[silence] Petr Kotik performs in Buenos Aires at Fundacion Proa

[S.E.M. Ensemble]

            In conjunction with the Marcel Duchamp Exhibition: una obra que
no es una obra ³de arte² at the Fundacion Proa in Buenos Aires, Petr Kotik
will perform two concerts.

           Petr Kotik will introduce and perform, together with an ensemble
of musicians from Buenos Aires headed by the soprano Sylvie Roberts, works
by Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and Edgar Varese.

           The performances will be part of the Ciclo de Conciertos de
Musica Contemporanea Festival directed by Martin Bauer.
            
            When:                        November 27th and 28th
                                               7:30 pm

            Where:                       Fundacion Proa Auditorium
                                               1929 Avenida Pedro de Mendoza
                   
            For more information visit www.semensemble.org OR
http://www.proa.org/exhibiciones/futura/pagina1.html
                   


Everything is clear in hindsight, but when events take place it is usually a
big mystery about why and how one got from one point to the next. Kundera
says it very eloquently:

>> Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge the past, he sees no
>> fog. From his present, which was then the faraway future, the path looks
>> perfectly clear, good visibility all the way. Looking back, one sees the path
>> and the people both succeeding and making grave mistakes. One sees that but
>> not the fog. Yet, everyone was walking in this fog and one wonders, who is
>> more blind ­ those who surrounded by fog, failed to see their path clearly,
>> or those who judge the past and do not see the fog that enveloped everyone. -
>> Milan Kundera, 1995
>> 
Kundera is referring here to politics and history, but the same could be
said about art. Why did American and European music, after the Second World
War, take such different paths? This question will probably never be
answered with certainty. But what is certain, among other things, is the
presence of Marcel Duchamp and Edgar Varese, two refugees from Europe, who
had undoubtedly major influence on artists in the U.S.
Duchamp¹s influence on music has been marginal, if any. In fact, we can only
connect Duchamp with Cage. But it is not inconceivable that in the ³fog,² as
Kundera states, Cage¹s encounter with Duchamp made an important mark.
Namely, Duchamp was the first to understand the importance of chance, not
for chance itself, but as a strategy to get rid of personal taste. To remove
ones taste and desires from the work (obviously one cannot remove oneself,
as one cannot jump out of ones own skin), for that, the chance operation
procedure lends itself as a perfect strategy and this was the reason for
Cage to embrace it in the early 1950s. I am not suggesting that Cage was
following Duchamp in discovering chance as a compositional method as
Duchamp¹s experiments forty years earlier were not known at all. But
Duchamp¹s contribution into the intellectual and esthetic discourse emanated
certain ideas that supported such a direction. The example of Edgar Varese
was another ³guiding light in the fog,² while European music continued in
path started by Anton Wbern, American music followed a diametrically
different approach in the example of Varese. While European New Music, after
1950, fell for a completely rational, analytical to the last note, and
dynamics method. American music in the works of Cage, Feldman, Wolff, etc.
relied on intuition, instinct, and the refusal of analysis. Would all this
happen without Duchamp or Varese? It may not, or at least the path would
have been much more cumbersome. They both offered some clarity in the fog of
reality.


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