Marcel Duchamp - Musical Erratum + In Conversation

This 74 minute album offers four spoken word extracts by Marcel Duchamp (in the English language), including The Creative Act, a fascinating lecture delivered in Houston in 1957, as well as a lengthy interview recorded in 1959.

The remainder of the album explores Duchamp's unique musical experiments. Devised in 1913, the Musical Erratum for piano forms part of the sequence of notes and projects which led to his celebrated artwork, La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Batchelors, Even. Abstract, elusive and even "unachievable" according to the artist himself, the Musical Erratum in fact consists of two scores. In the first, notes are replaced by numbered keys, with virtuoso performance is discouraged in favour of novel mechanical instrumentation.

The second offers a form of chance composition, by which numbered balls are dropped into the moving wagons of a toy train. Two versions are included here: a conventional (non-virtuoso) performance on piano, and one on which spinning rotary discs brush the piano strings to produce extraordinary tones.

CD tracklist:

1. Musical Erratum (La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même)/ prepared piano
2. The Creative Act
3. A L'Infinitif
4. Interview 1
5. Interview 2
6. Musical Erratum (La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même)/ piano