BY SAM GILLIES
There’s some amazing music out there, much of which you’ll find the opportunity to experience at least once in your life (if you look hard enough). But surprisingly, not every piece of music is that accessible. To honour these unfortunately unpopular works, we present to you four compositions that you will never get to see performed live, no matter how hard you try.
4. Ay-O: Rainbow No. 1 for Orchestra
Fluxus was a radical anti-art movement from the ’60’s that sought to purge the world of dead, abstract and artificial art by radically redefining the parameters and scope of what art could be, primarily through the medium of performance art and Yoko Ono. Fluxus worked primarily with ‘event scores’ – brief verbal notations designed to draw attention to a particular sound or occurrence, or present a particular action or event for performance. But they also had some interesting musical works as well, in particular, Ay-O’s work Rainbow No. 1 for Orchestra. Charming, right? Well…kind of. The typical fluxus work consisted of an instruction and Rainbow No. 1 is no different:
Soap bubbles are to be blown out of various wind instruments. The conductor breaks the bubbles with his baton.
Ay-O is trying to suggest a sonic event, while adding a touch of absurdity to the tradition of an orchestral performance. He even wrote a variation on the work, wherein the conductor is called upon to trade in his baton for a samurai sword. The hardest part about performing this work has got to be finding performers willing to combine very expensive instruments with soapy water. A quick survey of instrumentalists I know resulted in no-one willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of their instrument at the alter of fluxus, and I daresay this behaviour is representative of performers worldwide. So, until performers loosen up a bit, we’re all just going to have to imagine what this would sound like.
3. John Cage: ASLSP
You probably could have guessed that a Cage work would end up on this list. You probably would have thought it was going to be 4’33”, Cage’s notorious ‘silent’ work. But we all know that the whole point of4’33” is to question the idea of silence itself, and regardless of the content it, remains a work that you can experience the entirety of in a single sitting. Not so for ASLSP (As Slowly and Softly as Possible), a collection of eight pieces for solo piano with the direction to perform the work as slowly as possible. How slowly? Cage didn’t say, but given his fondness for conceptualisation over performance practice I’d hazard a guess to say that whatever you think is the right tempo you should probably play it slower. Concert performances have ranged from 20 to 70 minutes, but really that’s a bit of a cop out. A performance in St Burchardi churck, in the German city of Halberstadt, has got the right idea. They adjusted the tempi to account for the average lifespan of the organ the work was to be performed on, resulting in a projected 639-year performance. The downside is that, best case scenario you’re only ever going to be able to hear about a sixth of the work over the course of your entire life.
2. Gyorgy Ligeti: Poeme Symphonic for 100 Metronomes
The instructions are simple: this piece requires ten ‘performers’, each responsible for ten of the 100 metronomes. The metronomes are set up on the performance platform, and they are all then wound to their maximum extent and set to different speeds. Once they are all fully wound, there is a silence of two to six minutes, at the discretion of the conductor, then at the conductor’s signal they are all started as simultaneously as possible. The performers then leave the stage. As the metronomes wind down one after another and stop, periodicity becomes noticeable in the sound, and individual metronomes can be more clearly distinguished. The piece typically ends with just one metronome ticking alone for a few beats, followed by silence, and then the performers return to the stage.
For the record, that’s just a brief excerpt. The real score is much longer. I know what you’re thinking: “sure, it’d be a pain to get 100 metronomes in the same room, but I know lots of musicians and I could totally organise a performance of this piece!” Ok, that’s great. Lets settle for one metronome for now. Go grab your metronome. Go it? Cool. Now look at it. Now tell me, is it your phone? That’s what I thought. See the whole work kind of hinges on the wind down nature of old school metronomes – the kind that were prevalent in the ’60s but with the invention of the digital metronome via App Store (its free!) or even electronic metronomes (they’re cheap!) have been rendered obsolete. Unfortunately, Poeme Symphonic relies on the slow winding down act as an exaggerated slowing down of pulse and rhythm, something that electronic metronomes cannot do. This is completely understandable, a metronome’s job is to keep perfect time, not necessarily to be used in intricately detailed conceptual sound mass compositions. But ultimately it also means that it is unlikely we will ever get to see this piece performed anytime soon.
1. Dirk Higgins: Danger Music Number Nine (For Nam June Paik)
Some readers might be familiar with Nam June Paik’s most well known work Danger Music For Dirk Higgins, which is simply the instruction “Creep into he VAGINA of a living WHALE”. While this work is work is often dismissed as an immature joke, it actually fits into a larger category of conceptual art works refer to as Danger Music. Danger Music was largely conceived of by Dirk Higgins and found a following amongst some Fluxus artists in the ’60’s, as it fitted in perfectly with the highly conceptual exploration of what is and could music be. The basic prerequisite for Danger Music is that the work must engage with some element of danger, either putting the audience or the performer in a life threatening situation, or utilising elements that are usually reserved for dangerous situations. Higgins’ Danger Music Number Seventeen is the rare example of a piece of danger music that can actually be performed. The instructions are simple:
Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream!
Apparently it was a favourite of his to perform at parties. It looks kind of silly of paper, but if you actually go to the trouble of being involved in a performance – typically enacted without any fanfare or typical framing of the work as a performance – the work really captures an element of fear. Screaming is associated with something horrible, a primal reaction to an unknown threat. This is why the final two sentences of Kenneth Cook’s Play Little Victims has the power to unsettle to this very day (yeah, enjoy that reference, fans of out-of-print Australian authors!).
From all the social inappropriateness, it’s still a work that can be performed and listened to, which is where Danger Music Number Nine (For Nam June Paik) comes in and my earlier rambing thought makes sense. Nam June Paik’s Danger Music for Dirk Higgins was actual a response to Danger Music Number Nine, wherein Higgins instructs the performer to:
Volunteer to have your spine removed
That Nam June Paik was able to continue living speaks to the impracticality of performing this work outside of Wolf Creek.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.
