The addressee sides of Jackson Mac Low’s postcard scores are dated “Day of the Remnants of Bela / 29 April 1963.” The preceding phrase corresponds to the entry for 29 April in Angus MacLise’s Year (1962), a poetic calendar with dedicatory phrases for each day of the year in a format analogous to Roman Catholic saints’ days or to the Pataphysical Calendar of the French avant-gardist Alfred Jarry (1873–1907). In dating his works according to MacLise’s calendar, Mac Low aligns his performance works with a very small coterie of fellow experimentalists who would have recognized the reference to MacLise, including La Monte Young, who used the day names from Year to title and date the tape recordings of the drone-based musical collective known as the Theatre of Eternal Music. The calendar format suggests that event scores are something to engage with as part of an individual’s daily activities, while also opening up the possibility of synchronous engagement with an activity or prompt on the same day by a network of practitioners who are geographically dispersed. Mieko Shiomi would further develop the idea of synchronized, globally dispersed performances in her Spatial Poem (1965–75; see chapter 10).
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Title | Year (New York: Dead Language, 1962) |
Maker | Angus MacLise (American, 1938–79) |
Date | 1962 |
Type | artwork |
Location | Getty Research Institute, Jean Brown Papers, 94-B14562 |
Cite
MacLise, Angus. Year (New York: Dead
Language, 1962), 1962. Getty Research Institute, Jean
Brown Papers, 94-B14562. 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.
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