Piotr (or Pjotr) Zak is the name of a fictional Polish composer whose alleged composition ''Mobile for Tape and Percussion'' was broadcast twice on the

BBC Third Programme The BBC Third Programme was a national radio station produced and broadcast from 1946 until 1967, when it was replaced by Radio 3. It first went on the air on 29 September 1946 and quickly became one of the leading cultural and intellectual f ...

on 5 June 1961 in a performance supposedly played by "Claude Tessier" and "Anton Schmidt". In fact, the composer and the performers were pseudonyms of BBC producers

Hans Keller Hans (Heinrich) Keller (11 March 19196 November 1985) was an Austrian-born British musician and writer, who made significant contributions to musicology and music criticism, as well as being a commentator on such disparate fields as psychoana ...

and

Susan Bradshaw Susan Bradshaw (Monmouth, 8 September 1931 – London, 30 January 2005) was a British pianist, teacher, writer, and composer. She was mainly associated with contemporary music, and especially with the work of Pierre Boulez, several of whose writi ...

, who concocted the deliberately unmusical percussive piece as a hoax. According to Bradshaw, "It was a serious hoax to set people thinking that fake music can be indistinguishable from the genuine." The success of the hoax, however, is open to question. While ''Mobile for Tape and Percussion'' was reviewed seriously by several critics, all of the reviews were roundly negative, with the piece being almost instantly identified as a "non-musical" studio prank.

History

Broadcast and critical reaction

The broadcast of the work was preceded by alleged biographical information about Zak in the form of a programme note supposedly written by Schmidt. The text read by the announcer (

Alvar Lidell Tord Alvar Quan Lidell MBE (11 September 1908 – 7 January 1981) was a BBC radio announcer and newsreader. During the Second World War his distinctive voice became synonymous with the reading of news. Early life Lidell was born in Wimbledo ...

) was as follows: :Piotr Zak, who is of Polish extraction but lives in Germany, was born in 1939. His earliest works are conservative, but he has recently come under the influence of

Stockhausen Karlheinz Stockhausen (; 22 August 1928 – 5 December 2007) was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is known for his groun ...

and

John Cage John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading fi ...

. 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. The work was reviewed by three critics, who gave unenthusiastic or outright condemnatory reactions.; ; Jeremy Noble's review in the ''

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'' stated "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". Noble deemed the broadcast a "lapse" on the part of the BBC, and wrote "such recognizably musical events as did occur seemed trivial". Further down the scale from Noble's overall pan (leavened with some extremely faint praise), the '' Daily Telegraph's''′ critic Donald Mitchell called the performance "wholly unrewarding", adding that Zak Rollo Myers, writing in the '' Listener'', was harsher still, accurately identifying the piece as a ''farce d'atelier'' (studio prank) with "no possible claim to be considered as music", and characterising the BBC's broadcast of such a thing "a serious error of judgment". Myers continued, He concluded with praise for the other works on the programme, by

Webern Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern (3 December 188315 September 1945), better known as Anton Webern (), was an Austrian composer and conductor whose music was among the most radical of its milieu in its sheer concision, even aphorism, and stead ...

, Nono, Petrassi, and "the always satisfying Serenade in B flat for thirteen wind instruments by Mozart—which may have been missed by the many listeners who, I am sure, switched off their sets for the repeat performance of the Zak".

Admission of hoax

Nearly two months after the event, a BBC spokesman denied that the work was a hoax, describing it instead as an "experiment", in which "the percussion instruments on the tape were played at random. I imagine that Piotr Zak does not exist. But we did not hoax the listeners. It was an experiment". A conflicting report published the next day claimed that the BBC confessed the entire programme had been a hoax. It was revealed that the piece had been produced by

and

at the BBC. By striking randomly and with deliberate senselessness at a collection of percussion instruments, the two (as "Tessier" and "Schmidt") had produced a strenuously meaningless twelve-minute "work" of superficially "

avant-garde The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or ' vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretical ...

" character; this was completed by the addition of a selection of human whistling sounds (evidently meant to represent the "tape"), and with the resulting chaos being edited into some kind of whole by BBC technicians. Revealing the true nature of the work was itself apparently part of the publicity for the BBC broadcast of a radio documentary, ''The Strange Case of Piotr Zak'', first aired on 13 August 1961, in which Keller discussed his hoax with music critics Jeremy Noble and Donald Mitchell. Both critics agreed that the manner of presentation required them to take the piece seriously, but, since they both had given it an unfavourable review, they could not be said to have been fully taken in by the hoax. In the months and years after the original broadcast, some tellings of the story indicated that Zak's work received favourable reviews from critics unable to distinguish random noise from genuine avant-garde music. However, in an October 1961 editorial in ''The Musical Times'', editor Andrew Porter noted of 'The Zak Affair' that while some reports indicated that "critics were taken in by it....Let it go on record that this was not the case." After discussing and quoting several contemporaneous reviews (and referencing the similar

Ern Malley The Ern Malley hoax, also called the Ern Malley affair, is Australia's most famous literary hoax. Its name derives from Ernest Lalor "Ern" Malley, a fictitious poet whose biography and body of work were created in one day in 1943 by conservativ ...

affair that caused controversy in modern poetry circles 16 years earlier), Porter wrote that "the critics showed clearly that they could distinguish between Zak and Stockhausen – whose ''

Zyklus ''Zyklus für einen Schlagzeuger'' (English: Cycle for a Percussionist) is a composition by Karlheinz Stockhausen, assigned Number 9 in the composer's catalog of works. It was composed in 1959 at the request of Wolfgang Steinecke as a test piece ...

'', 'bashed out' by an imported solo percussionist at an earlier BBC concert, ''was'' praised."

Zak as reviewer

Despite Porter's editorial, "Pjotr Zak" (whose first name had always been previously identified as "Piotr") wrote a piece for ''The Musical Times'' a few months later. Written in actuality by Keller, it appeared in the July 1962 issue. Zak's piece was a 700-word review of Stockhausen's score for ''Zyklus'', a work that had debuted in performance in 1959, but was not published as a score until 1962. Zak's review discussed the nature of the score, which allows for improvisation, while indicating that he could not answer the question of how the meaning of Stockhausen's score was "audibly different from (a) a completely free improvisation from the same performer, or indeed (b) an experiment of the kind my ''Mobile'' has immortalized." However, Zak went on to write that "nobody interested in the development of creative thought can allow himself to remain ignorant of Stockhausen's score." He also humorously suggested that while Stockhausen was unquestionably an influence on "Zak", Zak's ''Mobile'' may have been an influence on the published score for ''Zyklus''..."even though neither Stockhausen nor I may readily admit the fact".

Notes

References

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External links

* Wood, Hugh. 2005.
Susan Bradshaw: Pianist with a Passion for New Music and a Serious Sense of Humour
. ''The Guardian'' (Wednesday 16 February). Hugh Wood briefly describes the hoax in this obituary. {{DEFAULTSORT:Zak, Piotr Nonexistent people used in hoaxes Fictional composers Hoaxes in the United Kingdom Fictional Polish people 1960s hoaxes Musical hoaxes