Two other performances arranged famous classical music. In String Quartet for Six Players (1976) and The Way He Always Wanted It XI (2013), String Quartet takes the first movement of Mozart’s String Quartet No. 15 and puts it through a rudimentary and clichéd process where a prompter rolls a die and then directs a duo of the players to jump to and/or repeat/extend a specific section. There are six players because, for some arbitrary reason, Prina wanted the violin parts doubled. This is then twice-arranged, by chance and orchestration. The first says nothing about the music or even what Prina thinks about it; the technique has been around since the eighteenth century as a compositional game, Musikalisches Würfelspiel. The fun in that was picking out elements to make a new piece of music, but it required the compositional skill to know how to create forms and styles. Prina’s abdication of intention to chance negated skill. And the violin doubling in the high Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium made the sound goopy.
The space was also at odds with The Way He Always Wanted It, Prina’s arrangement of a “melody programmed for player piano” by architect Bruce Goff, played by a flute sextet. The overlapping waves of sound from the flutes were even denser, and with less detail and individuation, than the string sextet. And Goff, whom Prina labels as a composer, was no Mozart—the melody is banal, awkward, dull. Music as object removes quality from consideration. Prina didn’t seem interested in working with the range of the instrument, and the experience was a test of endurance, especially with the reprise of String Quartet.
Then there was An Evening of 19th- and 20th-Century Piano Music (1982–85). This had nothing from the twentieth century; it was Prina’s arrangements for two pianos (played by Adam Tendler and Ursula Oppens) of excerpts from Beethoven symphonies, slowed down, stretched out, and shoved together. The description name-checked Theodor Adorno, usually a sign that there’s more interest in someone’s reputation than their music, and unsurprisingly this was an exercise in witless musicology. What Prina does to Beethoven is what Heinrich Schenker did when he invented modern analysis through Beethoven’s scores. It’s doubtful Prina was thinking this way, or that he even knows the technique. Schenker was a reactionary and a systematizer who felt he could determine the structural elements that made something like a Beethoven sonata work and write out the same in a method that explained it all. Then again, maybe Prina did have Schenker in mind, because he took out all the drama, tension, earthiness, contrasts between dark and light, anger and love. As Arnold Schoenberg supposedly remarked, Schenker removed all the interesting parts of Beethoven, the personality, the idiosyncrasies, the humanity, the style.
As a music maker and player, Prina showed no style. Everything was pitched with the same flat, noncommittal affect. The relative height of the series was The Way He Always Wanted It II, Movement 4 (2008) and the world premiere of A Lick and a Promise (2025). The former was another simplistic arrangement of another inconsequential Goff phrase, the latter a melody played by a chamber ensemble and repeated through some basic techniques of splitting apart notes and voices. Prina himself wrapped it up by singing the original idea with some random love-song type words, “two cups of coffee,” “the world reflected in your eyes,” etc. As a musical phrase, it was shaped like a combination histogram and scatter plot, and it was uninteresting, but it was the most coherent of any of the events up to that November 6 premiere date.
Then came Sonic Dan and full circle to the packaging of music performance as not music, but an artist displaying themself. Each song felt like that kind of possession, something to be looked at—even though there’s no way to see music. The bow on the box was in the middle, when Prina sang Olivia Newton-John’s massive hit, “Physical.” The reason for this is that he took the year of Gaucho’s release—1980—and the 1982 release of Sonic Youth’s eponymous first EP, split the difference and found the Billboard No. 1 hit for 1981.
Why 1981? Prina’s interest in pop music and audience’s changing taste through the years is understandable; it doesn’t take a critic to find something compelling and enjoyable in that. But he showed no joy in this, in fact he showed nothing, no ideas or feeling about music other than as a commodity. The choice is dispassionate and consumerist, even more so because the method is divorced from judgement beyond an arbitrary system that pleased him. It’s a performing extension of his The Top Thirteen Singles From Billboard’s Hot 100 Singles Chart for the Week Ending September 11, 1993 (1993). This is a clock that, on the hour, triggers a recording of the melody from one of these singles (“Dreamlover,” “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles),” etc) played on a carillon. A pop alarm clock, with the fussy arbitrariness of thirteen singles, not the top twenty or twenty-four to match the hours in a day.