"In 1920 Stefan Wolpe, a 18 year old student at the Berlin Hochschule fuer Musik, ogranized a performance of Beethhoven's Fifth Symphony using eight phonographs on a stage each playing the Symphony simultaneously but at a different speed.
Many years later he repeated the performance using two phonographs and spoke of "one of the early Dada obsessions, or interests, namely, the concept of unforeseeability":
Many years later he repeated the performance using two phonographs and spoke of "one of the early Dada obsessions, or interests, namely, the concept of unforeseeability":
That means that every moment events are so freshly invented, so newly born, that it has almost no history in the piece itself but its own actual presence. Wolpe's distortion can be heard as a attempt to re-create the experience of Beethoven's contemporaries when they first heard the Fifth, to conjure up a time when the work's course was still unforeseeable . " (from The FIrst Four Notes by Matthew Guerrieri, 2012) |