Vytautas Landsbegis: A Manifesto (1966)
New music is non-music and anti-art that raises a pure truth, a fact, a natural sound and everyday action. It will bring back the joy of a singing bird and the sensation of beauty unconditioned by any artificial sciences.
Anti-art is the only real, folk and social manifestation of man’s aesthetic sense. It’s real because it does not try to create a meaningless illusion of reality, intellectual puzzle or vain abstraction. It’s folk because it is created by everyone and is equally understood by everyone: smart and stupid, educated and unlearned. Anti-art is a real social revolution as it liberates former creators and teachers or artificial art from their work that is wrong and allows them to start to practice for the benefit of society.
Get off, dodecaphony, polyphony, harmony and cacophony!
We have to learn to enjoy the truth. We will re-find aesthetic pleasure in such simple actions as drinking water, spitting into a well, the natural act of blowing our noses.
The road will be long and nobody will understand us. But the future belongs to progress and we have to take the first steps towards it already today.
Until we use artificial sounds, let us find their free flow. Step by step eliminating artificiality we will reveal the depth of personality and entity.
Today there will be several experimental non-art pieces performed here. They will have an exclusively instructive meaning.
A wind orchestra of third-year students of the music department will perform non-music No. 2.
Normantaitė and Normantaitė accompanied by sounds of two colours will perform an opera ‘5 and 19’.
Pikiotas will play a yellow piece for the piano solo.
For the closing – a popular concert.
Source: Fluxus East: Fluxus Networks in Central Eastern Europe, ed. Petra Stegmann, (Berlin: Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, 2007), 209.