Nicolas Slonimsky Eats Dinner

In this three part program, the eminent musicologist, composer and conductor talks with Mrs. George Antheil, Charles Amirkhanian and Carol Law over roast duck at the home of Mrs. Antheil in Los Angeles, on December 28, [1970?]. Brace yourselves for a monologue that puts Spalding Gray to shame. Nicolas Slonimsky (1894-1995), whose career spans the period dating back to the mid-1920s, is totally uninhibited by a microphone hanging off a chandelier in the West Hollywood apartment of Böske Antheil (1902-1978). Amirkhanian and his wife Carol Law sit by helplessly as one course follows another. Recorded on a quarter-track reel-to-reel machine, the sound quality is less than sterling but the voyeuristic vantage point more than makes up for any difficulties. This is the new music equivalent of the Nixon Tapes.

In the last part Slonimsky makes a pronouncement on pianist Rosemary Brown's psychic discovery of new works by the great classical masters (whose careers have been "fatally affected by their protracted states of death") and then proceeds to prove without a doubt that he has memorized the perpetual calendar.