Musical Chairs

People who listen to contemporary classical music don't expect to like everything, or even to understand it. They often merely endure it, and remind themselves that Wagner and Beethoven were considered far out in their day too. Just how much a listener will unquestioningly endure was acknowledged last week by the British Broadcasting Corporation. On its highbrow Third Program, it recently broadcast a musical "composition"' consisting of twelve minutes of random noise —and received no complaints.

Called Mobile for Tape and Percussion, the thing was identified to the audience as the work of one Piotr Zak, a young avant-garde Pole considered "one of the most controversial figures in contemporary music." Zak's "work" was a dreadful cacophony punctuated by rattles, bangs and random blows on a xylophone. Next morning the music critics passed learned if mystified judgment. Wrote the London Times: "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." Agreed the Daily Telegraph: "Wholly unrewarding."

Last week the BBC admitted the program was a deceit. Composer Zak turned out to be the head of the BBC's chamber music department, Hans Keller, and accomplice Pianist Susan Bradshaw. They got the idea, they said, as they "were listening to the faintly melodious sounds produced by the moving of chairs." Said Miss Bradshaw: "We dragged together all the instruments we could find and went around the studio banging them.'' She was pleased with the results. "It was a serious hoax," she said. "That fake music can be indistinguishable from the genuine is a reflection on certain trends in present-day composition."