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.

In reality, Keller and Bradshaw made random noises in a BBC studio full of percussion instruments.

The hoax was revealed a couple months later in a discussion program with Keller and some music critics, to considerable kerfluffle, and news making in to the USA with articles in Time magazine 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 Stockhausen 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.

- Introduction by the announcer from the broadcast

A 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!

“Karlheinz Stockhausen‘s ‘No 9 Zyklus’ for one percussionist with obligatory imagination is now to hand (Universal 25s). The score occupies a unique position in the development of music….never before, to our knowledge, has a work itself influenced a work it was influenced by; and it is that very relation that obtains between Stockhausen’s Cycle and my own Mobile…”

In a 11 December 2015 blog post blog from the music collections at the Cambridge University Library and Pendlebury Library of Music (which holds Hans Keller's papers), they claimed they had received an email from Zak's granddaughter Zofia Zak:

Dear SW (if I may be so informal),

I have re-read recently my grandfather’s ground-breaking article in Musical Times on his hero Stockhausen’s work Zyklus which puts forward the extraordinary concept of a work influencing a work it was influenced by… I have always felt the Mobile would play a transcendental role such as this, that it would become a touchstone for realism and the re-assertion amongst contemporary composers of their innate, inborn gift for “thinking music not thinking about music” (I have put that in quotation marks as I am sure I have seen or heard it before somewhere). I am proud that my grandfather was able to play such a, pivotal, thought-provoking role.

With kind regards, Zofia Zak”

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