audiences who just love to hear us scrape through easy arrangements of Bach or the last 40 bars of the ‘1812’ Overture — the rest is far too difficult — is proof. There’s always thunderous applause, especially if we’ve got lost in something and ground to a halt. Always a standing ovation. And it’s not just because we have our friends and family in the audience. People genuinely thrill to it.”



All of which raises the question: Why? Why do people love bad art? Why is there a cult museum near Boston proudly dedicated “to bringing the worst of art to the widest of audiences”? And why does history afford a special place for the creatively incompetent, from poets like William McGonagall (the immortal versifier of “The Tay Bridge Disaster”) to singers like Florence Foster Jenkins (whose inability to sing packed Carnegie Hall) and, more recently, the “American Idol” reject William Hung (whose inability to do anything of artistic note has turned him into a celebrity)? Why, in fact, is so much latter-day TV obsessed with celebrating cultural failure?

One answer is that it’s a variant on classic banana-skin comedy; or, as Mr. McCall Smith prefers, “simple schadenfreude, a pleasure in the misfortune of others that’s all the sweeter with the R.T.O. because so many of us are otherwise well established in our lives.”

“Our clarinetist chairman is a typical example,” he added, “tremendously successful in investment banking, reached the very top. But now he’s at the very bottom of the orchestral ladder and, alas, will probably stay round about that level.”

But there’s another reason, surely, for the cult of bad art, and it has to do with liberation: the anarchic pleasure of disorder, the repudiation of established rules of judgment. Bad art is an invitation to escape the formal boundaries of adulthood and be a child, delighting in the rude and raw.

In this respect the Really Terrible Orchestra has interesting precedents. Back in the 1960s a maverick figure of the British musical avant-garde, Cornelius Cardew, created what he called the Scratch Orchestra; like the Terrible, it was an ensemble of players who couldn’t play, or at least couldn’t play the particular instruments they had selected for Scratch Orchestra Concerts, a proviso that allowed the involvement of bona fide musicians like Michael Nyman and Brian Eno.

For some, especially the newspapers, the Scratch Orchestra was just a grand joke; and much was made of its intuitive response to the “music” specially composed for it by Mr. Cardew, which was written representationally, not with notes and staffs but with pictures and poems.

For Mr. Cardew and company, however, it was no joke. There was a philosophical basis to it all, founded in the work of John Cage, who had declared that there was “no room for the policeman in art.” The Scratch Orchestra had profoundly humanist objectives concerning music as process rather than product, and with them came a sociopolitical agenda: initially a broad and fairly friendly swipe at cultural elitism but fossilizing into a hard-line Marxist-Leninist debate that hijacked the whole venture and brought it to a messy end.

But before it died, the Scratch Orchestra spawned a 1970s offspring in the Portsmouth Sinfonia, which involved some of the same personnel, including Mr. Nyman and Mr. Eno. Again there was an underlying philosophy; and it was eulogized in serious terms, not least by Mr. Nyman, who played the cello in shambolic performances of Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” and compared the results to Charles Ives. “The combination of everybody’s individual errors,” Mr. Nyman wrote, “built a musical structure that was incomparable.”

Mr. Eno, who played clarinet in the Sinfonia and produced its early recordings, similarly declared that what you heard in its performances was “a number of approximations of how the piece should be played,” and that they collectively amounted to beautiful music.

But for most of its audience — which was considerable, thanks to discs like “Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays the Popular Classics” and concerts in places the size of the Albert Hall — the joys of the Sinfonia were less elevated. Enthusiasts cherished the sagging intonation, the dubious conductors (one of whom managed unintentionally to conduct the “Blue Danube” waltz in 4/4) and such priceless occasions as when the soloist in Tchaikovsky’s B-flat minor Piano Concerto failed to turn up, and the orchestra played it without her, transposed down to A minor because, as a spokesman explained, “sharps and flats tend to unnerve us.”

Perhaps the height of the Sinfonia’s acclaim came when it was threatened with an injunction by the publishers of Richard Strauss on the ground that its performances of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” were rearranged without permission. The case never reached court, to the chagrin of the Sinfonia’s manager, who replied that the music had not been rearranged: “It’s just that we don’t play it very well.”

That is exactly the kind of response one could imagine coming from Alexander McCall Smith, were any publisher foolish enough to take a similar line with the Really Terrible Orchestra. There is an undeniable, and entirely mischievous, vagueness about its objectives, and it falls in line with the unclear intentions behind so much of the bad art of history. To what extent were the perpetrators in on their own joke? And to what extent was their badness deliberate?

William McGonagall is generally thought to have had genuine belief in his own worth as a poet; Florence Foster Jenkins, likewise as a singer. They weren’t trying to be awful. How much, you might fairly ask, is the Really Terrible Orchestra trying to stink?

“Not at all,” Peter Stevenson insisted, sounding slightly hurt when I asked to attend an orchestra rehearsal if it had such things.

“It’s unkind of you to think we don’t rehearse,” he said, “because we do. And some of us even take lessons, as I am at the moment, from a serious teacher. I can’t pretend that no one ever plays deliberately badly. It’s usually the trumpets, and they make me angry when they do. But for the rest of us, we are actually doing our best. And that’s the tension in which we operate. On the one hand, we’d like to get better. On the other, we know we won’t.”

Locked in this quandary the Really Terrible Orchestra has otherwise progressed from strength to strength. It made what Mr. McCall Smith called its “first world tour” to Pittenweem in Fife. “We went down terribly well in the village hall,” he added, “playing to an audience of fishermen who got a free glass of wine — well, several glasses actually — for coming. Gave us a marvelous reception.”

The second world tour is due to hit London in November. “I fear they’ve heard of us down there,” Mr. McCall Smith said, slightly concerned that they might also have heard a pernicious rumor that, thanks to persistent practice, the orchestra was less bad than it used to be.

“It’s not true,” he insisted, “and I don’t see how it could be. We’re only too happy for people to practice. I do myself, but it will never make a difference. No one good is ever going to join us. And if they did, they’d be hugely outnumbered. Children would raise the standard, but we don’t let them in for that reason. It would be too embarrassing. And though people say we have ambitions, what is ambition? When a piece speeds up, it’s ambitious enough for me.”'