Instructions for the Unexpected

In 1961, while studying electronic music at the New School, La Monte Young found himself staging benefit concerts across New York City to finance a book no traditional publisher would likely dare touch. An Anthology of Chance Operations—a loose bundle of scores, poems, diagrams, and conceptual instructions assembled from his avant-garde circle—defied conventional categories and commercial logic alike.

More zine than scorebook, more manifesto than anthology, it emerged from a heterogeneous network of artists who believed that music could be written as an action, image, or even single line of text.

Undeterred by these challenges, Young mobilized his community, trading letters, performances, and favors to bring the project into existence. Its eventual publication was less an institutional triumph than a collective improvisation, an artifact born from the same chance operations and experimental spirit that defined its contents. The scores circulating through this network didn’t simply document performances; they proposed new ways of organizing sound, movement, and social interaction, laying the groundwork for global shifts in contemporary art and performance.

These groundbreaking works and artists now form the backbone of The Scores Project, an interactive digital publication (with an accompanying print volume) produced by the Getty Research Institute. Built using Quire—Getty’s free, open-access publishing platform—the project presents 11 avant-garde scores from the Institute’s collections, activating them through essays, more than 2,700 archival materials, and original animations paired with audio playback. Featuring the work of John Cage, Alison Knowles, Jackson Mac Low, Benjamin Patterson, Yvonne Rainer, Mieko Shiomi, and others, it functions simultaneously as an archive, exhibition, and performance platform—an invaluable resource for scholars of this pivotal historical moment as well as contemporary artists seeking new ways to interpret these versatile materials.

“An important aspect of this project is that it addresses a gap or disconnect in the discourse,” says art historian Natilee Harren, a coeditor of the project. “In part, this is due to the interdisciplinarity of experimental scores, but also to gaps in access—both physical access to these materials and interpretive accessibility owing to their strangeness and complexity.”

Cage’s influence

Harren and musicologist Michael Gallope—along with several other contributing scholars including Julia Bryan-Wilson, John Hicks, and Benjamin Piekut—were invited to engage with the Institute’s collection of avant-garde scores to help bridge these gaps. For example, by comparing John Cage’s scores with pianist David Tudor’s written interpretations of how to perform them, Gallope discovered key insights into how the two elements corresponded.

Cage approached the musical score not as a fixed authority but as an invitation, an open framework through which performers could generate unpredictable sonic outcomes. His Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958) favors indeterminacy and nonhierarchical performance instructions, using unconventional graphics and textual cues to redistribute power between composer and performer. To illuminate this dynamic, Gallope worked with Getty Publications to develop animations that visually synchronize Cage’s scores, Tudor’s interpretations, and archival recordings of Tudor’s performances.

Critical reviews of a 1958 performance of the piece at New York’s Town Hall were less than receptive to all this boundary pushing. “Reviewers, not always interested in the esotericism of chance procedures, often focused on the sensory impact of Cage’s works from the 1950s, associating it with violence, wrestling matches, psychosis, comedy, childlike outbursts, or even the advent of a nihilistic age,” note Gallope and Nancy Perloff, the Institute’s curator of modern and contemporary collections, in an essay on Cage’s Concert.

In rewriting the rules of music performance, Cage and others were taking cues from a preceding generation of avant-gardists. In a 1913 manifesto, L’arte dei rumori (The Art of Noises), the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo had assailed the classical music tradition for “dripping with boredom stemming from familiarity,” while extolling the aesthetic value of industrial noise. Decades later, Cage and his peers extended Russolo’s provocation, transforming noise into a compositional strategy and redefining the score as a catalyst for experience rather than a prescription for sound.

Scoring the everyday

Other sections of The Scores Project focus on artists and works that stretched the definition of what a musical score, performance, or even instrument could be. Some blurred the line between art and life, often irreverently. For example, a chapter by Emily Ruth Capper on the artist Alison Knowles, who died last year at 92, explores how the Fluxus pioneer turned her everyday rituals into art. The Identical Lunch, a performance project that began in the late 1960s and continued until recently, documents a simple lunch that she ordered regularly from a local diner near her Manhattan studio: a tuna sandwich on wheat toast with lettuce and butter (no mayo), and a glass of buttermilk.

In a 2012 iteration at the University of Chicago—inspired by Fluxus founder George Maciunas’s unrealized proposal to blend the above ingredients into a liquid—Knowles conducted a group of students who “played” an array of kitchen blenders—filled with the lunch—each contributing a distinct sound based on its age, brand, or model. As a coda of sorts, Knowles served the resulting mix in paper cups to the few audience members willing to try it.

In a similarly whimsical vein, fellow Fluxus member Benjamin Patterson wrote Paper Piece in 1960 to include in a holiday letter to his parents, as detailed in a chapter by musicologist George E. Lewis. One of the most popular and performed Fluxus event scores, it features experimental, though highly accessible, notation that almost anyone can follow. The instruments? Sheets of paper and brown bags. Performers in a group are encouraged to “shake, break, tear, crumple, rumple, bumple, rub, scrub, twist, poof, and pop!” their way toward symphonic unity. With little more than paper and permission to experiment, Patterson’s score dissolves the distance between performer and audience, demonstrating how avant-garde innovation could be as playful, participatory, and accessible as it was radical.

New interpretations

These works not only subvert conventional instrumentation but also ask what counts as music or performance, urging a reevaluation of the aesthetic value of everyday objects and gestures. By emphasizing conceptual play and process over polish, they revolutionized artistic practice, encouraging new forms of interdisciplinary collaboration and eroding the myth of the lone artistic genius. Their influence still resonates.

“We are seeing today a resurgence in scores across contemporary art and performance,” says Harren. “So the project not only offers a cohesive narrative that was previously absent but it also connects these historical materials directly to contemporary performance, for example through Getty’s commissioned works featured in the Anthology of Chance Operations chapter.”

These pieces were part of a 2021 Getty series called Meaningless Work, Get to Work, curated by Sarah Cooper and Tashi Wada, for which contemporary artists developed fresh enactments of open-ended and poetic instructions by George Brecht, Earle Brown, Simone Forti, Walter De Maria, Mieko Shiomi, and others. These included cars played like musical instruments, the choreographed movement of rocks along a beach, and performers stepping backward into the ocean using a mirror. Unexpected happenings such as these defamiliarize our daily experiences of the world.

The scores that prompted them can be viewed as a kind of original open-access format for artists. In this way, the new digital platform mirrors the ethos of the original works: adaptable, shareable, and designed for reinterpretation rather than preservation alone. By placing rare archival materials alongside contemporary realizations, the project invites readers not only to study the scores but also to imagine how they might be activated again—anywhere, by anyone willing to follow an instruction and see what happens.

The project continues

Programming based on these works continues with Poetry in the Garden, an annual series of poetry readings in Getty’s Central Garden. An iteration this spring, cocurated with dublab, pairs poets and musicians for performances inspired by the project’s scores. Additionally, “Variations on a Theme: Benjamin Patterson’s Scores” features an exploration of the artist’s legacy and live performances of two of his 1960 works, including Paper Piece.

More than six decades after La Monte Young gathered his friends’ unruly contributions into a handmade anthology, The Scores Project and its related public programs carry on the same experiment in a different form: an open platform built not to stabilize works into fixed monuments but to keep them in motion. Just as Young relied on a dispersed community to bring chance operations into print, Getty’s digital publication invites artists, performers, and readers to activate these scores anew—testing instructions, reimagining performances, and discovering unexpected meanings. In this sense, the project is less a retrospective archive than an evolving anthology of its own, one that preserves the improvisational spirit of its origins while opening the door for the next generation to pick up the score and play.

Join us for Poetry in the Garden: Scores, a series of live performances inspired by The Scores Project: Experimental Notation in Music, Art, Poetry and Dance 1950–1975 on April 12, 2026.