In the decades following World War II, the musical score emerged as a unique and powerful medium for experimental art. A new movement of visual artists, composers, poets, and performers reimagined the score—traditionally defined as the written representation of a musical composition—as a tool for structuring experimentation in the nascent fields of performance art, conceptualism, and intermedia. They drew inspiration from unconventional musical notations devised in the early to mid-1950s by the composers Earle Brown, John Cage, and Morton Feldman. The new movement’s use of experimental scores spread during the 1960s through publications, festivals, concerts, classrooms, networked correspondence, exhibitions, happenings, and a renewed awareness of score-like antecedents in the charts, diagrams, sketches, and written instructions of earlier avant-gardes, from Dada and Surrealism to the Bauhaus. By the later years of the 1960s, diverse communities of artists, musicians, poets, and dancers had transformed the possibilities of the score into an ever-expanding universe of textual, symbolic, and graphic marks. They used experimental scores to stage a multitude of practices that dismantled and recast the traditional boundaries of artistic media.
Important precedents for this movement emerged during the 1950s. A number of early experimental scores were written expressly for the pianist David Tudor, a specialist performer who earned near-universal critical respect for the meticulous care he took in realizing even the most open-ended musical notations. Composers and artists who wrote scores for Tudor devised notations that reworked and, in some cases, abandoned the Western musical staff, with its usual notes, beams, rests, meters, and key signatures. They crafted intricate diagrams, freehand drawings, and textual instructions that dramatically expanded the performer’s role in interpreting a given score. To aid in his performances of such “indeterminate” works, Tudor first created in 1954 what he called a “realization”: a translation of the open-ended elements of an experimental score into a personalized notation system suitable for performance. Due to the strength of Tudor’s international reputation, his commitment to his collaborators’ desires to experiment across disciplinary and artistic boundaries, and his famously accurate and deadpan performances of even the most outrageous stunts, the pianist, in the years until about 1961, himself served as a key agent for score-based experimentation. By virtue of his reputation and accomplishments, Tudor would help establish a broader international legitimacy for avant-garde performance. Alongside the new forms of notation, committed performers such as Tudor played a crucial role in presenting these challenging works to skeptical audiences, thereby opening new possibilities for performance in an emerging culture of indeterminate composition.
By the late 1950s, a new generation of visual and performing artists began to use experimental scores to push their practice beyond accepted conventions of genre or medium. An important catalyst for these activities was John Cage’s course in experimental composition (1956–59) at the New School for Social Research. Cage’s course attracted artists who did not consider themselves musicians but were inspired—and, indeed, tasked by Cage with exploring different approaches to composing time-based performance works by experimenting with the score format. In turn, Cage’s students, including George Brecht and Allan Kaprow, adapted scores to hybridize and reconceptualize a number of existing artistic mediums (painting, sculpture, film, printed text, collage, etc.), thus producing new forms of what Dick Higgins would term intermedia.1
Through loosely organized peer networks forged by performances, festivals, mailed ephemera, publications, and word-of-mouth transmission, the 1960s saw an international explosion of experimental scoring practices. An important incubator of these activities was Fluxus, a loosely organized experimental performance and publishing collective launched in September 1962 in Wiesbaden, West Germany, whose membership spanned Western Europe, the United States, and Japan. Compositions by Fluxus affiliates including Alison Knowles, Jackson Mac Low, Benjamin Patterson, and Mieko Shiomi conveyed instructions for participatory events, broke down professionalized cultures of performance, posed philosophical questions to audiences, and experimented with various symbols and modes of written representation. At a remove from the layered complexities of modernist poetry, the language of their scores could startle readers with straightforward instructions for specific, often mundane tasks or parody technical and bureaucratic languages of modernization. In other moments, their graphically elaborate works emphasized visual interest over readability. In the context of a gallery exhibition or publication, an experimental score could be seen as a work of visual art in its own right, independent of any realization or performance. Meanwhile, poets such as Mac Low, and dancers, including those associated with New York’s Judson Dance Theater, played with scores as a way of rethinking and recalibrating their approaches to narrative, materiality, spectacle, and authorship.
Philosophically speaking, experimental scores enabled a shift in investment from the static polish of a finished work to procedures and processes—often iterative, indeterminate, or chance-derived—in a way that vastly expanded and challenged what counted as a work of art. Artists and critics of the time perceived this process-based work as facilitating escape from the fashionable but dogmatic theory of modernism that had been forwarded by the eminent American art critic Clement Greenberg, whose theory valued the specialized autonomy of modernist abstraction against the threat of popular kitsch, and prized the rigorous separation of artistic mediums (painting, sculpture, etc.) from one another.2 In retrospect, we can see artists’ turn to scores in this moment as a major event that helped usher in the series of paradigm shifts later associated with the demise of Greenbergian modernism, a change that prepared the ground for more recently accepted ideas about the destabilized nature of both contemporary art (as idea and object) and the complex identity of artists in relation to their work.
Existing accounts of this period have identified the score as a widely adopted tool among avant-garde artists, but there has not previously been a comprehensive scholarly overview of the origins and development of the score as a distinct transdisciplinary artistic medium deserving of its own narrative, alongside other recognized twentieth-century genres such as collage or the readymade.3 By foregrounding the role of experimental scores in the development of contemporary art and performance broadly speaking, The Scores Project resituates an array of historiographic debates in Western art around 1960: the aesthetic evolution of modernism into postmodernism; the relationship of postwar avant-garde movements to their prewar antecedents in Europe; differing conceptions of composition, improvisation, and indeterminacy; the increasingly porous relationships between artworks and their surrounding social worlds; and conflicting ideas of skill, authority, and authenticity.
Focused on this time period and phenomenon, The Scores Project presents and analyzes a selection of post–World War II scores drawn from the holdings of the Getty Research Institute (GRI). The project’s custom-designed digital interface helps readers better understand the rich historical and international contexts in play while also grasping the many ways experimental scores rewired artistic coordinates of space and time. In this way, The Scores Project is not merely a digitization effort; it is an interactive, critical anthology—a book, exhibition, digital research repository, and interactive dataset all in one. Eleven chapters, each focused on a particular artist or composer, reproduce curated selections of scores and related archival materials. The individuals featured are Morton Feldman, John Cage, Sylvano Bussotti, Benjamin Patterson, La Monte Young, George Brecht, Jackson Mac Low, Yvonne Rainer, Alison Knowles, Mieko Shiomi, and Allan Kaprow. Most of these figures knew one another and lived and worked in proximity to New York, with the exception of Shiomi, who was in Osaka, Japan. But they also traveled to Europe and East Asia, where their experimentations impacted and were impacted by a wider network of avant-garde figures. Chapter 5, on Young’s An Anthology of Chance Operations (1962–63), functions as a kind of temporal hinge or gateway linking 1950s activities to the efflorescence of notation in the ’60s. It includes a complete digitization of this watershed compendium of experimental notations and position statements, and it gestures outward to a broader milieu of artists engaged in the use of scores.
Navigating The Scores Project
It is notoriously difficult to demonstrate the technical particulars of any of these scores when bound by the limited space of a gallery exhibition, a published book, a concert program, or by traditional audio or video documentation. With this difficulty in mind, our collaborators at Getty Publications and Getty Digital, along with the project designers Andrew LeClair and E Roon Kang, devised an interface that facilitates viewing, reading, listening, and guided engagement with over two thousand historical documents, images, films, videos, and recordings. LeClair and Kang’s custom design aims to maximize technical and historical understanding of experimental scores for a wide range of readers, both specialist and nonspecialist, who may be drawn to this material from different disciplinary orientations. Each chapter features the following: (1) a Commentary section with a scholarly essay by an expert author that narrates the score’s original context and describes its key elements; (2) a click-through Score section that showcases high-resolution images of the scores; (3) a Playback section that contains time-based content in audio, video, and interactive formats, including historical realizations alongside newly commissioned performances directed by a diverse cohort of contemporary performance artists; and (4) an Archive section with a curated trove of relevant primary materials drawn largely from Special Collections at the GRI, including ephemera and 3-D imaging of related objects. These archival materials contextualize the scores and will facilitate new research by scholars and students who may be unable to travel to the GRI to access these unique items in person. All these primary materials are also collected in the book’s online Object Index, where readers can fully explore their contents and filter them by different categories.
Within a single chapter, readers can inspect preparatory compositional sketches, compare recorded performances, peruse historical concert reviews, and pore over intimate correspondence between composers and performers. Framing each featured score is a scholarly commentary that situates the work historically and theoretically, provides a cohesive overview of the chapter’s contents, and guides the reader in how to approach the wealth of materials included. In exploring the commentaries as well as the extended captions nested in the subsections of each chapter, users will enjoy an experience akin to peeking over the shoulder of a scholar as they examine rare archival materials. Readers will be prompted to note details and quirks in the scores, to play back animations that help decode various notations, and to ponder the ways in which words, images, and sounds either translate or fail to translate into one another.
Readers will also be alerted to links to other chapters, artists, and scores; in this manner, the primary digital format of The Scores Project demonstrates the networked quality of the materials and histories it contains. By bringing these works together in one accessible interface and presenting them in a way that reduces the technical barriers that scores often present to nonspecialists, we hope to spur increased interdisciplinary collaboration and pedagogy among art historians, music scholars, literary and performance scholars, and others. Just as importantly, The Scores Project provides exciting new ways for the general public to access and engage with these materials. Above all, our aim is to foster a renewed sense of wonder about this innovative and historically complex moment in the history of postwar art.
In their time, experimental scores of the postwar era provoked aesthetic shifts and new alliances across a wide array of artistic disciplines, and yet historical accounts of these materials have often remained constrained by siloed conversations within the disciplines of music studies, art history, literary studies, and performance studies. As a result, the multidisciplinary history of experimental scores has remained underappreciated, its scholarship fragmented into partial accounts that tend to privilege one medium and its artistic community above others. Faced with avant-garde artists who made it their life’s work to question professionalized boundaries, disciplinary rigidity on the part of scholars runs the risk of distorting the historical record or producing biased theories. Therefore, we as editors—with training in the fields of music studies (Gallope), art history (Harren), and literary studies (Hicks)—have selected for The Scores Project a series of works drawn from the GRI’s Special Collections that span artistic disciplines and productively trouble them along the way. New texts by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Emily Ruth Capper, George E. Lewis, Nancy Perloff, and Benjamin Piekut broaden the project’s intellectual reach even further. The multitude of voices and intellectual investments represented here constitute a polyphonic ensemble and not an irreproachable canon, an outcome that was also our aim as we curated the list of artists and scores. We hope the interdisciplinary connectivity of The Scores Project facilitates stronger understanding of the inner workings of each score across the domains of image, word, and sound, and helps to build and model an expansive, collaborative community of scholars, readers, and performers appropriate to this formative moment in the history of experimental art-making.
In this introduction, we offer accounts of the intertwined narratives on the antecedents, creation, and reception of experimental scores. We begin with the section “Music, Scores, and Indeterminacy,” which situates The Scores Project within global histories of musical notation and the various musical avant-gardes, paying particular attention to the distinction between indeterminacy and improvisation, especially as it relates to race. We then turn, in the section “Scoring Intermedia,” to histories of visual and performance art, looking at precursors to this experimental tradition in early twentieth-century avant-gardes (including Dada and Surrealism) and in the interdisciplinary pedagogy developed at Black Mountain College and its predecessor, the Bauhaus. In the final portion, “Poetry and Experimental Scores,” we discuss the score-like qualities of literature and prosody, showing how poets and literary critics referred to the musical score as a model in their longstanding debates over the relative status of a printed text compared to performed versions of a literary work.
By foregrounding the materiality, social history, and performance culture of experimental scores, The Scores Project refocuses attention away from well-worn disagreements over scores, performances, and musical works in the philosophy of music.4 Instead, the project draws attention to a more comparative understanding of the fine-grained social and intellectual histories of when, how, and why twentieth-century artists turned to experimental scores in the first place. In this way, the project invites readers to consider the importance of a medium that is extraordinarily versatile. Experimental scores are at once structuring and borderless; they are often conceptually specific yet emancipating for participants. As noted above, scores have helped artists shift their focus from the composition of finished works to the invention of experimental processes. They have encouraged audiences to move beyond passive reception to active interpretation, and in some cases direct participation. As a result, artistic practices have become a space to think without specific goals, to question without resolution, and to act without foreknowledge of an outcome. In these ways, scores have facilitated valuable and enduring processes for advancing experimental art.
Music, Scores, and Indeterminacy
Tracing the word score back to its origins in Old English, we discover that it denotes an inscription, a mark, or a tally.5 The historical meaning of the term is apt for describing how notation relates to music. A score is a media device, a visual inscription of music in graphic space, on clay tablets, with pigment, or by way of engraving or printing. It encodes, and thus transforms, dynamic musical time into a visible set of instructions for its performance. To be sure, score has since acquired a much more specific meaning. Since the early part of the eighteenth century, the terms score and musical score derive from the “scoring” of long bar lines down multiple staves.6 The modern English usage of the word most commonly refers to a single authoritative notation that includes all the individual parts of a complete musical work.
Musical notation has not always been associated with the preservation of an elaborate musical form. As was the case for the technology of writing in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus (ca. 370 BCE), the purpose of musical notation was, more practically, to supplement the powers of musical memory.7 Thus, it is important to note that even with the aid of musical notation, a great deal still had to be remembered or reconstructed by the performer. Most musical notation systems from throughout world history are a form of shorthand with only skeletal information about what is to be performed. For example, extant cuneiform script from Sumer circa 1400 BCE includes the names of strings and fragments of a melody; Ancient Greek notation since the sixth century BCE has symbols that indicate general melodic shapes over sung text; and there is evidence that Ancient Chinese musicians used solmization systems (in which pitches of the scale are assigned syllables, as in the solfège method in Western music) as early as the fifth century BCE and developed tablature notation around the sixth or seventh century CE. What we now recognize as modern Western notation developed out of medieval neumatic notation that initially suggested only melodic contours corresponding to a series of sung syllables rather than specific pitches or rhythms. This neumatic notation emerged in Western Europe in the ninth century CE and likely had origins in the Byzantine Empire. The gradual emergence of conventional Western musical notation—with its increasingly specific rhythms and pitches—took place over several centuries. Its dissemination and standardization were strongly intertwined with the emergence of the printing press, the attendant commercial sphere of music publishing, and the extractive and expansionist processes of Western colonialism and imperialism.8
But standardization, discursive power, and geographic diffusion over time does not mean that what is now recognized as Western musical notation became universal, nor should we accept uncritically the traditional narratives claiming that musical notation has become more detailed and prescriptive, and thus improved, over time.9 An astounding variety of notation systems based in solmization, neumatic chant, or instrumental tablature have been in use across Asia since the earliest ancient cultures. In early modern Europe, the guidelines to improvisation found in figured bass notation and partimento composition required considerable know-how beyond the specifications in the score. Moreover, since the development of the modern music industry in the early part of the twentieth century, a wide range of musical notations—from detailed to shorthand—have functioned harmoniously alongside one another.
In fact, what appeared so radically “indeterminate” for avant-garde composers during the 1950s was commonplace for a significant number of musicians outside the world of classical music. Much modern musical notation is often quite skeletal, either giving performers considerable freedoms or simply relying on their well-developed tacit knowledge and idiomatic performance practices. This characterization includes the use of lead sheets in jazz, chord charts in popular music, and certain forms of tablature (fig. 0.1). Depending on varying priorities for performance, each system indicates different elements, whether chord names, numbers that outline the harmonic voicing, notation of key rhythmic patterns, or, in the case of tablature, the physical position of the fingers.
Note as well that whereas chord charts and lead sheets are notation systems that have the weight of publishing industries behind them, the Nashville Number System (see fig. 0.1, bottom left) is one example of the ways musicians themselves, including those from a multitude of cultural traditions, make all manner of informal notations for their own use. Musicians in any number of traditions worldwide jot down basic chord charts, lyric sheets, and production notes; they number frets, develop homemade tablatures, and fill notebooks and smartphones with annotations about settings for buttons, knobs, and sliders on electronic instruments. In all instances, written aids, social conventions, memory, and oral tradition play a role in the production of the musical result.
By contrast, the musicians and artists featured in several chapters of The Scores Project—namely David Tudor, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Sylvano Bussotti, Benjamin Patterson, and La Monte Young—were all trained in the comparatively rigid twentieth-century practice of classical music performance that had its origins in a nineteenth-century European concept of the musical work. Examining this tradition, the philosopher Lydia Goehr has elaborated on the contours of the “work concept,” in which a score determines all the notes in a composition and remains a regulative ideal toward which each performance aspires.10 Historically, the work concept required (1) a strong author-function for composers (akin to the auteur model in cinema); (2) a highly conventionalized notation system; and (3) a norm-bound discipline of musical performance. By midcentury, the world of classical music, with its cultural prestige rising, had all three in spades.
It was within this conservative musical context that Cage and his circle dissented.11 In doing so, they followed the lead of an earlier generation of avant-gardists. The Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo, in his manifesto L’arte dei Rumori (1913; The Art of Noises), had sharply criticized the classical music tradition as “dripping with boredom stemming from familiarity,” while venerating industrial noise as worthy of aesthetic appreciation.12 Russolo also devised an early form of graphic notation for a work titled Risveglio di una Città (1914; Awakening of a City) that featured glissandi over unspecified pitches that were to be played on intonarumori, his custom-built mechanical noisemakers (fig. 0.2).13
Noisy and dissonant music had become a trend early in the twentieth century, often inspiring unconventional or surprisingly complex notations. In the United States, Charles Ives and Leo Ornstein had been pioneers in the use of dissonance, tone clusters, and polyrhythms. At the center of an American scene of so-called ultra-modernists in the 1920s, Henry Cowell devised customized notations for tone clusters (1917), complex rhythms (1917), and strumming inside the piano (1925), all key elements of his novel approach to composition, which he published in his influential compendium New Musical Resources (1930).14 During the 1920s and ’30s, Edgard Varèse achieved fame for his bracing and aggressive compositions that foregrounded percussion, timbre, and the use of a siren in forms of what he described as “organized sound.”15 Russolo, Cowell, and Varèse, along with Arnold Schoenberg (with whom Cage studied from 1935 to 1936), would prove to be significant musical influences on Cage.16
An expanded musical palette of noise and sound, an interest in unusual notations, a sense that advanced art ought to be challenging to aesthetic norms, and (for Cowell, Varèse, and many others) Asian and other non-Western influences as exoticized correctives to a Euro-Western status quo: these represented some of the values and priorities of the early twentieth-century musical avant-garde. One could argue that in their postwar work Cage and his cohort managed to translate these priorities into a pronounced level of philosophical self-consciousness, one they began to convey to an increasingly large public audience during the 1950s and ’60s through performances, print media, teaching, recordings, and television broadcasts. Cage’s iconoclastic modernism, exemplified not only by his use of indeterminate notation but also by his novel embrace of chance procedures derived from the I Ching, was also multidisciplinary from the start; the choreographer Merce Cunningham, who began collaborating with Cage in the early 1940s, would become his touring partner throughout the 1950s and ’60s.
And yet Cage’s own relationship to his fellow practitioners of indeterminacy and experimental notation was particularly complex. His dramatic popularization of this tradition of experimentalism did not, for example, enable the composer to break entirely with conservative elements of the historical and European past. George E. Lewis has detailed the ways Cage’s radicalism remained bound to a “Eurological” view of indeterminacy.17 This was particularly evident in Cage’s distaste for jazz and abstract expressionism, which the composer considered to be corrupted by intuition and ego-driven conceptions of freedom.18 In doing so, Cage, along with Feldman and Tudor, held fast to a fairly orthodox version of modernism insofar as their work self-consciously rejected mainstream and Black- and Latinx-coded genres such as jazz and popular music.19 This categorical disavowal of popular genres was, moreover, not merely stylistic. Racial segregation of their artistic circles was a reality: the institutions of classical music in the 1950s were almost entirely white. In fact, Patterson, a rare Black artist in Cage’s circle of the early 1960s, was denied employment as an orchestral musician in the late 1950s because of his race.20 At the level of genre, the actual segregation of audiences and performers scaled upward to discursive and social norms as well; Ornette Coleman remarked that his experiments involving novel combinations of notation and improvisation failed to dislodge the persistent sense that classical music was assumed to be white whereas jazz was coded as Black.21
While Cage openly expressed antipathy toward jazz, other modernists of the period idealized and prized its powers, albeit in ways that are complex in their own right. Certainly among Black artists themselves, the emergence of jazz was understood as integral to the literature and art of the Harlem Renaissance. Among white artists in Europe, however, ambivalent and fetishistic attachment to Black culture was widespread during the 1910s and ’20s, and it is explicit in the work of composers such as Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Darius Milhaud, and in modernist avant-garde movements including Futurism, cubism, sound poetry, and Surrealism.22 Among the composers engaging with experimental scores in the 1950s, Earle Brown had a pronounced interest in improvisation that stemmed from his background in jazz and popular music.23 Brown’s iconic experimental score, December 1952 (1952), widely credited as an early exemplar of graphic notation, is notoriously indeterminate: It has no bar lines or axis indicating the passage of time, and it can be read with the score positioned in any direction (fig. 0.3). His open-form scores, many of which accommodated improvisation, were inspired not only by his experience with jazz but also by abstract expressionist painting, the mobile sculptures of Alexander Calder, and the mathematical tools of Joseph Schillinger’s system of musical composition.
Amid these variously conflictual and contradictory attitudes toward improvisation, Lewis underscores a simple historical fact: modernist engagements with indeterminacy already had a strong track record among Black musicians well before 1960, even if this antecedent was rarely acknowledged—and was, moreover, often maligned—by Cage himself. Blues People (1963) by Amiri Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones) offers a rich account of bebop, an Afro-modernist revolution in musical form developed throughout the 1940s and ’50s by Black musicians such as Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and Dizzy Gillespie.24 Bebop musicians, in fracturing and redeveloping many of the entertainment conventions of the swing era of jazz, shared the Euro-modernist desire to use dissonance, experimentation, and indeterminacy in ways that “posed potent challenges to Western notions of structure, form, and expression.”25 Bebop was distinct, however, not only for its weave of harmonically complex lead sheets and intricate improvisations but also for its associations with a resistant social mission that sought to contest racist prejudices and empower Black artists toward social and economic advancement. Cage’s near-opposite commitment, in the 1950s, to performative “discipline” (rather than improvisation) was likewise indifferent to Afro-modernist social causes. As someone who was, in his own words, no fan of social protest, Cage tended to associate himself with a quiescent anarchic libertarianism. And by prioritizing the whiteness of “classical” composition alongside an exoticized fascination with Asian philosophy and Chinese calligraphy, he placed exceptional value on the design and script of printed scores, while casting the improvisational “freedoms” of Afro-modernist jazz as a disavowed other.
Yet, across the three opening chapters of The Scores Project, readers will find that the distinctions between improvisation and indeterminacy, or between personal expression and formalist discipline, overlap a great deal when examining—and listening to—Tudor’s practice at a granular level. A score like Feldman’s Intersection 3 (1953), as introduced by Gallope in chapter 1, is formalist by design and in visual appearance, but it was intuitively written and is often frenetic, even jarring, in its acoustic effect, redolent of the French poet and theater director Antonin Artaud’s celebration of extreme physicality in performance. Cage’s visually stunning compendium of notations in his Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958), discussed by Gallope and Nancy Perloff in chapter 2, was made according to the careful ego-attenuating formalism of chance procedures; however, Tudor’s realizations, similarly evoking Artaud in their moments of menacing atonality and abstraction, reveal intriguing personal choices and expressive flair more familiar to nineteenth-century ideals of pianistic virtuosity. Finally, Bussotti’s expressivist and highly calligraphic score for Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor (1959), discussed by Gallope in chapter 3, appears visually gestural but explicitly blurs the line between improvisation and indeterminacy altogether, leaving its performer in a position to construct a realization in a more careful and formalist Cagean manner.
In the 1960s and ’70s, techniques and procedures involving indeterminacy, improvisation, iterability, and chance—all variously associated with experimental scores—were mixed, matched, and reworked in innumerable ways by an ever-broadening circle of musicians and artists. Two compendia published during the 1960s, La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low’s An Anthology of Chance Operations (1962–63) and Cage and Alison Knowles’s Notations (1969), along with the influential journal Source: Music of the Avant-Garde (1967–73), helped draw attention to this range of work as it developed throughout the decade.26 In the wake of Tudor’s many legendary performances of the 1950s, Neo-Dada artists including George Brecht, Philip Corner, Dick Higgins, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Terry Jennings, Mac Low, Pauline Oliveros, and Young wrote experimental scores for him as a pianist—many featuring only text—as if Tudor were a medium for experimentation in and of himself. Soon after, Tudor’s work evolved away from realizations at the piano and toward improvisation and live electronics at a time of exceptionally high touring activity with Cage and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in the 1960s and ’70s.27
During the 1960s, score experimentation among musicians continued apace without Tudor. The inventive linear design of Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise (1963–67) became famous in its own right, in part for being highly indeterminate for performers. Cathy Berberian, renowned as a singer with exceptional abilities in avant-garde music, wrote a work of graphic notation exploring extended vocal techniques titled Stripsody (1966). Also in 1960s and ’70s, Pauline Oliveros developed orally transmitted guidelines for communal experiences of deep listening and sonic meditation and published them as “prose instructions or recipes.”28 Concurrently, the pioneering sound artist Maryanne Amacher created experimental and conceptual scores that explored the affordances of telephones and long-distance media.29 And a number of Black musicians who continued to challenge the binary division between Western classical composition and improvised jazz forged their own experimental notations. Anthony Braxton, straddling the divide between composition and improvisation, experimented with graphic scores beginning in the 1970s. The trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, has more recently developed an exceptionally colorful and imaginative notational language imbued with personal cosmology called Ankhrasmation, examples of which have been exhibited as art (fig. 0.4).
Scoring Intermedia
It would be misleading, of course, to suggest that the postwar fascination with experimental scores was owed entirely to the work of musicians. In the first decades of the twentieth century, artists, poets, and performers associated with the avant-garde movements of Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism originating in Europe crafted their own experimental notations, many of which made only glancing reference to musical traditions. These artists made novel use of score-like forms: instructions, explanatory notes, diagrams, poetry intended for performance, and even invitations directed at potential participants among unsuspecting publics. Many of these innovations would prove influential to postwar developments in avant-garde performance art, conceptualism, and intermedia.
Dada notations were emblematic and perhaps the most notorious. Dada artists, internationally networked across the cities of Zürich, Cologne, Hanover, Berlin, Paris, and New York (many as émigrés), experimented widely across the domains of collage, graphics, poetry, and sculpture. Their aesthetic strategies aimed to dethrone the powers of reason, disrupt the authority of individual expression, and stage a mockery of bourgeois cultural values.30 Crucially, their creative protests against the “achievements” of modernism unfolded against the backdrop of World War I.
Some Dada experiments were explicitly score-like: Marcel Duchamp’s Erratum Musical (1913) is a musical composition for three voices ordered by individual notes that were printed on cards and then pulled at random from a hat. Tristan Tzara, Richard Hulsenbeck, and Marcel Janco’s L’amiral cherche une maison à louer (1916; The admiral looks for a house to rent) is a collage-like “simultaneous poem” composed in orchestral fashion for three clashing voices. Tzara’s much simpler To Make a Dadaist Poem (1920) instructs the reader to write a poem by stringing together individual words cut out of a newspaper and drawn sequentially from a bag. These Dada scores questioned, if not eschewed outright, the telos of a finished object. Instead, they elicited audience participation, produced variations through iteration, and decentered subjectivity in their provocative centering of chance operations.
Other Dada artists used score-like notations to direct participants to a written prototype or conceptual outline that stood as an adjunct to artworks executed as physical objects. Prominent examples include Duchamp’s notorious readymades (arrived at in 1913) and his immense and perplexing The Large Glass (1915–23)—a nine-foot-tall window-like structure straddling the boundary between painting and sculpture—whose related notes and sketches Duchamp published in 1934 as The Green Box.31 At a remove from the construction of actual three-dimensional objects, fellow Dadaists Marius de Zayas and Francis Picabia pioneered the use of diagrammatic machine drawings, or “mechanomorphs,” that articulated skeletal forms and prototypes more fanciful than realistic. Soon after, affiliates of the Bureau of Surrealist Research in Paris, including André Breton and Artaud, prepared written instructions on gatheing participants for dream séances at which audiences were inspired to reconsider the perceptual frames of everyday experience.
Sound poetry, devised in the years leading up to World War I, understood the poetic page as a format that already functioned similarly to a musical score. Poems composed by Russian Futurists tried to forge a “transrational” language of unconscious expression (or zaum) that could overcome linguistic and national obstacles. Italian Futurists, for their part, made use of the sounds of the machine age and the panicked drama of war with variously incomprehensible or illogical constructions.32 Following the lead of the Futurists, a number of Dada sound poets explored novelties in graphic design to lend the recitation of words a pronounced affective charge. Often published in typographically inventive layouts, their poems circulated internationally via self-published magazines such as Dada, Merz, and 291. Prefiguring the postwar flowering of concrete poetry, these publications radicalized the visually inventive design of works such as Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; A throw of the dice will never abolish chance) and Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (1913–16).33 In live performance, recitations of sound poetry could shift back and forth between semi-intelligible oration and raw, shockingly abstract noise as they channeled a mix of mystical and primitivist fantasies, thus establishing a precedent for later avant-gardists’ appropriative relationship to African and other non-Western arts and cultures.34 Hugo Ball’s otherworldly incantations performed at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich in 1916 and Kurt Schwitters’s typographic score for Ursonate (1922–32), which prescribes tongue-twisting vocalizations, are among the best-known examples (figs. 0.5, 0.6).35 Refusing traditional interpretive practices, these poems challenge the reader’s silence while seeming to invite, if not demand, some kind of commitment to performance.
After the dissolution of Dada in the early 1920s and the subsequent rise and diffusion of Surrealism internationally, a rural campus established in 1933 about eighteen miles east of Asheville, North Carolina, came to play an important role in the transmission of intermedia experimentation to postwar avant-gardes across the United States.36 It was Black Mountain College, whose faculty members, most famously among them the European émigrés Josef and Anni Albers, brought with them creative practices initially developed at the innovative and highly influential German Bauhaus (1913–33). In a marked departure from traditional art pedagogy focused on faithful reproduction and the acquisition of virtuosic skills, the Alberses’ modernist pedagogy fused the Bauhaus’s integrative approach to form and materials with a bespoke curriculum based in the progressive educational philosophy of John Dewey, which emphasized learning by doing in ways that encouraged students’ individual independence, inquiry, and creativity. As a means of balancing rigor and creative experimentation, the Alberses’ pedagogy made use of abstract geometric schema to examine and play with basic design principles and the elemental laws of form, inculcating in students a way of seeing and working that would translate across creative disciplines. As Josef Albers explained:
We should discover for instance that music, too, has to do with proportion and the values of line and volume; also that literature can be static and dynamic, and can have staccatos and crescendos, and poems can have color; that the play on the stage has not only dramatic climax but also an optical and an acoustical one; that there are musical qualities in all art—that every art work is built (i.e., composed), has order, consciously or unconsciously.37
This approach echoed the Bauhaus foundation courses developed by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, a curriculum further transmitted through midcentury English translations of Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925/1953) and Kandinsky’s Point and Line to Plane (1926/1947), both of which distilled the creative process into a series of score-like explanatory diagrams.38 From Klee’s notion of form as a dynamic process (Werden, or becoming) that originates with a “line on a walk,” to Kandinsky’s visual translations of excerpts from music, dance, and architecture into concatenations of dots and arabesques, their influential theories of form imagined distinct artistic disciplines communicating with one another via the elemental graphic language of notation.39
In the 1940s and ’50s, Black Mountain College became a venue for experimental intermedia and Dada revivalism. Josef Albers launched a summer program there in 1944 that welcomed a diverse array of guest artists, writers, composers, and designers. A soon-to-be-famous generation of radical pedagogues arrived in 1948, including Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, R. Buckminster Fuller, and Louise and Richard Lippold. That summer, Cage, Cunningham, Fuller, and Elaine de Kooning staged a polarizing performance of proto-Dada works by Erik Satie, namely his one-act play The Ruse of the Medusa (1913), and Cage delivered lectures that explicitly opposed the Germanic attachments to formal and aesthetic organicism so often associated with Ludwig van Beethoven. Though the musical notation used in Satie’s works was largely conventional and the Chinese influence of chance procedures (derived from the I Ching) was not yet a part of Cage’s or Cunningham’s vocabularies, the cross-disciplinary collaboration rejected the intellectual frameworks of Hegelian oppositions and organic unities in favor of something more absurdist and depersonalized—evocative of the Dada experimentation that had largely fallen out of fashion.
Meanwhile, in France, the writer, performer, and Surrealist affiliate Antonin Artaud had been developing an avant-garde approach to performance in Paris throughout the 1920s and ’30s. His book of essays in performance theory, Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theater and Its Double [1958]), outlined a “Theater of Cruelty” that proposed to tear through the usual communicative media of language and representation using the blunt tool of shock, mobilized to dissolve the boundary between art and life and thereby dismantle the audience’s trusted capacities of perception.40 Though largely unknown in the United States in his time, Artaud’s influence over the 1960s avant-garde would become considerable. In advocating dramatic works that deemphasized dialogue, Artaud argued that the essential building blocks of theater were not the words of a text but rather the physical instructions (staging, lighting, blocking, costuming) for performers to enact. In this manner, the Theater of Cruelty outlined a score-like precedent for the emergence of nonnarrative, materially driven performance art.
The carnality of Artaud’s aesthetic impacted musicians with equal power. An unhinged reading Artaud delivered in 1947 caught the attention of the French composer Pierre Boulez, who would proclaim a year later, when he published his brutally noisy Second Sonata (1948), that “music should be collective hysteria and magic, violently modern—along the lines of Antonin Artaud.”41 During the summer of 1949 in Paris, Cage met Boulez and was electrified and impressed by the extreme dissonance of the Second Sonata. Through Boulez, he became acquainted with Artaud’s work. The subsequent winter, Cage approached Tudor and asked the pianist if he could handle the American premiere of Boulez’s sonata. In preparing the fiendishly difficult score for a premiere in December of 1950, Tudor in turn learned of Artaud’s importance to Boulez and taught himself French in order to read Artaud’s writings.42 By 1951, Tudor had met and fallen in love with the poet and year-round Black Mountain faculty member M. C. Richards, and he shared with her typescripts of Artaud’s work. That fall, Cage, Tudor, and Richards were all reading Artaud, and Cage’s music shifted dramatically from relatively consonant Satie-like meditations into a brutal atonality dictated by chance procedures.43 Meanwhile, Richards herself began work on an English translation of Artaud’s The Theater and Its Double.
Amid recurring conversations about Artaud, Cage returned to Black Mountain in the summer of 1952 with Cunningham, Tudor, and Richards.44 Having that spring written the score for an experimental theater piece, Water Music (1952), Cage sketched (reportedly in a single afternoon) the score for what is now recognized as the first “happening.” What came to be known as Theater Piece No. 1 (1952) was conceived by Cage as a series of time brackets to be filled by the undetermined activities of its participants: Tudor, Cunningham, Richards, the poet Charles Olson, and the artist Robert Rauschenberg. Though a culture of intermedia collaboration was already established at Black Mountain, Theater Piece No. 1 broke new ground in terms of its disordered, highly indeterminate, and unrehearsed, collage-like atmosphere.45 The audience was small (fewer than fifty people), but the event became legendary: It disoriented its audience by providing an aleatoric experience that combined dance, recorded music, spoken poetry, projected images, and Rauschenberg’s White Paintings (1951) suspended from the ceiling.46 Its intermixing of art forms addressed to the ears and the eyes sought to eliminate the boundaries between the sonic and the visual. Later that summer, in Woodstock, New York, Tudor premiered Cage’s famous silent piece, 4′33″ (1952), a union of indeterminate notation and the readymade that likewise pointed to the ways in which the performance of music contains its own sense of theatricality.
Though Theater Piece No. 1 and 4′33″ were important antecedents for the rise of so-called Neo-Dada after 1960, the renewed interest in Dada’s spirit of negation and the embrace of nontraditional materials had other advocates in the years after the movement’s initial flourishing from 1916 to 1924.47 In 1936, Alfred H. Barr of the Museum of Modern Art curated the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, whose exhibition catalog featured a short essay on Dada that remained one of very few English-language sources on the movement until the late 1940s. By then, the abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell, also a member of the summer faculty at Black Mountain, had begun to independently investigate Dada as an antecedent to the better-known work of the Surrealists.48 His research culminated in the first retrospective canonization of Dada as a movement, The Dada Painters and Poets (1951), a publication of primary sources that revitalized interest in Dada in the postwar period. Two years later, a Dada exhibition organized at New York’s Sidney Janis Gallery by Marcel Duchamp himself further contributed to Dada’s renewed notoriety.49 Broadly speaking, among American avant-gardes of the postwar period, Dada’s anti-illusionistic, anti-egoic approaches to collage, chance, and the readymade held a unique and powerful appeal by comparison with the automatism and dream imagery of Surrealism, which remained attached to the dictates of the unconscious ego and the aesthetics of figurative representation in ways that facilitated its vulgar popularization and commercialization, especially in the U.S. context.50
Cage’s aforementioned course in experimental composition at the New School, which took place from 1956 through 1959, carved out an inspiring space for a new generation of visual and performing artists to begin composing experimental scores. He introduced Black Mountain–inspired pedagogy and the negative aesthetics of the avant-garde to a cohort of emerging figures—including George Brecht, Al Hansen, Dick Higgins, and Allan Kaprow, among others—who would go on to become the protagonists of happenings and Fluxus.51 Many of Cage’s best-known students came to the course from nonmusical backgrounds and were interested in developing general methods for experimental composition beyond the domain of music. In response to Cage’s assignments, they composed graphic and text-based scores and collectively performed them using everyday materials and dime-store objects, many of which were purchased on the way to class. Unburdened by traditional approaches to music theory and composition, the workshop-like environment encouraged in its participants a generative, boundary-expanding disposition and collaborative spirit. The artists nurtured there came to prize a generous yet rigorous attitude toward shared experimentation, an appreciation of the aesthetic value of everyday objects and gestures, a heightened sensitivity to consciousness rooted in a loose admiration of Zen philosophy, and a commitment to concrete experience. This sensibility, imparted to a range of practices in the decade to come, opposed what leading Fluxus organizer George Maciunas called the “artificial abstraction of illusionism” characteristic of classical theater and fine arts.52
As the activities of Cage’s class branched out into numerous independent artistic practices and idioms, experimental scores became an essential tool for aesthetic innovation after modernism. Artists associated with happenings and Fluxus crafted compositions using a variety of graphic languages, including charts and tables, freely drawn diagrams, and seemingly simple text-based directives written in an imperative tone. In their view, the score was an ideal format for time-based, process-oriented, and/or interactive art forms. In its most basic sense, the score orders and organizes actions and events in time; more simply still, it can be used to conceptually frame and thus draw attention to phenomena already unfolding in everyday life.
In this new generation of avant-garde scores, the traditional linkages between composer, notation, performer, sound, and listener were reconfigured as a perpetually generative ontology of iterative forms. A compelling diagram drawn by Brecht in one of his notebooks from Cage’s class lays out these possible relations in the form of a star-shaped network (fig. 0.7). Here, the key elements of a musical performance are interwoven into a complex, nonhierarchical matrix that facilitates multidimensional experience and awareness. Crucially, among other notes, sketches, and half-completed compositions that appear in Brecht’s notebooks of the time, this diagram does not faithfully refer to Cage’s particular ideas. In fact, knowledge transmission in Cage’s classroom was not one-way. Even as he imparted emerging developments in composition to his students, he solicited feedback from them on his own works in progress and as he informed them about ongoing debates among his peers, fostering an environment of dynamic interchange.53
The text-based compositions in gnomic prose pioneered by Brecht, Young, and Yoko Ono around 1960 would become the most widespread genre of notation among Fluxus artists in particular.54 Such pieces were known after Brecht’s appellation as “event scores,” a term that acknowledged their utility akin to musical notation but in an expanded sense—specifically embracing materials beyond sound. Complementing Brecht’s, Young’s, and Ono’s text-based event scores were other visually divergent approaches, such as the wonkily vectored diagrams of Higgins’s Graphis series, begun in 1958, and Maciunas’s parodically rigorous charts and tables. The impact of this work was further reinforced by the activities of the far-flung network of itinerant Fluxus artists who disseminated their score-based works via touring performances and direct mailings beginning in 1962. As a performer, Tudor continued to play a central role in the dissemination of these notational experiments throughout this early period, receiving dozens of text-based scores written and/or dedicated to him from composers and artists around the world. Cage and Tudor expanded their reach outside the United States and provoked the avant-garde art and music ecologies of various international locales by giving concerts and lectures across Europe beginning in the late 1950s. In 1962 they continued this work on a trip to Japan that was arranged with the help of composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. In this rapidly evolving culture of the event score, works were written for, dedicated to, and sent to an intimate yet widely dispersed scene of knowing avant-garde artists and performers.
It is crucial to note, however, that the radicalism of experimental scores was not simply licensed by Cage’s process-oriented radicalism; these artists drew on a much broader set of cultural influences in positioning the novelty of their work. While the postwar avant-garde’s veneration of the ephemeral, the ordinary, and the everyday staged a critique of modernist autonomy, their works also often relied on the unacknowledged cultural labor of those outside the privileged sphere of the art world. Avant-garde choreographers, for example, appropriated tropes from Black dance—from minstrelsy to vaudeville.55 Motifs lifted from folklore and popular culture were incorporated into happenings and other performance art forms to access an authentic sense of the “vernacular” via loosely primitivist stagings of rituals that were then framed by an arguably elitist sense of aesthetic self-consciousness. More broadly, Blackness and Indigeneity were taken as fetishized otherness through the bohemian appropriations of abstract expressionism and Beat poetry, both of which were influential to this generation of avant-garde artists. A number of 1960s experimentalists—namely Young, Henry Flynt, and John Cale—abandoned notation entirely in order to investigate Afro-diasporic traditions, South Asian music and philosophy, and other vernacular modes of experimentation far outside the practice of Western classical music. The proximity and relationships between different racialized milieus of this moment—many of them disavowed or unexpectedly intertwined—deserve greater scrutiny and further scholarship.56 In the dense cultural geography of New York’s SoHo neighborhood, for example, Maciunas’s Fluxus headquarters at 359 Canal Street was situated mere blocks from Ornette Coleman’s Artist House, a ground-floor performance space at 131 Prince Street that Maciunas helped to renovate. And among Higgins’s and Knowles’s lesser-known collaborators was the Black jazz singer Jeanne Lee, who set the works of numerous sound poets to music and was herself featured in the premieres of Cage’s Renga (1975–76) and Apartment House 1776 (1976).57 Readers can experience Lee’s unique contributions in audio recordings of her interpreting a Jackson Mac Low text score alongside the poet in chapter 7.
The post-1960 experimental scores included in this publication strike a balance between the textual and the visual, and their interactive, multidimensional presentation here enables us to appreciate the attention and care paid to the materiality of their published formats. Benjamin Patterson’s Paper Piece (1960), which premiered in Cologne well before the official launch of Fluxus, is introduced in chapter 4 by George E. Lewis. Cataloging the multitude of sounds that Patterson discovered can be elicited from paper, Lewis shows the visual artist to be a pioneer of an extended technique for this unexpectedly musical material. The democratic appeal of Paper Piece’s wit, deskilled techniques, and spirit of curious discovery anticipates affective qualities that would characterize many later Fluxus event scores. Brecht’s Water Yam (1963), introduced by Natilee Harren in chapter 6, is a nearly complete compendium of his corpus of event scores, printed individually on card stock and housed loosely in a box. Among the first Fluxus publications designed and produced by Maciunas, its unbound format offers endless possibilities for exploring the fascinating interrelations between the scores’ conceptual propositions and enactable gestures.
The dance notations of the choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, exemplified by her sketches for We Shall Run (1963), provide a glimpse into the creative use of scores by the postmodern dance community, particularly affiliates of the Judson Dance Theater. As Julia Bryan-Wilson explains in chapter 8, Rainer used line drawings she called “people plans” to map the flow of bodies through space, and she developed a personal vocabulary of textual descriptions of dancerly and non-dancerly movements as a memory aid for herself and to instruct other performers. The terse, direct language with which Rainer outlines her choreography—almost entirely free of specialized dance terminology—bears similarities to the plainspoken, imperative tone of many text scores of the period. Such unadorned language knowingly signaled her association with the post-Cagean milieu and befitted the counter-spectacular stance articulated in her powerful “No Manifesto” of 1965, in which she said “no” to virtuosity, seduction, and make-believe.58 And yet, because dance’s instrument is the body, capable of innumerably varied, precise articulations, Rainer’s scores are among the most complex included in this publication, while also remaining unable to stand alone as transmitters of the work. They are more like personal records, adjunct to the oral transmission and muscle memory of authorized répétiteurs through which a dance conventionally travels, their charming idiosyncrasy a far cry from Labanotation and its aspirations to systematicity.59 Rainer’s diverse notations are of interest to us here precisely because their skeletal nature highlights the ineffable dimensions of embodied knowledge. By extension, they point to the ways in which performance practices persist, as Diana Taylor has argued, via ephemeral, interpersonally transmitted repertoire and textual archives, as well as digital, visual, and other means—even if, as Peggy Phelan notes, “performance’s only life is in the present.”60
If the example of Rainer’s dance sketches points to the limitations of the score as a mechanism of inscription, the late 1960s saw avant-garde artists developing score-like documentation that opened up further possibilities for the score’s look and utility. In the context of The Scores Project, they invite us to creatively reconsider the relationships between works and their authors, performers, and audiences. Unlike other works featured here, Alison Knowles’s The Identical Lunch (late 1960s–early ’70s) was habitually “performed” before it was noticed by fellow artist Philip Corner and then transcribed into a readymade event score. As Emily Ruth Capper shows in chapter 9, Knowles thus transformed a convenient lunch into a communal project of quasi-ethnographic observation in which others were invited to revel in the changing shape of a quotidian ritual.61
For her part, Mieko Shiomi’s multi-part work Spatial Poem (1965–75) attempted to realize the utopian promise of the event score format in its call for long-distance collaboration and openness to divergent interpretations. In chapter 10, Harren demonstrates that equally compelling is the work’s recursive structure, in which documentation of prior performances is enveloped into the international publication and recirculation of the scores themselves. In chapter 11, we see how Allan Kaprow devised scored activities that invited small groups of committed participants to explore a formalist approach to seemingly ordinary social situations. Emily Ruth Capper’s discussion of Routine (1973–75) emphasizes the foundational role of experimental pedagogy in Kaprow’s work and recounts how the artist’s filmed version of the activity provocatively blurs the line between score and documentation. Remarkably, Kaprow’s didactic actions recorded on film function as their own score that unfolds in time. Espousing a philosophical perspective on experimental scores, Shiomi’s Spatial Poem and Kaprow’s Routine move beyond a score’s two-dimensional paper format in ways that question the boundary between documentation and instruction.
Over the course of the 1960s and into the ’70s, experimental scores invigorated a multitude of creative practices in the visual and performing arts. This development in turn contributed to the canonization of historical avant-garde precursors. A number of these artists who were trained in art history—Kaprow and Higgins in particular—worked to self-historicize and theorize their own experimental practices for audiences that lacked the proper language and knowledge to grasp the historical import of their work.62 The protean intermedia aesthetic philosophy these artists articulated attempted to reconcile and synthesize numerous influences: sound poetry and collage, Dada and Surrealism, the progressive pedagogy of Black Mountain College, abstract expressionist painting, Cage and the New York School composers (a group consisting of Feldman, Cage, Tudor, Brown, and Christian Wolff), and the newly emergent culture of mass media.63 During the 1960s, Fluxus artists effectively redefined the meaning of Duchamp’s readymade to include not only objects but also gestures, sounds, and events. From this perspective, event scores were understood as “temporal readymades” that could appropriate and anoint ephemeral phenomena as aesthetically significant.64 Their notations became a remarkably powerful tool in transforming the artwork from an inert object into a wildly transmutable idea capable of migrating through any medium imaginable. As Higgins summarily concluded in his “Exemplativist Manifesto” (1976) with a grand gesture redolent of Jacques Derrida’s concept of grammatology: “All form is a process of notation.”65
Other artists keen on gaining a historical awareness of and thereby legitimating new intermedia art forms produced maps, flowcharts, and timelines detailing their avant-garde lineages. Alongside Maciunas’s better-known historiographic diagrams, Nam June Paik’s “Expanded Education for the Paperless Society” (1968) included a flowchart representing the history of musical notation as an antecedent to what he called “Music Graphic” (the graphic notation of something like Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra), “event and action music” (event scores by Brecht et al.), and ultimately an ethnographic “mix media music” (visually compelling, multisensory performance including opera as well as “all non-European music”) (fig. 0.8).66 Notably, Paik’s chart is part of a manifesto arguing the urgent need for integrating multimedia technology into arts pedagogy—precisely what The Scores Project seeks to realize. In fact, it can be argued that the proliferation of scores in the 1960s fittingly paralleled early histories of computing and cybernetic theory. As a quasi-algorithmic conceptual tool, scores were a handily adaptable format for playing with textual and diagrammatic codes and linkages. Others ushered the score into the terrain of social utopias. In 1969, Lawrence Halprin, the visionary landscape architect and partner to the postmodern dance pioneer Anna Halprin, published The RSVP Cycles, attesting to the creative power of scores understood in the broadest possible sense, from ancient mandalas and topographical maps to grocery lists and recipes.67 In its capaciousness, Lawrence Halprin’s catalog represents a distinct peak of the period’s mania for scores as it begs the question of what graphic inscriptions, if any, do not qualify as being score-like.
Ultimately, visual and performance artists’ embrace of scores as a generative tool was as consequential for the period of transition from modernism to postmodernism as was minimalism’s activation of the space of the beholder and pop art’s intermingling of high art with the low culture of mass media.68 In the years since, artists have continued to make use of all sorts of notations—from scores, diagrams, and instructions to certificates, blueprints, drawings, and the like—though with some sense that the once revolutionary challenges to authority, autography, and polished works in favor of iterative, experimental, and open-ended practices have become accepted, even routine directions for contemporary artists. Meanwhile, for scholars and curators, the recognition of the importance of experimental scores has inspired renewed debates around the ontology, preservation, and, ironically, authenticity of ephemeral works of art in ways that knit together such diverse fields of inquiry as aesthetics, patronage, museum studies, conservation, and intellectual property law.
Poetry and Experimental Scores
Language-based directives were certainly one of the hallmark features of the expanded forms in which experimental scores were composed and distributed after 1960. Nevertheless, from a historical perspective, it is remarkable to note that self-described poets were largely on the periphery of these aesthetic innovations. In France, at least one sympathetic tradition of poets operated in parallel to Cage and his circle. Disaffection with the increasingly doctrinaire strictures of Bretonian Surrealism led to the founding in 1948 of the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Oulipo). Though their work was not popularized in the United States until the 1960s, Oulipo’s emphasis on the creation of potential literature—that is, the invention of procedures or constraints that could be employed to generate actual, finished literary works—presents us with a literary analogue to the score-based experiments featured in The Scores Project. This parallel notwithstanding, the avant-garde poets of the postwar era who did interact most directly with Cage and his circle’s score-based experiments in the early 1950s, namely Charles Olson, M. C. Richards, and Jackson Mac Low, had a subtler, more indirect relationship to a broader history of score-like experimentation in Western poetry, a relationship that requires a bit of historical context.
Long before any modernist or avant-garde poetry, there was a common sense that the text of a written poem was analogous to a score. From the dawn of print culture up until the early twentieth century in the West, it was assumed that printed poems would be read aloud in the presence of others—and thus performed in a score-like fashion—so as to retain a sensory link to ubiquitous traditions of oral literature and folklore. This history of performing poetry in print allows us to better understand how the changing conceptions of prosody, orality, and the phenomenology of poetic rhythm paralleled cross-disciplinary score-based work in the other arts. Before the emergence of mass media, the expressive recitation of literary works was a prime source of communal entertainment for primarily middle-class audiences, much like amateur performances of musical scores. In England and the United States, the recitation of poetry was the focus of enunciation contests that were widespread in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and these contests in turn were evidence of a vigorous debate over the proper pronunciation and rhythms of English speech. In a move that parallels the nineteenth-century emergence of parlor song and Christian hymnals intended for middle-class amateur musicians, participants in these disputes assumed that such performances of literary works ought to be achievable by any reader with sufficient literacy and education; that is, they did not require professional performers.69 These debates only intensified in the early days of radio and the phonograph, and the ideas were associated with an explosion of textbooks, manuals, and theoretical treatises on poetic meter and other rhythmic effects that were considered essential to the oral delivery of a text.
A chief preoccupation of modern American poetry was the widely acknowledged “crisis of verse” / crise de vers that emerged from the widespread adoption of free-verse rhythms rather than the more regularly patterned structure of meter and rhyme. Some poets and critics argued that modern poets ought to renounce regular rhythms and other pleasing sonic effects of traditional versification—even to the point of becoming deliberately prosaic in their language—in order to reflect the broken or alienated conditions of modernity.70 Others, however, sought to maintain continuity between the meters of earlier eras of English-language poetry and the prosodic experiments that were quickly being embraced as canonical works of high modernism in the age of the New Criticism.71 The pedagogues concerned with proper enunciation reacted to the crisis of free verse in their own way. Some simply dismissed these new works outright as not poetry—conservative literary critics regularly decried any new experimental works either as nonsense or as being indistinguishable from prose—while Robert Frost infamously described free verse as “playing tennis with the net down.”72 But others rushed to amend their prosodic theories by explaining how free-verse poems ought to be recited and how attending to their oral delivery remained indispensable to understanding and experiencing these literary works.
Leading up to this moment of early modernist crisis, the musical score and the notion of the printed text as the authoritative guide to oral delivery reemerged as a model for literary scholars. The poet Sidney Lanier, in his Science of English Verse (1880), had sought a unified ground for the rhythms of both metrical and free-verse poetry (fig. 0.9).73 For his analyses, Lanier used musical notation in place of traditional scansion (derived from the foot-based prosodies of Greek and Latin poetry), a quirkily overdetermined approach emphasizing time and rhythm over accents and stresses on syllables that would continue to be championed by Harriet Monroe, the influential editor of Poetry magazine in the modernist era.74 Other scholars looked to phonographic recordings of exemplary recitations as a way of establishing the subtle yet perceptible regularity of free verse when read aloud by expert performers.75 Aided by a robust discourse of formalization made with reference to musical scores, the focus on exemplary virtuoso performances of poems became a means of legitimating modernist experimentalism.
Meanwhile, other strains of modernism sought to revive the vernacular, ephemeral, and improvisational dimensions of oral poetry. By the 1950s, attempts to shake up the stale, insular, and self-congratulatory performance norms of the academic poetry reading were emerging from virtually all of the various schools of so-called New American Poetry, as identified in 1960 by the influential anthologist Donald Allen. (Members of these schools included the Beat poets, Black Mountain College poets, figures of the San Francisco Renaissance, and New York School poets.) Their challenges ranged from “Fresh Air” (1955), the New York School poet Kenneth Koch’s merciless satire of academic poetry culture, to the much more militant call for “poems that kill” from Amiri Baraka, founder of the Harlem-based Black Arts Repertory Theater/School.76 Midcentury poets seeking emancipation from the sterility of mainstream recitation found models for immediacy and spontaneity in abstract expressionist painting, collage and assemblage, existentialist philosophy, psychoanalysis, jazz, the mind-expanding qualities of psychoactive drugs, and exoticizing endeavors into mysticism and spiritualism.
In this vein, Afro-modernist bebop, newly circulating in recordings at midcentury, inspired many of these poets to actively return to a form of oral literature that was presumed to bypass the mediation of writing and reach audiences more directly. The improvisational performances of Beat poets, which often entailed similarly improvised musical accompaniment and were occasionally distributed as audio recordings, further emphasized performance at the expense of a purely textualist concept of the literary work. Their innovations would in turn become a formidable influence on the musicians and poets who infused the spoken word into free jazz, the 1960s folk revival, rock music, and the New York punk movement of the 1970s. The work of Gil Scott-Heron and Patti Smith stands out as perhaps the best known and most direct channeling of the sensory immediacy of oral delivery into an incantation driven by the hypnotic intensity of jazz, blues, soul, and—for Smith—rock. Echoing elements of Scott-Heron’s innovations, hip-hop artists, particularly in the wake of the genre’s flowering in the 1990s, would even more radically return to the powers of prosody and voice to assert a performance-driven model of poetic expression.
Of course, these musician-poets were not necessarily interested in experimental scores; they were more directly turning to forms of oral transmission joined to the affective impact of music. Others retooled the formalist study of meter and prosody in ways that explicitly made use of experimental scores that presented temporal performance instructions in inventive visual layouts.77 In a formalist vein, Charles Olson reimagined the visual display of a poem in the manner of a musical score, with the fixed-width typography of the typewritten manuscript becoming a strict temporal axis stretching evenly across the printed page. Olson’s essay “Projective Verse” (1950) described a rhythmic aspect of “open field” composition, in which the visual arrangement of the poem on the page serves as the definitive guide to performance, with the understanding that each line of verse would be equivalent in duration to one breath on the part of the reader. He writes:
It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work. It is time we picked the fruits of the experiments of Cummings, Pound, Williams, each of whom has, after his way, already used the machine as a scoring to his composing, as a script to its vocalization.78
Around the same time that Olson developed his theory of projective verse, a generation of concrete poets in Brazil and elsewhere employed typography not just for visual effects but also as a score-like guide to performers.79 Although concrete poets have long been misunderstood as working in a purely visual medium, recent scholarship has sought to recover their overlooked sonic dimensions. The Brazilian poets Haroldo and Augusto de Campos referred to their influential experiments across the nexus of word, image, and sound as verbivocovisual, a neologism drawn from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939).80 Many concrete poets saw their strategies as an aesthetic counter to the increasingly ubiquitous visual language of capitalist advertising that was permeating their rapidly urbanizing cities, and some wrote poems that critically engaged popular advertising through sonic wordplay rendered in the color palettes of iconic brands, as Décio Pignatari did in Beba Coca Cola (1957) (fig. 0.10). Rather than establishing a countercultural priesthood of high art, these poets sought to build their own aesthetic and cultural theories from scratch, articulating a clean, definitive break with European modernisms that had been permanently discredited by association with two world wars.81 Still other concrete poets sought to reify their works by having them fabricated in heftier material forms, as did the Scottish poet and gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay, who constructed and commissioned site-specific works in wood, glass, and stone for his home, known as Little Sparta (fig. 0.11). This diversity of aims and programs for concrete poetry was recognized at the time by Fluxus affiliate Emmett Williams, who edited an impressively international and multilingual collection of concrete poetry in 1967.82
Given the range of midcentury poets working at some proximity to experimental scores, it may appear strange that the use of language by the key figures featured in The Scores Project—and particularly in event scores by Young, Brecht, and Mac Low, or in Cage’s lectures, which echoed Olson’s experimental concept of open-field composition—may appear so conspicuously disengaged from both the visual and the aural experiments of their poetic contemporaries. But this, too, simply requires further historical context. Many of these figures were fascinated by a certain optimism about the transparency of language that characterized midcentury discourses of cybernetics, positivism, infographics, the imperative grammar of ad agency sloganeering, or the rhetoric of protest signs.83 Though these artists often took such language to provocative extremes or subjected it to forms of critique, such an exhortatory tone, previously associated with didactic and moralizing traditions, had heretofore been virtually absent from the traditional scope of lyric, modern, and avant-garde poets.84 (Kaprow may be considered an exception to this functionalist trend, as his approach to rhetoric and communication was more clearly influenced by the Beat poets, particularly Allen Ginsberg.)
As a case in point, the language-based instructions that accompany Cage’s score for Concert for Piano and Orchestra deploy a view of language as essentially functional and communicative. The purpose is simply to explain how the performer should interpret the unconventional notations in the pages that follow. If anything, Cage’s use of language derives from scientific communication, symbolic logic, and informational graphics. Just as one might label the values being plotted on the x and y axes of a chart or graph, so Cage instructs the performer about the values of the parameters of his calligraphic squiggles and amoebas. Tudor’s highly calculated and systematic approach to his realizations—which, in the case of his second realization of the Concert for Piano, ballooned into pages upon pages of preparatory work with precise ruler measurements and calculations in long division—effectively doubles down on a quantitative method for resolving the relationship between the graphic and linguistic elements of Cage’s score.
And yet, if the avant-gardists in The Scores Project did not necessarily see their use of language as poetic, it does not mean that their claims to linguistic transparency were devoid of ontological and aesthetic richness. Even as their score language appears simple, direct, unadorned, and functional—occasionally akin to stage directions—some instructions are often so compressed that they ironically invite perplexity or confusion. As John Hicks demonstrates in chapter 7 on Mac Low’s provocative postcard scores, the bracing simplicity of their language echoes some of the more conceptually oriented, koan-like event scores of Brecht, Young, and Ono, deliberately testing the limits of what is performable or even imaginable. These text-based scores, with their ambivalent and complex relation to the history of poetry and music, and their curious position between the ideal and the material, in many ways prefigured the broader turn to language in late 1960s conceptual art.85 For certain, they mark a major touchstone in the development of contemporary performance art and related intermedia practices.
An Invitation
This publication is an invitation to explore. Experimental scores are philosophically and historically complex entities, a key reason they became so fascinating and popular during the 1960s. We hope the unified multisensory format of The Scores Project facilitates a comparative understanding of multiple realities and modes of existence for each score that may have been difficult if not impossible to imagine in the traditional physical spaces of an archive, gallery, or performance venue.
Certain guiding questions may facilitate comparisons: What did artists prioritize in their scores and instructions? Even though each of these scores has an author, to what extent was their authorship fundamentally collaborative? Were the works intended for specific performers, readers, or viewers? Or for unknown participants or communities? Were participants presumed to be skilled or informed in any way? Did these works rely on an existing social habitus, a socially competitive scene or clique, or institutional structures and authorities? Is extension in time given the same weight in each score? Does a recorded performance in turn affect future interpretations of a score? This is particularly the case with dance, in which filmed documentation captures many more details of bodily movement—and ultimately intellectual property—than can be preserved in dance notation and instructions. But it is also true for Kaprow, Knowles, and Shiomi, who turned documentation of an action into its own kind of score. It is true for Brecht’s Drip Music (Drip Event) (1959–62; see chapter 6), in which a particular interpretation of the work involving a ladder and a watering can, reiterated through repeated stagings as well as photographic and filmic documentation, helped codify a post-facto performance protocol, one Brecht himself avoided. To what extent did artists retain traditional aesthetic values of appealing design in their scores? Or of arresting, peaceful, beautiful, or disturbing sounds and images in the result? Is it possible to have a “bad” or tasteless performance of these scores? If so, how and why? Is it because we as twenty-first-century participants have ironically been seduced by the author-function and a desire to preserve a work’s historical integrity?
As we keep these questions in mind, the archival records for each of these scores provide a front-row seat to the sociohistorical context from which the works first emerged. Rather than supposing the score is some kind of urtext for the work, users can compare realizations, notes, and correspondence to understand some of the larger conceptual apparatuses and influences that went into the creation and performances of the scores. We hope users will arrive at new materials and conceptual understandings of each score by working directly from archives and historical materials to better understand the philosophical practices at play. For example, in newspaper clippings, we can trace a history of middle brow receptions of performances that is unfiltered by the idealized lens of disciplinary metanarratives. As archival correspondence shows, fraught negotiations over artists’ compensation and recognition for their creative work sometimes conflicted with their professed desires to de-commodify the art object. In turn, such material needs have raised important questions for museums and collectors today. Recent scholarship linking art history, performance studies, museum and curatorial studies, and conservation has begun to track in earnest how the score format has become an essential tool of legally compensating artists for otherwise ephemeral works.86
Considering the wealth of materials gathered in The Scores Project, we can ascertain how the identities and reception of these multifaceted experimental compositions shifted over time through the engagement of different communities of performers and audiences, some quite distant from the scores’ original authors. Accordingly, we have included ephemera typically omitted or sidelined in traditional scholarship and arranged these materials into constellations that facilitate new understanding of the works from which they derive. In other words, The Scores Project reimagines the format and user experience of scholarship on interdisciplinary arts by taking cues from the art itself. Through its accessible design, far-reaching historical narrative, and abundance of exciting primary materials, this project aims to create a compelling, dynamic model for the curation and communication of performance materials to the general public.
Even so, when such rich archival materials are available, we as readers, viewers, listeners, and participants do not construct the context for experimental scores from the ground up. To every work we encounter for the first time, we bring our past experiences and understandings of all the works we have encountered previously—experiences that undoubtedly color our reception of new ones. Those with academic training may assume the role of a hypothetical, idealized “reader” of literature, “viewer” of visual art, “listener” of music, or “participant” in performances and happenings. Accompanying these idealized readers, viewers, listeners, and participants are a host of other implicit assumptions about the context or habitus in which their encounters take place: private, undisturbed reading; contemplative viewing in a white-cube gallery; listening to a high-fidelity recording or in an acoustically optimized performance space; and so on. It is these baseline assumptions that many of the scores presented in this publication willfully disrupt. Yes, this publication is an invitation to explore. But arguably it does more, as do the scores featured within it. They invite us to rethink how one writes history or practices theory and philosophy, and they ask us to understand how artistic practice itself dislodges the familiar and, in doing so, creates new and provocative forms of life.
Notes
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Dick Higgins, “Intermedia” (1965–66), republished with commentary by Hannah Higgins in Leonardo 34, no. 1 (2001): 49–54; and Dick Higgins, “Statement on Intermedia” (1966), in Dé-coll/age 6 (1967), ed. Wolf Vostell, reprinted in In the Spirit of Fluxus, ed. Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss, exh. cat. (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1993), 172–73. See also Natilee Harren, “The Crux of Fluxus: Intermedia, Rear-Guard,” in Art Expanded, 1958–1978, ed. Eric Crosby with Liz Glass, vol. 2 of Living Collections Catalogue (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015), https://walkerart.org/collections/publications/art-expanded/crux-of-fluxus/; and Trevor Stark, “Passionate Expanse of the Law: Intermedia and the Problem of Discipline,” in Call It Something Else: Something Else Press, Inc. 1963–1974, by Alice Centamore and Christian Xatrec (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2023), 48–60. ↩︎
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Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” (1960), in The New Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966); Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria” (1968), in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). ↩︎
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A number of studies have laid groundwork pointing to the important role of scores in 1960s visual and performance art, including Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002); Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Branden Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (New York: Zone Books, 2008); Julia Robinson, “From Abstraction to Model: George Brecht’s Events and the Conceptual Turn in Art of the 1960s,” October 127 (Winter 2009): 77–108; Jane McFadden, Walter De Maria: Meaningless Work (London: Reaktion Books, 2016); and Natilee Harren, Fluxus Forms: Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). ↩︎
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See, for example, Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects (New York: Harper & Row, 1968); Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976); Roman Ingarden, The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity, trans. Adam Czerniawski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). ↩︎
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Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Score (n.),” https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/2363072221. Note as well that in German the word for a score is Partitur, which is of Latinate origin, deriving from partire, meaning to divide, partition, or share. ↩︎
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David Charlton and Kathryn Whitney, “Score,” Grove Music Online, 20 January 2001, https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.25241. ↩︎
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For a detailed treatment of the integration of orality and memory with early forms of medieval musical notation, see Anna Maria Busse Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). See also Thomas Forrest Kelly, Capturing Music: The Story of Notation (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015); and Hannah Higgins, “Notation,” The Grid Book (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). ↩︎
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Standardized Western notation, made accessible by the Western publishing industry, served to reinforce biases and stereotypes held by the West’s imperial and colonial plunderers, and they were thus more likely to approach the music of non-Western peoples as something to be extracted and exoticized rather than understood and appreciated on its own terms. See Glenda Goodman, “Sounds Heard, Meaning Deferred: Music Transcription as Imperial Technology,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 52, no. 1 (2018): 39–45. ↩︎
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For an example of an ethnocentric teleology that privileges Western classical music notation as a quasi-Hegelian synthesis of past attempts, see the entry on “Notation,” by Ian D. Bent et al., in Grove Music Online, https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.20114. Bent and his coauthors position Western classical notation as an ideal synthesis of a series of historical developments. But from a global perspective, the detailed specifications of modern Western notation is but one system among many. Even within Western Europe, dynamic markings did not appear until the seventeenth century, articulation marks emerged during the nineteenth century, and both were the product of various experiments forwarded by various composers from within Europe. See David Cope, New Music Notation (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 1976), 3. ↩︎
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Goehr, Imaginary Museum. ↩︎
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For an approach to some of the dramatic conflicts and scenes of social tension in New York–based experimental music in 1964, see Benjamin Piekut’s take in Experimentalism Otherwise (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). ↩︎
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Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises (Futurist Manifesto, 1913), trans. Robert Filliou, A Great Bear Pamphlet (New York: Something Else Press, 1967), accessible at https://www.ubu.com/historical/gb/russolo_noise.pdf. Filliou was a French artist associated with Fluxus alongside Dick Higgins, founder of Something Else Press, which issued this translation in chapbook form. ↩︎
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Luigi Russolo, Risveglio di una Città, originally published in Lacerba (1 March 1914): 72–73. ↩︎
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For a synoptic account of this period, see Carol Oja, Making Music Modern (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Of note, Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press (see note 12 above) reissued Cowell’s New Musical Resources in 1969, in acknowledgment of its renewed relevance. ↩︎
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Edgard Varèse and Chou Wen-chung, “The Liberation of Sound,” Perspectives of New Music 5, no. 1 (1966): 11–19. ↩︎
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Cage describes some of these influences in his famous 1937 essay, “The Future of Music: Credo,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 3–6. ↩︎
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George E. Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” Black Music Research Journal 22, Supplement: Best of BMRJ (2002), 215–46. ↩︎
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See Michael Zwerin, “A Lethal Measurement,” in John Cage: An Anthology, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Praeger, 1970), 161–68; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press; discussed and cited in Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950,” 227–28. See also Caroline A. Jones, “Finishing School: John Cage and the Abstract Expressionist Ego,” Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 628–65; and Rebecca Y. Kim, “John Cage in Separate Togetherness with Jazz,” Contemporary Music Review (2012): 63–89. ↩︎
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Varèse himself had an ambivalent attitude toward jazz that evolved from racist disapproval to a marginal, if inconsequential, curiosity during the 1950s. In 1957, Varèse convened recording sessions of Greenwich House Music School that brought in a largely white cast of jazz improvisers, with the noted exceptions of Art Farmer and Charles Mingus. See Brigid Cohen, “Enigmas of the Third Space: Mingus and Varèse at Greenwich House, 1957,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 71, no. 1 (2018): 155–211. ↩︎
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See Benjamin Patterson, “I’m Glad You Asked Me That Question,” in Benjamin Patterson: Born in the State of FLUX/us, by Valerie Cassel Oliver (Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2010), 110; and Benjamin Patterson, oral history interview by Kathy Goncharov, 22 May 2009, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-benjamin-patterson-15685#transcript. Patterson immigrated to Canada in search of work in 1957, then left in 1959 for France and Germany. He remained largely in Germany until his return to New York in 1963. He later returned to Germany, where he spent the rest of his life. ↩︎
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See, for example, David Toop’s interview with Ornette Coleman in David Toop, Exotica: Fabricated Soundscapes in a Real World (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999), 187. ↩︎
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At the grand register of cultural policy and transatlantic competition, jazz—much like abstract expressionist painting—was by midcentury being used to assert the artistic supremacy of New York over Paris, as well as an ideological agenda of democratic “freedom” against the Cold War threat of Communism. See Lisa Davenport, Jazz Diplomacy: Promoting America in the Cold War Era (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009); Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Timothy Brennan, Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2008); and Jairo Moreno, “Imperial Aurality: Jazz, the Archive, and U.S. Empire,” in Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique, ed. Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 135–60. For middle- to upper-class white people in the United States, jazz would also become the basis for the mimetic trope of the countercultural hipster while similarly serving as an “authentically” American inspiration for abstract expressionists and Beat poets, among many other artists and writers. For a historical account of this phenomenon, see Norman Mailer, “The White Negro,” Dissent (1957): 157–66. ↩︎
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Brown started his musical life as a trumpeter and big-band arranger, and while working as a recording engineer for Capitol Records from 1955 to 1960, he crossed paths with Black musicians including Count Basie and Ray Charles. See Jason Cady, “An Overview of Earle Brown’s Techniques and Media,” in Beyond Notation: The Music of Earle Brown, ed. Rebecca Y. Kim (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017). Brown also produced, from 1960 to 1973, a series of recordings titled Contemporary Sound Series for Time/Mainstream Records that would help expand the notoriety of the midcentury musical avant-garde. See D. J. Hoek, “Documenting the International Avant Garde: Earle Brown and the Time-Mainstream Contemporary Sound Series,” Notes 61, no. 2 (2004): 350–60. ↩︎
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See LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka], Blues People (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999); Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). ↩︎
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Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950,” 218. ↩︎
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La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low, eds. (with George Maciunas, designer), An Anthology of Chance Operations (New York: self-published, 1963); and John Cage and Alison Knowles, eds., Notations (New York: Something Else Press, 1969). Beyond these primary anthologies, practical and systematic guides for the use of experimental notations have since been published. See, for example, Howard Risatti, New Music Vocabulary: A Guide to Notational Signs for Contemporary Music (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975); and Gardner Read, Pictographic Score Notation: A Compendium (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998). ↩︎
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On the collaborative and improvisational practices of Cage, Tudor, Gordon Mumma, David Behrman, Ichiyanagi, and Takehisa Kosugi with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company of the 1960s and ’70s, see Benjamin Piekut, “Not So Much a Program of Music as the Experience of Music,” in Merce Cunningham: CO:MM:ON TI:ME, ed. Fionn Meade and Joan Rothfuss (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2017), 114–29. For more on Tudor’s work with modular synthesizers, see You Nakai, Reminded by the Instruments: David Tudor’s Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). ↩︎
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Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2005), 29. ↩︎
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See Amy Cimini, Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022). ↩︎
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Leah Dickerman et al., Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2005); and Leah Dickerman, “Dada Gambits,” October 105 (2003): 3–12. ↩︎
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See Molly Nesbit, “The Language of Industry,” in The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, ed. Thierry De Duve (Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1991); and David Joselit, “Dada’s Diagrams,” in The Dada Seminars, ed. Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkovsky (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2005). Regarding his decision in the 1960s to agree to the re-creation in edition of a number of his readymades that had been lost or destroyed, Duchamp explained that the readymade proposed “to wipe out the idea of the original, which exists neither in music nor in poetry.” Marcel Duchamp, quoted in Otto Hahn, “Passport No. G255300,” Art and Artists 1, no. 4 (July 1966): 7. ↩︎
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On sound poetry, see Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Douglas Kahn, Noise Water Meat (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin, eds., The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Nancy Perloff, Explodity: Sound, Image, and Word in Russian Futurist Book Art (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2016). See also Explodity’s associated interactive website: https://www.getty.edu/research/publications/explodity/index.html. ↩︎
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Trevor Stark, Total Expansion of the Letter: Avant-Garde Art and Language after Mallarmé (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020). See also Willard Bohn, Apollinaire, Visual Poetry, and Art Criticism (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1993). ↩︎
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Ralf Burmeister, Michaela Oberhofer, and Esther Tisa Francini, eds., Dada Africa: Dialogue with the Other, exh. cat. (Zürich: Scheidegger und Spiess, 2016). See also Kurt Beals, “Primitivismus: The Dada Rhythms of Rhythmus 21,” in Hans Richters Rhythmus 21: Schlüsselfilm der Moderne, ed. Christoph Bareither, Kurt Beals, Michael Cowan, Paul Dobryden et al. (Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012); and Kurt Beals, Wireless Dada: Telegraphic Poetics in the Avant-Garde (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019). ↩︎
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On the politics of Dada sound poetry and collage, see T. J. Demos, “Circulations: In and around Zurich Dada,” October 105 (Summer 2003); Demos, “Zurich Dada: The Aesthetics of Exile,” in Dickerman and Witkovsky, Dada Seminars; Hal Foster, “Dada Mime,” October 105 (Summer 2003); Megan R. Luke, Kurt Schwitters: Space, Image, Exile (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); and Stark, Total Expansion of the Letter. ↩︎
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Martin Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972); Eva Díaz, The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Helen Molesworth and Ruth Erickson, Leap before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933–1957 (Boston and New Haven, CT: Institute of Contemporary Art Boston in association with Yale University Press, 2015); and Eugen Blume et al., eds., Black Mountain: An Interdisciplinary Experiment, 1933–1957 (Leipzig: Spektor Books, 2015). For a digital archive of Black Mountain College’s history, see https://www.blackmountaincollege.org/politicsdigitalportal/. ↩︎
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Josef Albers, “Art as Experience,” Progressive Education 12 (October 1935): 391–93. The title of Albers’s essay is a nod to John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934; reprint, New York: Perigee, 1980). See also Jeffrey Saletnik, Josef Albers, Late Modernism, and Pedagogic Form (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). ↩︎
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Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, trans. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (New York: Praeger, 1953); and Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, trans. Howard Dearstyne and Hilla Rebay (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Museum of Non-Objective Painting, 1947). ↩︎
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Fabienne Eggelhöfer and Marianne Keller Tschirren, Paul Klee: Bauhaus Master (Madrid: Fundación Juan March, 2013), 49; Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, 16; and Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, 40–45. ↩︎
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See Kimberly Jannarone, Artaud and His Doubles (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). ↩︎
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Pierre Boulez, “Propositions,” Polyphonie, no. 2 (1948): 65–72. ↩︎
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For an account of the transmission of Artaud’s writings through Boulez, Cage, Tudor, and M. C. Richards, see Eric Smigel, “Recital Hall of Cruelty: Antonin Artaud, David Tudor, and the 1950s Avant-Garde,” Perspectives of New Music 45, no. 2 (2007): 171–202. On Artaud’s reception in the visual arts, see Frédéric Acquaviva and Kaira Cabañas, Specters of Artaud: Language and the Arts in the 1950s, exh. cat. (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2012); and Lucy Bradnock, No More Masterpieces: Modern Art after Artaud (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020). ↩︎
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Cage and Tudor also visited Black Mountain College in the summer of 1951, where Tudor performed an aggressive and dissonant (Artaud-inspired) program of fully notated piano pieces: Boulez’s Second Sonata and excerpts from Cage’s Music of Changes (1951). Cage first saw Robert Rauschenberg’s White Painting [three panel] (1951) the following summer, when it was included in Theater Piece No. 1 (1952). ↩︎
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Following the Alberses’ departure from Black Mountain in 1949, the college would subsequently come under the leadership of the poet Charles Olson, who officially became rector in 1953. For a detailed chronology, see Duberman, Black Mountain: Exploration in Community. ↩︎
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In Cage’s words, Theater Piece No. 1 was also strongly influenced by Artaud: “We got the idea from Artaud that theater could take place free of a text, that if a text were in it, that it needn’t determine the other actions, that sounds, that activities, and so forth, could all be free rather than tied together. . . . And this was extended on this occasion [Theater Piece No. 1] not only to music and dance, but to poetry and painting, and so forth, to the audience. So that the audience was not focused in one particular direction.” Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage (New York: Limelight Editions, 1988), 110. See also Branden Joseph, “Moving Images,” in Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). ↩︎
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For the overlapping oral histories of Cage’s otherwise undocumented Theater Piece No. 1, see Duberman’s exhaustive Black Mountain: Exploration in Community, particularly chapter 12, “A New Black Mountain,” 334–62, and the comprehensive accounts given in William Fetterman, John Cage’s Theatre Pieces: Notations and Performances (New York: Routledge, 1995), and Eva Díaz, “John Cage’s Chance Protocols,” in Experimenters. ↩︎
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See Catherine Craft, An Audience of Artists: Dada, Neo-Dada, and the Emergence of Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 3. ↩︎
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Craft, Audience of Artists, 44. Annette Leddy argues that an important but underrecognized influence on Motherwell’s ideas was an intense six-month visit to a group of “dissident surrealists” who were riding out World War II in Mexico City and who formulated their break with Surrealism in the journal Dyn. See Leddy, “The Painting Aesthetic of Dyn,” in Annette Leddy and Donna Conwell, Farewell to Surrealism: The Dyn Circle in Mexico, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012), 9–34. ↩︎
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Other revelatory, canon-forming exhibitions that cemented Dada’s place in narratives of twentieth-century art include Dada: Dokumente einer Bewegung (Düsseldorf: Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 1958), The Art of Assemblage (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961), and Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968). ↩︎
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Sandra Zalman, Consuming Surrealism in America: Dissident Modernism (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015). ↩︎
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Beginning with their first retrospective accounting in a 1970 exhibition in Cologne organized by Harald Szeemann and Hanns Sohm, happenings and Fluxus have been historicized as partner movements given the proximity of the artists’ social circles and aligned aesthetic and intellectual interests. However, much like the often paired movements of Dada and Surrealism, their appreciable differences are increasingly being recognized. Harald Szeemann and Hanns Sohm, eds., Happening & Fluxus (Cologne: Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1970). ↩︎
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George Maciunas, “Neo-Dada in Music, Theater, Poetry, Art” (1962), in Armstrong and Rothfuss, In the Spirit of Fluxus, 156–57. ↩︎
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Brecht’s notebooks show that Cage invited critique of the ideas that eventually became his famous lectures on indeterminacy given in Darmstadt, Germany, in September 1958. See Rebecca Y. Kim, “In No Uncertain Musical Terms: The Cultural Politics of John Cage’s Indeterminacy” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2008), 153–54; and Harren, Fluxus Forms, 60. Cage’s writings from this period are collected in Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1961). ↩︎
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Liz Kotz, “Post-Cagean Aesthetics and the Event Score,” in Words to Be Looked At, 59–98. On Ono’s complex, and often overlooked, relationship to this historical moment, see Brigid Cohen, Musical Migration and Imperial New York: Early Cold War Scenes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 179–222. ↩︎
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Brenda Dixon Gottschild, The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). ↩︎
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See Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950.” Jeremy Grimshaw details the influence of Indian classical music on Young in Draw a Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Recent studies charting a distinct lineage and theoretical framework for radical Black performance include Malik Gaines, Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible (New York: New York University Press, 2017), and Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York: New York University Press, 2015). In the fields of music studies, see Paul Steinbeck, Sound Experiments: The Music of the AACM (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022); Ana R. Alonso-Minutti, Eduardo Herrera, and Alejandro L. Madrid, eds., Experimentalisms in Practice: Music Perspectives from Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Jairo Moreno, Sounding Latin Music, Hearing the Americas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023); William Sites, Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020); and Anna Gawboy, “Theosophy and Esoteric Musical Modernism,” in A Cultural History of Western Music, vol. 6, A Cultural History of Western Music in the Modern Age, ed. William Cheng and Danielle Fosler-Lussier (London: Bloomsbury, 2024). ↩︎
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Eric Porter, “Jeanne Lee’s Voice,” Critical Studies in Improvisation 2, no. 1 (2006), https://www.criticalimprov.com/index.php/csieci/article/view/53/185. ↩︎
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Yvonne Rainer, Work 1961–1973 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974), 46. See also Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). ↩︎
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For more on dance scores of the 1960s and approaches to preserving and reconstructing performance works, see Alison D’Amato, “Mobilizing the Score: Generative Choreographic Structures, 1960–Present” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2015); Megan Metcalf, “Making the Museum Dance: Simone Forti’s Huddle (1961) and Its Acquisition by the Museum of Modern Art,” Dance Chronicle 45, no. 1 (February 2022): 30–56; and D’Amato’s and Metcalf’s contributions to Hanna B. Hölling, ed., Object—Event—Performance: Art, Materiality, and Continuity since the 1960s (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2022). The Merce Cunningham Trust has developed multimedia “dance capsules” to record and transmit the choreographer’s repertoire (https://www.mercecunningham.org/the-work/dance-capsules/); another model based on the work of Lucinda Childs is the digital publication A Steady Pulse: Restaging Lucinda Childs, 1963–78, ed. Bill Bissell (Philadelphia: Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, 2015), http://danceworkbook.pcah.us/asteadypulse/. ↩︎
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Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 16–33; and Peggy Phelan, “The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction,” in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 146. ↩︎
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Knowles did not participate in Cage’s classes, but she absorbed detailed accounts from her partner Dick Higgins while he was enrolled. Perhaps fittingly in regard to Knowles’s ongoing engagement with food as material, her relationship with Cage developed rather through their mutual participation in the New York Mycological Society. ↩︎
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As noted earlier, Higgins released re-editions of Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noise, Cowell’s New Musical Resources, and Richard Huelsenbeck’s Dada Almanach through his publishing house, Something Else Press, alongside prolific defenses of his peers’ work (see notes 12 and 14 above). ↩︎
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See Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” (1958), among other writings included in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Dick Higgins, “Intermedia” (1965–66), republished with commentary by Hannah Higgins in Leonardo 34, no. 1 (2001): 49–54; and Dick Higgins, “Statement on Intermedia” (1966), in Dé-coll/age 6, ed. Wolf Vostell (1967), reprinted in Armstrong and Rothfuss, In the Spirit of Fluxus, 172–73. ↩︎
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This term was invented by George Maciunas to describe the event scores of George Brecht. See Brecht, letter to Maciunas, circa 1963, Hanns Sohm Archive, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. ↩︎
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Dick Higgins, “Exemplativist Manifesto” (1976), in A Dialectic of Centuries: Notes towards a Theory of the New Arts (New York: Printed Editions, 1978), 159; reprinted in Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick Higgins, ed. Steve Clay and Ken Friedman (Catskill, NY: Siglio, 2018), 250. See also Harren, Fluxus Forms, 1–26. ↩︎
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Nam June Paik, “Expanded Education for the Paperless Society” (1968), Radical Software 1, no. 1 (1970): 7–8. See also Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Maciunas’ Learning Machines: From Art History to a Chronology of Fluxus (Berlin: Vice Versa Verlag, 2003). Harren, “Crux of Fluxus.” ↩︎
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Lawrence Halprin, The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment (New York: G. Braziller, 1969). ↩︎
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See Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 35–68; and Harren, "Crux of Fluxus.” ↩︎
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These debates over the correct recitation of English poetry were deeply ideological and frequently deployed in service of ethnolinguistic nationalist aims (for example, pitting “proper” English pronunciation against regional variants and dialects). On enunciation contests in the United States, see Nancy Glazener, Literature in the Making: A History of U.S. Literary Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 95–106; and in England, see Mark S. Morrisson, “Performing the Pure Voice: Elocution, Verse Recitation, and Modernist Poetry in Prewar London,” Modernism/modernity 3, no. 3 (1996): 25–50. On prosody as a site for debates over national culture, see Meredith Martin, “Prosody Wars,” in Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Jason David Hall (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), 237–61; and Meredith Martin, The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). On the rise of musical literacy in the nineteenth century, see Leon Botstein, “Listening through Reading: Musical Literacy and the Concert Audience,” 19th-Century Music 16, no. 2, Music in Its Social Contexts (1992): 129–45. ↩︎
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On deliberately prosaic works, see, for example, Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony: The United States (1885–1915): Recitative (1934–78), which was derived from archived courtroom transcripts; and the later work of Laura (Riding) Jackson prior to her renunciation of all her poetic works in 1938. See also John Hicks, “‘A Fairer House than Prose’: Verse and Its Others in American Poetry, 1850–1950” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2012). ↩︎
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Note also Al Filreis’s analysis of the Cold War context in which leftist poets of the 1930s were deliberately excluded from the canons of modernism that emerged from this 1950s version of modernism, which valued difficult, challenging poems whose political ideas—whether laudable or troubling—were obscured by the poetic impenetrability that only the heroic professional reader/interpreter could decipher. Mac Low is one of Filreis’s prime examples of an explicitly leftist poet who was excluded from mainstream poetry publications as a result of his too-transparent political commitments. Alan Filreis, Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 18–30 and 240–41. ↩︎
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Robert Frost, in a televised reading and discussion for Pittsburgh’s WQED, quoted in Newsweek, 30 January 1956, p. 56. ↩︎
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Sidney Lanier, The Science of English Verse (New York: Scribner’s, 1880). For the edition in archive.org, see https://archive.org/embed/scienceofenglish00laniiala. ↩︎
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Harriet Monroe, “Rhythms of English Verse,” Poetry 3, no. 2 (November 1913): 61–68; and continued in Poetry 3, no. 3 (December 1913): 100–111. Full text issues of Poetry are available via the Modernist Journals Project: https://modjourn.org. Further resources on quantity are to be found under the word “quantity” in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, in Derek Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974), and in the first four chapters of John Hollander, Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 3–90. ↩︎
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Amy Lowell, “The Rhythms of Free Verse,” Dial 64 (17 January 1918): 51–56. Lowell is responding to reviews of the second edition of William Morrison Patterson’s The Rhythm of Prose: An Experimental Investigation of Individual Difference in the Sense of Rhythm (New York: Columbia University Press, 1917), in which he reverses, as a result of his work with Lowell, his earlier stance and acknowledges a difference between vers libre and prose. ↩︎
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Kenneth Koch, “Fresh Air” (1955), in The New American Poetry, 1945–1960, ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 229–35; and Amiri Baraka, from “Black Art,” in William J. Harris, The LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991), 219. ↩︎
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In a more Futurist, technological approach to reconceiving the presentation of text in space and time, Robert Carlton Brown in 1930 proposed an optical reading device that would, in Jerome McGann’s description, “provide the reader with the power to read in all directions and at any speed, to change type size and type-face at will, to leap forward or backward in the text: to browse, to speedread, to connect any and all parts of the text in any and all ways,” and that “prophecies as well the practical emergence of computerized word processing and hypertextual fields.” Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 81–87, here 84. ↩︎
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Charles Olson, “Projective Verse” (1950) (Brooklyn, NY: Totem Press, 1959). See also the discussion of Olson’s essay in Kotz, Words to Be Looked At, 113–14. In broader terms, Kotz (Words to Be Looked At, 99–135) contrasts open-field compositions with the urbane collages of New York School poets in her discussion of John Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath. ↩︎
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See the preface to Augusto de Campos, Poetamenos (São Paulo: Edições Invenção, 1973), where the poet explains how certain typographic features such as spacing and the use of multicolored type are intended to contribute to the compositions as visual works while also providing guidance for an oral performance of the texts. ↩︎
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See Nancy Perloff, Explodity: Sound, Image, and Word in Russian Futurist Book Art (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2016); and the exhibition Concrete Poetry: Words and Sounds in Graphic Space, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 28 March–30 July 2017, https://www.getty.edu/research/exhibitions_events/exhibitions/concrete_poetry/index.html. ↩︎
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See Aleca Le Blanc, “The Material of Form: How Concrete Artists Responded to the Second Industrial Revolution in Latin America,” in Pia Gottschaller and Aleca Le Blanc, Making Art Concrete: Works from Argentina and Brazil in the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2017), 1–24. ↩︎
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Emmett Williams, ed., An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (New York: Something Else Press, 1967). ↩︎
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Undergirding this in part was the popular mass media philosophy of Marshall McLuhan, who helped artists imagine the utopian potential of newly globalized intermedia communications uniting image, text, and sound. See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Random House, 1967), and Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations (New York: Something Else Press, 1967). ↩︎
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Among modernists, one exception to this absence of the imperative mood would be the genre of the manifesto. See Mary Ann Caws, Manifesto: A Century of Isms (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds., Futurism: An Anthology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). ↩︎
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It is telling to observe where Lucy Lippard’s Six Years, a genre-defining chronology of conceptual art, begins: with an event score by George Brecht. Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York: Praeger, 1972). See also Kotz, Words to Be Looked At; and Robinson, “From Abstraction to Model.” ↩︎
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See, for example, Pavel Pys, “Momentary Arrest: Collecting Interdisciplinary Artworks,” Walker Reader, 21 May 2020, https://walkerart.org/magazine/momentary-arrest-collecting-interdisciplinary-artworks; Metcalf, "Making the Museum Dance”; Hölling, Object–Event–Performance; and Hanna B. Hölling et al., eds., Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2023). ↩︎
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