Құбылмалы Пётр Зак ісі: 1961 жылғы әуе кешінің алаяқтығы

Fictional Polish composer

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 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 and Susan Bradshaw, 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.

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 Hans Keller and Susan Bradshaw 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" 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 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, 'bashed out' by an imported solo percussionist at an earlier BBC concert, was praised."

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".