Product Code Database
Piotr (or Pjotr) Zak is the name of a fictional Polish composer whose alleged composition Mobile for Tape and Percussion was broadcast twice on the BBC Third Programme on 5 June 1961 in a performance supposedly played by "Claude Tessier" and "Anton Schmidt". In fact, the composer and the performers were pseudonyms of BBC producers Hans Keller and Susan Bradshaw, who concocted the deliberately unmusical percussive piece as a hoax. According to Bradshaw, "It was a serious hoax to set people thinking that fake music can be indistinguishable from the genuine." The success of the hoax, however, is open to question. While Mobile for Tape and Percussion was reviewed seriously by several critics, all of the reviews were roundly negative, with the piece being almost instantly identified as a "non-musical" studio prank.; ;
The work was reviewed by three critics,Mitchell 1961b. who gave unenthusiastic or outright condemnatory reactions.; ;
Jeremy Noble's review in the The Times stated "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". Noble deemed the broadcast a "lapse" on the part of the BBC, and wrote "such recognizably musical events as did occur seemed trivial".
Further down the scale from Noble's overall pan (leavened with some extremely faint praise), the Daily Telegraph's′ critic Donald Mitchell called the performance "wholly unrewarding", adding that Zak
Rollo Myers, writing in the Listener, was harsher still, accurately identifying the piece as a farce d'atelier (studio prank) with "no possible claim to be considered as music", and characterising the BBC's broadcast of such a thing "a serious error of judgment". Myers continued, He concluded with praise for the other works on the programme, by Anton Webern, Nono, Petrassi, and "the always satisfying Serenade in B flat for thirteen wind instruments by Mozart—which may have been missed by the many listeners who, I am sure, switched off their sets for the repeat performance of the Zak".
Revealing the true nature of the work was itself apparently part of the publicity for the BBC broadcast of a radio documentary, The Strange Case of Piotr Zak, first aired on 13 August 1961, in which Keller discussed his hoax with music critics Jeremy Noble and Donald Mitchell. Both critics agreed that the manner of presentation required them to take the piece seriously, but, since they both had given it an unfavourable review, they could not be said to have been fully taken in by the hoax.
In the months and years after the original broadcast, some tellings of the story indicated that Zak's work received favourable reviews from critics unable to distinguish random noise from genuine avant-garde music. However, in an October 1961 editorial in The Musical Times, editor Andrew Porter noted of 'The Zak Affair' that while some reports indicated that "critics were taken in by it....Let it go on record that this was not the case." After discussing and quoting several contemporaneous reviews (and referencing the similar Ern Malley affair that caused controversy in modern poetry circles 16 years earlier), Porter wrote that "the critics showed clearly that they could distinguish between Zak and Stockhausen – whose Zyklus, 'bashed out' by an imported solo percussionist at an earlier BBC concert, was praised."
Zak's review discussed the nature of the score, which allows for improvisation, while indicating that he could not answer the question of how the meaning of Stockhausen's score was "audibly different from (a) a completely free improvisation from the same performer, or indeed (b) an experiment of the kind my Mobile has immortalized." However, Zak went on to write that "nobody interested in the development of creative thought can allow himself to remain ignorant of Stockhausen's score." He also humorously suggested that while Stockhausen was unquestionably an influence on "Zak", Zak's Mobile may have been an influence on the published score for Zyklus..."even though neither Stockhausen nor I may readily admit the fact".
|
|
