| telephone concert: april 15, 1983. -- artpool, budapest / blix, vienna / aufbau-abbau, berlin |
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Music played into the telephone is TELEPHONE MUSIC because, no matter how rich and wonderful the music is when it goes into the telephone, when it emerges a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand kilometers away it will be telephone sound. The narrow band of frequencies available in the telephone (the price of its cheapness and universal availability) means that everything that goes into the telephone comes out as telephone sound. In a concert of TELEPHONE MUSIC the instrument is the telephone itself.
TELEPHONE MUSIC was an attempt to use the telephone (as the most universally available electronic communications medium) to create a common space for artists across the ideological barriers that divided Central Europe at the time - between "western" Vienna, divided Berlin and "eastern" Budapest. At the ÖKS in Vienna, Artpool in Budapest and Aufbau/Abbau in Berlin, the telephone was simply connected to an amplifier so that sound and music performances by artists could be played to each other for a couple of hours. The telephone budget was provided by the ÖKS in Vienna so Berlin and Budapest were called from Vienna and each performed for about 20 minutes. The sound was received in Vienna and relayed over a second line to the third partner. The Vienna performance was played over 2 lines direct to the other 2 locations. The final part of the concert was a 3-way jam session as a kind of improvised telephone conference patched together by Karl Kubacek in Vienna. |
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