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403

Title Letter from George Brecht to M. C. Richards
Maker George Brecht (American, 1926–2008)
Date July 1963
Medium letter
Type correspondence
Location Getty Research Institute, Mary Caroline Richards Papers, 960036, box 6, folder 6

This letter from George Brecht to M. C. Richards from July 1963 captures the particular kind of conversation Brecht was able to have with a poet about the carefully composed language of his event scores. Explaining his aversion to using articles and connectives, Brecht admits, “My own leaning is toward having as little as possible do as much as possible.” The rest is a beautiful meditation on his sense of the extraordinariness of the ordinary and banal, his feeling that “all moments are equally miraculous.” Brecht’s references to “the center” and “centering” evince an awareness of Richards’s book-in-progress, Centering In Pottery, Poetry and the Person, which would be published the following year.

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

Cite

Brecht, George. Letter from George Brecht to M. C. Richards, July 1963. Getty Research Institute, Mary Caroline Richards Papers, 960036, box 6, folder 6. 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/403/.

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