Erratum Musical - 7 Variations on a Draw of 88 Notes

tirage 63-78 - sec - 3:31
tirage 63-78 - sustain - 5:16
tirage 63-78 - UC+sustain - 7:49
tirage 63-78 - très lent, fort - 3:34
tirage 78-63>63-78 - envers-endroit - 8:39
tirage 78-63 - détaché - 3:15
tirage 78-63 - détaché; pianissimo - 3:21

to listen to tirage 78-63 - détaché; pianissimo

performed by Stephane Ginsburgh on a Bösendorfer 200
Recorded at rue de Bordeaux 17, Brussels on the 8th of February 2001

Sub Rosa label

Erratum Musical, 1913 by Ya-Ling Chen

Reviews and descriptions (lot's of them, all in English... look's like France is not interested in its own genius)

Duchamp created a number of musical compositions, many purely conceptual. But when Stephane Ginsburgh recorded Duchamp's 1913 opus Erratum Musical a few years back, he took into account Duchamp's observation that 'pataphysics involved "canned chance" and ensured all the piece's 88 piano notes were picked out in a random order with no emphasis on any one in particular.
That Ubu that you do
By Mark Barnes
The Guardian (UK, 5/2008) - read the full article

The directions behind Marcel Duchamp's Erratum Musical are deceptively simple. Each note on a given keyboard is played only once, the order of the notes is determined by random draw, and there are no instructions for how the notes are to be played. A Dadaist joke? On the contrary, it yields intricate music and a primer for discussing how sound relates to emotion. In the first few minutes of this composition, each note is like the period at the end of the sentence--individual and straightforward. This succinct presentation lacks an emotional pull, as if pianist Stephane Ginsburgh is testing the keys rather than playing them. As Erratum Musical unfolds, however, the duration of the notes lengthens, introducing a fragile uneasiness. It continues with subtle manipulations of tempo and acoustic properties. Keys are struck with a feathery touch, making the notes quiver at the edge of emotional and audible perception--only to rush back to the foreground with a spiteful presence as Ginsburgh pounces on the keyboard with a seemingly smug resolution. Although the exponential possibilities of Duchamp's Erratum Musical invite chaos, Ginsburgh's performance exhibits a sublime, unified beauty, like that found in the random latticework of a snowflake.
Editorial Reviews
Michael Woodring
Amazon.com

Although Marcel Duchamp only wrote two pieces of music, it’s still surprising that there haven’t been more recordings of them. Like the rest of Duchamp’s oeuvre, the concepts involved are open-ended enough to produce scads of possible interpretations and recordings. Until this new CD, the only readily commercially available recordings of Duchamp’s music was the S.E.M. Ensemble’s wonderful Music by Marcel Duchamp (Edition Block and Paula Cooper Gallery, 1991). Happily, we now have another interpretation of Duchamp’s Erratum Musical, which is said to have been written around 1913 but didn’t make its official appearance until 1934, when it was included as part of his "Green Box" fine art edition. Although originally written as a vocal piece for his three sisters, on this magnificent recording pianist Stephane Ginsburgh has transcribed the work for solo piano.

Playing Duchamp’s music is like cooking a meal. Instead of a score, Duchamp provides you with a recipe, which, in this case, is simple enough. First gather and prepare the ingredients: take 88 cards with numbers scrawled on them (for each key of the piano) and throw them into a vase, then pull ’em out at random to create a composition consisting of exactly 88 notes, with the stipulation that no note can be played twice, but all 88 notes must be played. Duchamp also allows no rhythm whatsoever: no fast parts, no slow parts; rather, the notes should be spaced at an even distances from the others. What’s left up to the player is the tempo: as long as you follow all the other rules, you can play it as slowly or as quickly as you wish. On this disc, Ginsburgh has created seven unique "Erratum" variations for solo piano based on the rhythms of an average day. He began by drawing the cards at 11 a.m. and proceeded to chronologically record the works over the course of the day, with every section mirroring the feeling of when it was recorded: things move quicker in the beginning of the day and stretch out by the evening.

It’s a surprisingly fresh listen and attains a simplicity that other composers jump through hoops to get at. But then most other composers are schooled musicians; Duchamp is not. And because he functions as an artist rather than a musician, he allows himself certain permissions that might seem outrageous in a concert-hall context.

Upon hearing Erratum Musical, comparisons to the sparseness of Scelsi or Feldman are inevitable. Notes hang in the air for what seems to be forever, followed by long silences before other eternal notes are floated. Cage used a similar process in his 1959 recording Indeterminacy, on which he forced himself to read stories of varying lengths in exactly one minute per story. Sometimes he has to cram his words to get them all in; in other instances, he stretches out each word to fill what seems to be an eternal minute. Listening to Indeterminacy, one can see how much Cage took from Duchamp. But the real eye-opener is Duchamp’s connection to Erik Satie. The spacious drift of the "Erratum" pieces resembles Satie’s "Furniture Music" and is best listened to as atmospherics. I never thought I’d consider Duchamp as a proto-ambient stylist, three-quarters of a century ahead of the trends.

The Duchamp industry is always hungry for new material; countless scholars are certain to pounce on this disc and squeeze every last analytical drop out of it. But you don’t need to know a thing about Duchamp to be able to appreciate the gorgeously resonant sounds that Ginsburgh squeezes out of his Bösendorfer on this crisply engineered recording. And that, in my book, constitutes Marcel Duchamp as one helluva composer.
Kenneth Goldsmith
New York Press

Other reviewers
Incursion Music Review
Supersphere

Dada exhibitions in Paris, Washington and New York
Centre Pompidou in Paris (October 5, 2005 - January 9, 2006)
National Gallery of Art in Washington (February 19 - May 14, 2006)
The Museum of Modern Art in New York (June 18 - September 11, 2006)

Marcel Duchamp's websites
Tout-fait
Marcel Duchamp World Community
La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même at the MoMa
The Treatment of Random Pitches in Frank Zappa’s 'Approximate' in relation with Duchamp en Feldman
Etant donné Marcel Duchamp