A special event screening the new film Piano Aktivitys as a Disciplind Destruktshun (a piano work’t), documenting the 60th anniversary performance of composer Philip Corner’s notorious piece “Piano Activities. The event will also include live performances by Extradition.
If you were to google Corner, the first hits you’d get (and many of the hits that follow) would concern “Piano Activities,” a 1962 score that asks performers to “pluck,” “tap,” “scratch or rub,” “drop objects” on, “act on strings” of, “strike soundboard, pins, lid,” “drag various kinds of objects across,” and “act in any way on underside of” a piano. The intention was to liberate the piano from its history and allow all its other possible sounds and energies to emerge.
Says Corner: “There is a quote from Nam June Paik—’The piano is bourgeois, it must be destroyed.’ I don’t believe that. I mean, I like the piano, I play the piano. . . . The first performance [of “Piano Activities”] was done in New York and . . . just basically you play on the inside of the piano, the other part of the piano with an object. . . . [You] want to guarantee a certain kind of workman-like attitude toward the music. You don’t go and play funny little things or da dada da da da, you know, you’re just not supposed to do things like that. But steady pulses, silence with a single tone. You know, stuff that has to do with the raw material, and that was my attitude: liberating the energy of the piano.”
“Piano Activities” created a scandal/sensation on September 1, 1962, when it was performed at the inaugural Fluxus Festival in Wiesbaden, Germany, by an all-star Fluxus group that included George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, Emmett Williams, Ben Patterson, Dick Higgins, and Alison Knowles. In that performance, the performers took the score’s instructions to their most extreme interpretation, using saws, hammers, and other tools to completely destroy the piano on which they were performing. When it was over, they auctioned its pieces off to the audience.
Corner, who was not in attendance, was unhappy on hearing the news, but later admitted the validity of the interpretation and took part in similar performances of the piece, taking care to use pianos at the very end of their usable lives.
“The first time I heard about [the Weisbaden performance] I was a little shocked, a little bit ‘oh yeah what kind of crap?’ But I was wrong. . . . In order to destroy they must have done it in the way that I had conceived it.”
In 2012, Corner presented “Piano Activities” again in Wiesbaden during a concert celebrating the 50th anniversary of that first Fluxus festival. Then, in 2022, he introduced (by video link) a 60th anniversary performance at the Fluxus in the Swamp festival in Gainesville, Florida, performed by Billie Maciunas (widow of George), Bibbe Hansen (daughter of Fluxus artist Al Hansen), Craig Coleman, Jade Dellinger, Benedicta Opoku-Mensah, Jack Massing, Sean Miller, Kyle Selley, and Dan Stepp. That piece used a revised version of the score titled “Piano Aktivitys as a Disciplind Destruktshun (a piano work’t)” (2022), which emphasizes both the “work” aspect of the performance and the transformation of the piano into a collection of new art objects. Video of this performance was later made into a documentary film by Sean Miller, Wes Kline, and Chad Serhal, who will present its West Coast premiere at Extradition as the second half of this event, following performances of four pieces by the Extradition Ensemble:
Philip Corner, Reverence Your Instrument / One Note Once (2025)
Philip Corner, Music Art Ideal (2021)
Philip Corner, Just Another 12-Tone Piece (1975)
Dick Higgins & Philip Corner, The Thousand Symphonies, No. 177 (1968/2003)
Performers to be announced. Program subject to change.