Comprising twenty-two movements of music produced using turntables and mixers,[1] it was difficult to perform due to technical problems.
[5] He later described the completed work as "an opera for blind people, a performance without argument, a poem made of noises, bursts of text, spoken or musical.
A lone man possesses considerably more than the twelve notes of the pitched voice.
[7]Excerpts of the piece were debuted in the United States on 14 June 1952 as a prelude to a Boston production of Kurt Weil and Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera.
Reporting on the performance, DownBeat wrote that the piece "was played on a sound track compounded of an amazing variety of 'concrete' sounds from trains to the magnified beat of a cricket's heart and truncated cadences of the human voice.