Missouri Classical Music News and Notes

People who listen to contemporary classical music don't expect to like everything, or even to understand it. They often merely endure it, and remind themselves that Wagner and Beethoven were considered far out in their day too. Just how much a listener will unquestioningly endure was acknowledged last week by the British Broadcasting Corporation. On its highbrow Third Program, it recently broadcast a musical "composition"' consisting of twelve minutes of random noise —and received no complaints.

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 Telegraph: "Wholly unrewarding."

The 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 . . . Composer Zak's cacophonous creation lasted twelve minutes and left the London Times complaining desperately . . . Zak's Mobile proved to be the handi work of two pranksters who banged away haphazardly at "all the instruments we could find" in an effort to discover just how much the public would endure.