Wrote this well over a decade ago, as a text message to Harvey John Brown, the notorious violinist! lol
“It is difficult, now, to understand the controversies that so beset initial performances of the founding works of Unheardism. From the infamous Boulez episode, through to the street protests, the ‘Bring Back Music’ marches, the reactionary critiques. With the decline of such partisan dramatics, a more balanced and measured judgment has come into play, from which, the advances that have been made can be more securely estimated.
This is not to say that there is a soporific unanimity attendant upon the movement, there are differences, often heated, even amongst the leading proponents of the movement. But the fundamental tenets of the “Revolution of Forgotten Silences” (Schmidt:HRFS, pp.i-vii) are accepted by all, even the soundees, or ‘musicians’, as they like to call themselves.
We are fortunate today to have the founder of the tradition with us, prior to the inaugural performance of his latest work, and he has kindly agreed to a few words with us before introducing the work.
The piece is rather short compared to previous works, at two and a half hours long there have been speculations that he is crossing over into the more commercial realms of “Quiet” popularity. He strenuously denies this, and the difficult part writing in the third movement seems to add confirmation to such denials.
But what is truly revolutionary about the work is the option for the audience to play Bach and Al Di Meola on their m-players, throughout the performance. Some have called it genius. Though, there has been one dissenting voice. The radical Gustavio Zizzo. Although currently conducting a six month workshop in orbit around Saturn (“the hadrons are less noisy there”), he has surveyed the score and declared, unequivocally, “Reactive Dilettante!”, ironically echoing the precise words of the founder when asked about John Cage as a possible precursor.
AKs response: “Well, Gustavio is a virtuoso, and he has furthered my explorations of molecular noise reduction to an incredible degree, but he misses the point, I think.”
Gustavio cannot hear spoken responses at present, as his ears have been surgically removed, a practice he often indulges in to enable fine tuning.”