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Nam June Paik in Scandinavia, 1961

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Nam June Paik in Scandinavia, 1961 Action Music! – Nam June Paik in Scandinavia, 1961 Søren Møller Sørensen Abstract In the summer of 1961 Nam June Paik performed his Action Music in the three Scandinavian capitals Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen. These performances and the turmoil they triggered have attained an iconic status in the national music histo- riography of these countries. This essay surveys their reception. It offers a brief account of their treatment in Scandinavian music historiography and a more detailed analysis of the Danish reception. It argues that the fact that Paik’s performances were organised by Scandinavian contemporary music associations and thus institutionally framed as music had significant consequences for their reception. Paik’s perfor- mances can be viewed as a “stress test” that revealed valuable information about the mental state of a musical milieu in a decisive phase of modernisation and internationalisation. The German Connection In the summer of 1961 Nam June Paik was on tour in Scandinavia. He performed on 18 September at Liljevalchs Konsthall in Stockholm, on 27 September at Kunst- og Håndverksskolen in Oslo and on 30 September at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art near Copenhagen. The performances were entitled Action Music, and among the four programmed pieces by Paik himself1 at least two – Hommage à John Cage and Étude for Piano – have a documented perfor- mance record prior to their presentation in Scandinavia. Hommage à John Cage was premiered at Galerie 22 in Düsseldorf in 1959, and both of the pieces were performed at Atelier Mary Bauermeister in Köln in 1960 (Herzogenrath 1976: 18 and 44) in a series of presentations of primarily American avant-garde music, organised during the festival of the International Society of Contemporary Music (iscm) as an alternative to the European high-modernist bias of the festival’s official programme. The programme at Atelier Mary 1 From the correspondence between Paik and the Scandinavian iscm sections we know that Paik had promised “approximately” this programme: Lesemusik (Paik 1961); Hommage à John Cage (Paik 1959); Étude for pianoforte (Paik 1960); Komposition (La Monte Young 1960); Aus piano piece for David Tudor (Sylvano Bussotti); ATMAN ATMAN (Paik 1961a). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/97890043�0506_0�7 <UN> 260 Møller Sørensen Bauermeister also included the reading of the so-called Köllner Manifesto (Metzger 1980a), by the German critic and theorist Heinz-Klaus Metzger, who in the late 1950s had established himself as a central figure in the Darmstadt and Cologne circles, defending the most radical modernist and avant-garde tendencies on the basis of Adorno’s aesthetics but contrary to Adorno’s pre- dominantly negative attitude towards these tendencies (Metzger 1980b). Through the series of concerts and performances at Atelier Mary Baumeister, which targeted the contemporary-music audience of the official iscm festival and was soon to be known as the Cologne ‘contre festival’ (von Zahn 1992), Paik attained a certain, and to some extent rumour-based, fame (Berg and Jensen (eds.) 1961) in the European contemporary music milieu. This was part of the background for Paik’s performances in Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen. The connection with Scandinavia, however, was established through another of the leading modernist music institutions of the time. The tour was a result of the collaboration between the Scandinavian sections of the iscm, initiated by the Swedes, and contact with Paik was established through the young Swedish com- poser Jan W. Morthenson, who had met him at the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne. Paik was at this time introduced to the German contemporary music circles through studies at the conservatory in Freiburg (by Wolfgang Fortner) and participation in the Darmstadt summer school, where he met John Cage in 1958. But he was by no means an established name. A letter from the Swedish to the Danish and Norwegian iscm sections reveals that the young Paik was “very pleased with our interest. Jan Mortensson [sic], a member of the programme committee of Fylkingen [the iscm section], has met him in Cologne (Mortensson is twenty years old and very radical)” (Anonymous). From the same correspon- dence we know that the fee in Oslo and Copenhagen was 500 kroner. We also know that the organisers must have been well aware that more than a usual piano recital was to be expected. In the initial correspondence with the Swedish section of iscm Paik specifies the equipment he needs: two very bad pianos, three tape- recorders, two of them with remote control, two very powerful amplifiers with loudspeakers, a telephone, a medium-size blackboard with white chalk and a piece of cheap window glass. In a later letter to the Danish section Paik informs the organisers that he has decided on a change of programme, which calls for further props. Étude platonique would be replaced by ATMAN-ATMAN as “[t]his piece is better for me and for the audience. But unfortunately I have to ask you to arrange one more thing for me. I have to take a bath on the stage (nothing obscene, don’t worry, but very serious)” (Paik 1961b). But although the organisers knew that what was going to happen would not conform to traditional notions of music, the concrete framing of the performances as music had obvious and significant implications. The fact that Paik was part of <UN>.
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