Word: zak
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...confusion onstage was loudly reminiscent of a 1961 broadcast during which the BBC startled England with a perform ance of Mobile for Tape and Percussion, identified as the work of young, avant-garde Polish Composer Piotr Zak (TIME, Aug. n). Composer Zak's cacophonous creation lasted twelve minutes and left the London Times complaining desperately: "It was certainly difficult to grasp more than the music's broad outlines, partly be cause of the high proportion of unpitched sounds and partly because of their extreme diversity." Zak's Mobile proved to be the handi work of two pranksters...
Composer Cage, a real person as Zak was not, works in much the same way. Before Music Walk began, he had no idea how it would sound, had determined only that it would last ten minutes, involve certain props and three performers doing more or less as they pleased. It was a prime sample of what students of the avant-garde call "indeterminate" music, i.e., music that is based on almost pure chance...
Called Mobile for Tape and Percussion, the thing was identified to the audience as the work of one Piotr Zak, a young avant-garde Pole considered "one of the most controversial figures in contemporary music." Zak's "work" was a dreadful cacophony punctuated by rattles, bangs and random blows on a xylophone. Next morning the music critics passed learned if mystified judgment. Wrote the London Times: "It was certainly difficult to grasp more than the music's broad outlines, partly because of the high proportion of unpitched sounds and partly because of their extreme diversity." Agreed the Daily...
Last week the BBC admitted the program was a deceit. Composer Zak turned out to be the head of the BBC's chamber music department, Hans Keller, and accomplice Pianist Susan Bradshaw. They got the idea, they said, as they "were listening to the faintly melodious sounds produced by the moving of chairs." Said Miss Bradshaw: "We dragged together all the instruments we could find and went around the studio banging them.'' She was pleased with the results. "It was a serious hoax," she said. "That fake music can be indistinguishable from the genuine is a reflection...
...little girls. But the modern imagination bursts out in all directions. Isamu Noguchi's Double Bird, seen against a deep green hedge, looks like a piece of exotic calligraphy done in white marble. David Smith has produced a Hudson River Landscape of delicate bronze, while Theodore Ros-zak's bristling sculptures seem to spring from the ground like wild and angry plants. As in all shows, art sometimes seems far removed from nature at the Old Westbury Gardens, but seldom has the one so complemented the other...