Extradition Presents: Philip Corner Film + Muzik

A special event featuring the West Coast premiere of the new film Piano Aktivitys as a Disciplind Destruktshun (a piano work’t), documenting the 60th anniversary performance of composer Philip Corner’s notorious piece “Piano Activities." The event will also include a Q&A with the filmmakers and live performances by Extradition.

If you were to google Philip Corner, the first hits you’d get (and many of the hits that follow) would concern “Piano Activities,” a 1962 score that asks performers to “pluck,” “tap,” “scratch or rub,” “drop objects” on, “act on strings” of, “strike soundboard, pins, lid,” “drag various kinds of objects across,” and “act in any way on underside of” a piano. The intention was to liberate the piano from its history and allow all its other possible sounds and energies to emerge. From that humble beginning, the piece created an international scandal on September 1, 1962, when it was performed at the inaugural Fluxus Festival in Wiesbaden, Germany. During that performance, an all-star Fluxus group that included George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, Emmett Williams, Ben Patterson, Dick Higgins, and Alison Knowles took the score’s instructions to their most extreme interpretation, using saws, hammers, and other tools to completely destroy the piano on which they were performing. When it was over, they auctioned its pieces off to the audience.

Corner, who was not in attendance, was initially unhappy. “The first time I heard about [the Weisbaden performance] I was a little shocked, a little bit ‘oh yeah what kind of crap?’ But I was wrong. . . . In order to destroy they must have done it in the way that I had conceived it.”

In 2012, Corner presented “Piano Activities” again in Wiesbaden during a concert celebrating the 50th anniversary of that first Fluxus festival, taking care to use a piano at the very end of its usable life. Then, in 2022, he introduced (by video link) the 60th anniversary performance captured in this film. That performance used a revised version of the score titled “Piano Aktivitys as a Disciplind Destruktshun (a piano work’t)” (2022), which emphasizes both the “work” aspect of the performance and the transformation of an end-of-life piano into a collection of new art objects.

For the first half of this event, Extradition will perform four additional Corner works:

> Philip Corner - Reverence Your Instrument / One Note Once (2025)

> Philip Corner - Music Art Ideal (2021)

> Philip Corner - Just Another 12-Tone Piece (1975)

> Dick Higgins & Philip Corner - The Thousand Symphonies, No. 177 (1968/2003)

Performers to be announced.

Friday, Sept 12 @ Leaven Community, 5431 NE 20th Ave, Portland, OR

Doors 7pm, music 7:30pm

More information: https://extraditionpdx.com/calendar