Philip Corner: Film + Muzik
Schedule
Fri, 12 Sep, 2025 at 07:30 pm
UTC-07:00Location
Leaven Community | Portland, OR
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A special event featuring the West Coast premiere of "Piano Aktivitys as a Disciplind Destruktshun (a piano work’t)," a new film by Wes Kline, Sean Miller, and Chad Serhal 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, rub, drop objects on, act on the strings of, strike soundboard/pins/lid of, drag various kinds of objects across, and act in any way on underside of a piano. The intention was to liberate the instrument 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 Nam June Paik, George Maciunas, 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 2022 version of the score that emphasized 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): Matt Hannafin (reverence, bell)
> Philip Corner - Music Art Ideal (2021): Annie Gilbert (trombone), Ben Cohen-Chen (soprano sax), Juniana Lanning (piano), Gilly Hanner (guitar), Reed Wallsmith (alto sax), Loren Chasse (percussion), Matt Hannafin (percussion)
> Philip Corner - Just Another 12-Tone Piece (1975): Maxx Katz (flute), Collin Oldham (cello), Juniana Lanning (piano), Catherine Lee (oboe d'amore), Ben Cohen-Chen (tenor sax), Shao Way Wu (bass), Matt Hannafin (vibraphone)
> Dick Higgins & Philip Corner - The Thousand Symphonies, No. 177 (1968/2003): Catherine Lee (oboe d'amore), Shao Way Wu (bass), Annie Gilbert (trombone), Juniana Lanning (piano), Maxx Katz (flute), Gilly Hanner (electric guitar), Collin Oldham (cello), Reed Wallsmith (alto sax), Ben Cohen-Chen (tenor sax), Loren Chasse (percussion), Matt Hannafin (percussion)
Friday, Sept 12 @ Leaven Community, 5431 NE 20th Ave, Portland, OR
Doors 7pm, music 7:30pm
Tickets: https://buytickets.at/extraditionensemble/1743605
Information: https://extraditionpdx.com/calendar
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Where is it happening?
Leaven Community, 5431 NE 20th Ave, Portland, OR 97211-5509, United StatesEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
