Marcel Duchamp was a key player in the international Dadaist circuit and one of the major thinkers in the arts in the early twentieth century.
Duchamp did not limit himself to just painting and/or sculpture, but created works that embodied elements of both; he also dipped into other disciplines as well: print media, literature, mass-produced artworks, motion pictures and, briefly, musical composition. For
Duchamp, the concepts behind his works were as important, if not more so, than the work itself, and in this respect he was easily 50 years ahead of his time. In a rich legacy that extends from the era of pre-modern impressionism to that of freaked out pop art and multimedia,
Duchamp's legacy provides a timeline of development that is both independent from, and parallel to, the arts of his age, even though he sought to avoid traveling in already established streams from about 1912.
Duchamp's work embodies such varied and self-contradictory concerns as deterministic chaos, optical phenomena, abandonment of "retinal art," found objects, Cartesian materialism, and a desire, in his words, to "invent a new causality," approaches considered un-artistic in his time but certainly part of the mainstream in the arts by the time he died in 1968.
LTM's Marcel Duchamp: La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, meme (The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even) takes its name not from The Large Glass (a famous painting on glass now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art) but from the appearance of this device on a limited-edition 1934 publication of
Duchamp's work called The Green Box. The front cover and color of the disc's cover box corresponds to this work, which included miniature versions of certain Readymades, a set of Rotoreliefs (purely visual phonograph records), and a number of texts and facsimiles. The Green Box includes two musical compositions, not included here, but among the various papers of working notes
Duchamp made in the preparation of The Large Glass is a manuscript titled "Musical Erratum: La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, meme." This is realized twice here in versions for two pianos, the first by Mats Persson and Kristine Scholz, the other by Tom Feldschuh.
Duchamp's piece is not so much a composition as a recipe for making one, though it is not a simple recipe, and the two realizations represented here are quite different. Musical Erratum: La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, meme is strikingly similar in process to the I Ching-inspired works that
John Cage created in the 1950s and 1960s, and even includes a number of composed silences.
The disc is roughly half music; the remaining half consists of recordings, in English, of various recorded talks and interviews
Duchamp conducted late in life. Some of these have been around before -- The Creative Act appeared on a flexi-disc included in an issue of Aspen Magazine in the 1960s -- though they are far from common and the interviews are highly revealing. They disclose that
Duchamp had a taste for prevarication -- he liked to string along his interviewers with ideas that were provocative for their own sake and didn't want the truth to get in the way of a good story. Naturally, LTM's Marcel Duchamp: La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, meme would be a pre-requisite for anyone wanting to get in touch with the work of
Duchamp; however, it is also a highly enjoyable recording in itself, even if it is not an item one would return to every day.