Quadrupel Konzert was held on February 23, 1977 in the Musik Akademie Basel’s Great Hall. The concert, which ran for 1 hour and 26 minutes, featured Roth playing four instruments: a Hammond organ, the Great Hall’s house organ, a piano, and a French horn. The work is structured around four phases, each approximately 20 minutes in length, in which Roth plays the four instruments while occasionally singing and giving instructions to the sound engineer David Johnson. The first phase was recorded by Johnson and played back for the second phase, which allowed Roth to play along, accompanying himself. These steps were repeated for phases three and four, the last of which was followed by a series of encore performances lasting a total of 1 hour and 5 minutes. Also included here is a 116 minute remix of the concert that Roth later produced but never released.

Quadrupel Konzert was first released in 2014 as a triple LP box set from Edizioni Periferia to accompany the exhibition “And Away with the Minutes, Dieter Roth and Music,” at Kunsthaus Zug in Switzerland and the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin. For more information on this concert, please see the publication Dieter Roth: und die Musik/And Music, Quadrupelkonzert (Edizioni Periferia, 2014).

Dieter Roth (1930-1998) was a prolific Swiss artist who worked in a diversity of forms including sculpture, painting, design, performance, books, poetry, and printmaking. Roth challenged conventions of art by merging different media and utilizing materials that decayed over time. He frequently produced artists’ books, and his groundbreaking publications remain monumental and influential to the medium. Roth produced sound works and created music throughout much of his life. He also ran a record label, Dieter Roth’s Verlag, which released his and other artists’ works in the 70s and 80s.

These recordings were originally presented on http://blogs.fhnw.ch/dieterrothmusic/publikation/
Special thanks to Michel Roth, and Meike Olbrich for their help in collecting these works and to the Dieter Roth Estate, and Hauser & Wirth for allowing us to present them here.

© Dieter Roth Estate
Courtesy Hauser & Wirth