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345

Title Event Score
Maker George Brecht (American, 1926–2008)
Date August 1965
Medium offset print
Type score
Location Getty Research Institute, Jean Brown Papers, 890164, box 3, folder 34

After George Brecht’s intensive period of composing event scores had ceased, he wrote this piece, titled Event Score, in August of 1965. As a reflection on the meaning and function of the intermedial format he had developed and honed, it considers the event score’s relationship to conscious and unconscious perception. Around the same time, one finds the following reflection in his notebook:

These notices are thoughts that came from zero. Very few of the hundred or so that were written down came directly from a specific experience. Though they are simply what they are (appropriately poems for some), they are connected in my mind with musical scores; they have so far seemed to me scores for events. (Why only listen?) They are thoughts that can float around in your head, and then sometime perhaps

There is a woman with a yellow hat sitting on a white chair.

There is steam on top of my ice water.

A phone rings rooms away.

(George Brecht, Notebook no. 13, 1964–Summer 1965, Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives, Museum of Modern Art, New York).

© 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Cite

Brecht, George. Event Score, August 1965. Getty Research Institute, Jean Brown Papers, 890164, box 3, folder 34. In The Scores Project: Experimental Notation in Music, Art, Poetry, and Dance, 1950–1975, ed. Michael Gallope, Natilee Harren, and John Hicks. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2025. https://www.getty.edu/publications/scores/object-index/345/.