The British alternative music magazine The Wire has included the sound recording George Maciunas. Musical Scoring Systems, released by Music Information Centre Lithuania, in its TOP 10 CD list. In The Wire’s last issue of the year the Lithuanian sound recording appears in the Modern Composition category amongst the TOP 10 download, streaming, vinyl and CD lists. The initiator of this CD is Anton Lukoszevieze, a British musician and artist of Lithuanian descent. He and his ensemble Apartment House recorded eight experimental compositions by George Maciunas (Jurgis Mačiūnas) specially for this CD.

The independent magazine The Wire, published in London from 1982, suddenly emerged from being a quarterly avant-garde jazz and New Music fanzine to become the most influential international magazine of experimental, alternative and modern music, subscribed to by readers in more than 40 countries. The Wire asserts that in waging war every day against ‘the mundane and the mediocre’ it collaborates with more than 60 freelance writers, stationed at points across the globe. One of those writers is Julian Cowley who reviews both literature and music, who himself in the 1970s actively practiced improvisational music, and in the 1980s worked with the British avant-garde poet and critic Eric Mottram. Cowley has been writing on music for The Wire since the 1990s.

In the October number of The Wire he reviewed George Maciunas’s CD, expressing his strong sympathies for its radical openness, expanded conception of what musical performance might entail, purposeful perversity and humour. However, in presenting the recorded composition of the Lithuanian provocateur and central coordinator of Fluxus, Cowley wrote that their essential feature was action and not sound. Therefore, it was ‘not ideal material for a CD.’ So it was really surprising that in spite of this Julian Cowley placed George Maciunas’s CD at number nine in the TOP 10 Modern Composition list prepared by him for the December issue of The Wire.

Anton Lukoszevieze himself views these compositions quite differently, strongly arguing that they are in fact music and compositions, in spite of the fact that before each performance one has, as it were, ‘to do it yourself’, take a grid form, fill it with the sounds one wants to produce and mark the time when they should sound. In the accompanying booklet to the Musical Scoring Systems CD Anton Lukoszevieze writes ‘The simplicity of these scores is deceptive and they require the dedication and application of committed performers, unafraid of the extreme demands that some of these scores require. These works are not improvisations, though they contain improvisatory elements and the beauty of indeterminate sonic collisions. I think of Antonin Artaud’s last days, alone in his room attacking a splintered wooden block, in rage and frustration, isolated and mad at the world. But, when I see the broken violin on the floor from Solo for Violin (for Sylvano Bussotti)​, I feel a sense of joy, joy in the manifold liberation of sounds and the heralding of a new age of avant-garde music. This was over half a century ago of course and still the resonances of such experimental works are resounding strong and wide in the world of music. These seminal works are important, not from a historical or musicological perspective, but because they make me feel alive, they make me laugh, cry, feel frustrated and elated. Is this not what we ask of music, to be universal?’

The Wire’s complete 2015 TOP 10 Modern Composition CD list:

1. Herbert Distel. Travelogue (hatOLOGY)
2. David Rosenboom. Naked Curvature (Tzadik)
3. Allison Cameron. A Gossamer Bit (Redshift Music)
4. Charlemagne Palestine. Organo Rinascimentale Non Temperato (I Dischi Di Angelica)
5. Eva-Maria Houben. Air: Works for Flutes and Organ (Edition Wandelweiser)
6. Christian Wolff. Pianist: Pieces (Sub Rosa)
7. Lois V Vierk. Words Fail Me (New World)
8. James Moore & Andie Springer. Gertrudes: Music for Violin and Resonator Guitar (New World)
9. George Maciunas. Musical Scoring Systems (Music Information Centre Lithuania)
10. James Saunders. Assigned #15 (Another Timbre)

Translated from the Lithuanian by Romas Kinka
Information from MICL