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Milan Knizak the musican.

Article Excerpt
Until recently only a small circle of the Czech public had much idea of the musical . activities of Milan Knizak, best known as controversial artist, bombastic personality and director of the National Gallery. Despite the large number of copies issued, his only double album ever to be released in Czechoslovakia passed without much notice at the beginning of the 1 1990s. Otherwise until recently his musical side was represented only in Petr Kofron and Martin Smolka's book "Graficke partitury a koncepty" [Graphic Scores and Concepts"] and on the attached CD produced by Agon. At the end of last year and beginning of this spring, however, the Anne Records company at last took on the task of releasing another album that had waited for ten years--Navrhuju krysy [I Propose Rats], and the recordings by the legendary group Aktual, previously only circulated in samizdat versions. The music that has earned Knizak some reputation (and recordings) abroad, i.e. his "destroyed music" still has to be ordered abroad.

Obviously the needles were destroyed...

Destroyed music was something Knizak started to work on as early as 1963-4 He acquired a gramophone and collection of records and experimented by playing them speeded up or slowed down, and later dam-aging them by burning them, gluing layers on, putting together bits of different records, scratching and so on, He first presented this kind of music as the 2nd Manifestation of Topical Art in 965, and has been giving occasional concerts with a set of gramophones and synthesizers ever since. But Knizak was not to be satisfied with the mere playing of destroyed records, and he immediately set off from this starting line in three directions, which he combines in every possible way.

First, he regards a vinyl record treated in this way as a certain kind of musical notation in itself. The short text Destruovana hudba [Destroyed Music] (in. Novy raj) ends with the words, "Although music created by playing destroyed gramophone records cannot be transcribed into notes or another language (or only with great difficulty), the records themselves can be considered to be notation"

Second, Knizak decided to treat traditional scores in the same way as the records. By striking out or adding notes, signatures and other signs, changing the order of bars or directly collaging different pages of notation, he produced a "more exact" equivalent of his work with the records. Why more exact? Because there is always inevitably and element of chance in the work with records, while in work with written (printed) scores all the consequences of changing the score can be identified, One example of this kind of work was Fantasia "by a collective of composers", i.e, W.A. Mozart, F. Suppe, H. Lemoine, V. Polivka, M. Knizak, or Ouartet + Piano.

Third, the records have a visual, decorative aspect. At the end of the 1970s Knizak was indirectly inspired by Gino di Maggio to work on the records as art objects as well as musical products -- art objects in which the music is only present "latently". Examples included Knizak's Lenin installation at the Venice Biennial in 1990 or on the wall of the Prague Rudolfinum at the exhibition Hnizda her [Nest of Games]. All the jackets of the books and recordings on which the destroyed records are depicted fail into the same category, for instance the jackets for the albums Broken Music and The Ceremony of Burning Mind (part of the run was issued with an inserted record drilled with holes and inscribed with the words Kill Yourself And Fly")

In 1991 Knizak produced a series of scores combining all three approaches. Records (and bits of compact disks) were inserted directly into scores between the note signs (Quasi trillo), and fragments of the scores were glued onto paper with the instruction "use any order" (Spiced symphony) and suchlike. This is already purely conceptual territory, since the gluing of the record fragments onto a surface makes them impossible to play (the broken up CD was likewise unplayable) but these pieces were nonetheless a pregnant summary of what Knizak called destroyed music.

One of the aims of this article is to offer at least a partial account of Knizak's discography It is impossible to give a complete list since examples of the destroyed music are often undisclosed and in the hands of foreign galleries which...