Piotr Zak

Avant-garde composer from a June 5, 1961 episode of the BBC radio show on classical music, Third Programme. They played Zak's Mobile for Tape and Percussion; Zak was a hoax perpetrated by BBC employees Hans Keller (a music theorist and writer) and Susan Bradshaw (a classical pianist), as a criticism of then-current trends in avant-garde music by Stockhausen and John Cage.

The hoax was revealed a couple months later in a discussion program with Keller and some music critics, with news making Timemagazine and Variety.

Part one of the programme ends with the first performance in this country of a work by Piotr Zak entitled Mobile for Tape and Percussion. The two percussion players are Claude Tessier and Anton Schmidt, who has provided the following note: Piotr Zak, who is of Polish extraction but lives in Germany, was born in 1939. His earliest works are conservative, but he's recently come under the influence of [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlheinz_StockhausenStockhausen] and John Cage. This work for tape and percussion was written between May and September of last year. Within the precise and complex framework defined by the score, there is considerable room for improvisation.

So as a post script, in the July 1962 issue of the prestigious The Musical Times, there was an article titled “Zak on Stockhausen” written by ZAK! And Zak says that he was influenced by Stockhausen, while simultaneously Stockhausen was influenced by Zak with the same piece.

External Links

• https://musicb3.wordpress.com/2015/12/11/zaks-mobile-is-the-rest-noise/
• https://archive.org/details/time-1961-05-19/Time%201961-08-11/page/52/mode/2up?q=%22piotr+zak%22&view=theater
• https://musicb3.wordpress.com/2013/09/13/hans-keller-piotr-zak-and-the-bbc/
• https://modernismmodernity.org/articles/keller-duchamp
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/949096?seq=1