In this article, music critic and pianist Frede Schandorf reviews a 1961 Danish television broadcast of a performance by John Cage and David Tudor. It reproduces notations by Sylvano Bussotti (No. 4 of Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (Zyklus). The substance of the review is a conservative rejection of noise and chance and links the avant-garde to its military strategy whose enemy is the audience. With an Artaudian flair, Schandorf hears in Cage and Tudor’s music “screams of anguish from a barren future land” (angstskrig fra et goldt fremtidsland). The second half of the review is more charitable and credits the avant-garde with a reasonable historical claim to be a developmental outgrowth of a long history of experimentation and noise in Western concert music.
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| Title | “Musikken der fik TV-Seerne til at Storme Radiohuset: Er den gale musik kun skruptosset?,” Politiken, 13 |
| Date | 30 July 1961 |
| Type | press clipping |
| Location | Getty Research Institute, David Tudor Papers, 980039, box 63, folder 3 |
Cite
“Musikken der fik TV-Seerne til at Storme Radiohuset:
Er den gale musik kun skruptosset?,”
Politiken, 13, 30 July 1961. Getty Research
Institute, David Tudor Papers, 980039, box 63, folder
3. In
The Scores Project: Experimental Notation in Music,
Art, Poetry, and Dance, 1950–1975, ed. Michael Gallope, Natilee Harren, and John
Hicks. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2025.
https://
