Based on excerpts from the text: Keeping Score: Notation, Embodiment, and Liveness By Hendrik Folkerts.
“To approach a definition: the score is a notational device that connects the material of a discipline—ranging from music, dance, and performance to architecture, linguistics, mathematics, physics—and its systems of knowledge to a language that produces description, transmission, and signification, in order to be read, enacted, or executed in whatever form desirable.”
Make a score of your performance
1. Acts / scenes / chapters - how do the following take part in these and where?:
5. Sound / video - amplified voice? lights?
6. Props - are they activated? How do these move or change?
Cornelius Cardew, Treatise (1963–67), EP 7560, musical score (excerpt), assigned 1970 to Peters Edition Limited, London
English experimental music composer, and founder (with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons) of the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental performing ensemble. He later rejected experimental music, explaining why he had “discontinued composing in an avantgarde idiom” in his own programme notes to his Piano Album 1973[full citation needed] in favour of a politically motivated “people’s liberation music”. (wikipedia)
“Cardew’s method was premised on a dissolution of the hierarchies and boundaries between composer and interpreter, as well as between performers active in different fields of performance, from music to visual art. The Scratch Orchestra had no fixed leader or conductor; rather, everyone was equally involved and implicated in the enactment of the score. The orchestra consisted of both musicians and nonmusicians acting as one “assembly” in a collective state of continuous training and research. The name of the orchestra refers to each member notating their accompaniments (understood as “music that allows a solo”) in a musician’s scratch book, in whatever notational language they see fit: “verbal, graphic, musical, collage, etc.,” as Cardew put it in his “constitution” for the group.”
Scratch Orchestra link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8-4yl3Zvdo&feature=emb_title
Treatise (1963–67), Musical score.
“The show, curated by Barbara Held and Pilar Subirà (Possibility of Action: The Life of the Score at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona Study Center in 2008), reversed the conventional understanding of a score as an abstract representation of tone, taking instead as their starting point Cage’s contrary notion of the score as a representation of action with a unique and unpredictable result. The score is a generator of an action, they wrote, “to be performed, the outcome of which is unknown, and an end result that can never be repeated.”3 This view adheres to a typical chronology in which the score precedes the live enactment, standing as a precursor for a future iteration. The “unknown outcome” indicates the importance of chance and singularity assigned to the enactment of the score (particularly with respect to Cage), claiming it as the site of origin and performance as the site of singular presence, effect, and changeability.” (…) In the case of the Scratch Orchestra, its political dimensions include the democratic way its members developed a language for the score, in which they took a written instruction by Cardew and each developed it into myriad methods and forms of notation.”
This work belongs to Christou’s last compositional period, during which he experimented with a personal art form that involves stage performance, mythical archetypes, dramatic elements and avant-garde materials and means. At this time, he also introduced new concepts, such as metapraxis and protoperformance, in order to engage with elements of the unconscious, influenced, in particular, by the field of analytical psychology as shaped by the Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung (1875–1961). (From: https://llllllll.co/t/experimental-music-notation-resources/149/367)
Strichnine Lady Link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVSTUR6uBSI
“The score for his late piece Epicycle (1968) includes both written instructions and drawn images that describe how to spatialize and time the performance, all of which lead to the execution of a “continuum”—that is, a continuous space for performance that participants could step in and out of and where, potentially, every observer could be cast as a performer”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuPHwdazjSs
(…) The interpreter becomes as much the “author” of the score or composition as the composer, if not more so, and the prevalent dialectics of origin(al) and result should be abandoned. Through the transaction of interpretation and subsequent execution (or in the case of Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra, the fabrication of score within a collective), the score becomes part of its own iteration. Within the language systems that are produced, the relationship between score and performance evolves as interdependent, and meaning is produced through a process of transaction, iteration, and repetition, akin to the notion of iterability that Jacques Derrida discusses in “Signature Event Context.”
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer, music theorist, artist, and philosopher. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. (wikipedia)
«Fontana Mix» consists of a total of 20 pages of graphic materials: ten pages covered with six curved lines each, and ten sheets of transparent film covered with randomly-placed points. In accordance with a specific system, and using the intersecting points of a raster screen, two of the pages produce connecting lines and measurements that can be freely assigned to musical occurrences such as volume, tone color, and pitch. The interpreter no longer finds a score in the customary sense, but rather a treatment manual for the notation of a composition.
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“(…) the score can easily remain within the autonomy of its own materiality, but it may also manifest as or lead to the production of another object or live enactment, sketched out by the parameters of the score’s language.”
Atelierul—scenariul (The Studio—the film script) (1978), charcoal, colored pencil, and pastel on paper, 89.5 x 116.8 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York
Script developed for the performance film The Studio (1978)
“The script for The Studio, which consists of written instructions accompanied by miniature drawings of Brătescu’s studio, invokes this space as a stage that is literally inscribed with the actions of the artist: lie down, wake up, walk around, sit, lie down, etc. In the film, the transition between the first two scenes (“The Sleep” and “The Awakening”) and the third sequence (“The Game”) marks the passage from Brătescu’s purely private experience—sleeping and awakening, unaware of any external presence—to a situation in which the artist is conscious of the camera’s gaze and starts to perform. Brătescu is both the subject that performs and the object that is observed by herself as the one operating the camera; her studio is both a private and a public space. The script for The Studio is an important interlocutor between the subjectivity and objectivity that is enacted in the simultaneously private and public atmosphere of the artist’s studio. The figures she draws to represent herself in the score, abstractions of her own body, constitute a rudimentary style of self-portraiture. The text that accompanies and is superimposed on these drawings, in turn, references the actions of her body that manifest in the space of the studio as well as on film. The score highlights Brătescu’s role as author, interpreter, actor, and spectator in her work as it moves between self-portraiture, auto-instruction, and enactment. “
Film Still from The Studio, 1978.
“(…) operations of chance, the relationship between language (as score) and event, and what Lucy Lippard described as the “dematerialization of the art object” in the American art context of the 1960s and 1970s: The curators’ selections included Yoko Ono’s instructional scores, Ian Wilson and Robert Barry’s conversation pieces, and Lawrence Weiner’s instructions for wall drawings, to name a few examples. Lippard’s notion of the dematerialized encompasses a wide range of media in which “the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary” and that “stress the acceptively open-ended.”
Conversation Piece, an event score from Grapefruit, 1964.
Joseph Beuys (12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German Fluxus, happening, and performance artist as well as a painter, sculptor, medallist, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist, and pedagogue. (wikipedia)
Score for Action with Transmitter (Felt) Receiver in the Mountains, 1973
Founded in 1960 by the Lithuanian/American artist George Maciunas, Fluxus began as a small but international network of artists and composers, and was characterised as a shared attitude rather than a movement. Rooted in experimental music, it was named after a magazine which featured the work of musicians and artists centred around avant-garde composer John Cage.
The Latin word Fluxus means flowing, in English a flux is a flowing out. Fluxus founder Maciunas said that the purpose of Fluxus was to ‘promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art’. This has strong echoes of dada, the early twentieth century art movement.
Fluxus played an important role in opening up the definitions of what art can be. It has profoundly influenced the nature of art production since the 1960s, which has seen a diverse range of art forms and approaches existing and flourishing side-by-side.
Fluxus had no single unifying style. Artists used a range of media and processes adopting a ‘do-it-yourself’ attitude to creative activity, often staging random performances and using whatever materials were at hand to make art. Seeing themselves as an alternative to academic art and music, Fluxus was a democratic form of creativity open to anyone. Collaborations were encouraged between artists and across artforms, and also with the audience or spectator. It valued simplicity and anti-commercialism, with chance and accident playing a big part in the creation of works, and humour also being an important element.
Many key avant-garde artists in the 60s took part in Fluxus, including Joseph Beuys, Dick Higgins, Alice Hutchins, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Ben Vautier, Robert Watts, Benjamin Patterson and Emmett Williams. (https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/f/fluxus)
Intentionally uncategorizable, Fluxus projects were wide-ranging and often multidisciplinary, humorous, and based in everyday, inexpensive materials and experiences—including everything from breathing to answering the telephone. When asked to define Fluxus, Maciunas would often respond by playing recordings of barking dogs and honking geese, perhaps confounding his questioner but also demonstrating the experimentation and embrace of absurdity at its core. Performances—which Fluxus artists called “Events,” in order to distinguish them fromHappenings and other forms of performance-based art—were a significant part of the movement. These were largely based on sets of written instructions, called “scores,” referencing the fact that they were derived from musical compositions. Following a score would result in an action, event, performance, or one of the many other kinds of experiences that were generated out of this vibrant movement. (https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-fluxus-movement-art-museums-galleries)
In many ways, most Fluxus ‘scores’ (for music or other kinds of performance and/or composition) are fairly legible as scripts for performance/enactment; i.e. the text comes first and the performance after (if at all). Certainly, one of the interventions (and charms) of Fluxus scores were the openness of the scores, where interpretation and chance were much more important than following the letter of the law, as one might in traditional sheet music, for example. As such, reading Fluxus scores as performance texts allows us to see how writing can activate art/life works that writing cannot contain or control. (https://jacket2.org/commentary/how-make-us-flux-scoresscriptsinstructions)
Toshi Ichiyanagi. Music for Electric Metronome. 1960 (Fluxus Edition announced 1963). Score. Master for the Fluxus Edition, typed and drawn by George Maciunas, New York. Ink and typewriting on transparentized paper, 11 3/16 x 15 3/16″ (28.4 x 38.5 cm)
Yasunao Tone. Anagram for Strings. 1961 (Fluxus Edition released 1963). Score. Master for the Fluxus Edition, typed and drawn by George Maciunas, New York. Ink and typewriting on transparentized paper, 8 ¼ x 11 11/16 (21 x 29.6 cm)
“While these scores can be enacted, their producers considered them stand-alone art objects and often exhibited them in galleries to be experienced for their visual qualities, for example in Tokyo’s Minami Gallery, where the 1962 Exhibition of World Graphic Scores introduced works by Fluxus artists George Brecht, Dick Higgins, and La Monte Young to a Japanese audience.” (https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2012/12/21/exhibiting-fluxus-keeping-score-in-tokyo-1955-1970-a-new-avant-garde/)
“(…) the score can easily remain within the autonomy of its own materiality, but it may also manifest as or lead to the production of another object or live enactment, sketched out by the parameters of the score’s language.”
To wade into the muddy waters of the score as an “original,” it is key to look more closely at the score’s relationship to temporality and chronology. In the traditional musicological sense, the score acts as a precursor to an event. Each live enactment can be traced back to the score as a kind of “core material,” so that in the score future performances—and thus temporalities—are latent. Additionally, a score can emerge from a live iteration, or, at the least, may be adapted according to it. Though highly unstable in terms of representation, the score has a documentary aspect—and in turn becomes a forecast of future performances—thus further augmenting the complex multi-chronicities that the score conjures.
Filipino composer José Maceda. Trained as a concert pianist in the 1930s and later obtaining degrees in musicology, anthropology, and ethnomusicology in the United States, Maceda started composing his major works in the 1960s.
(…) Maceda’s lifelong endeavor (he died in 2004): a dissimulation of the cultural hegemony of Occidental music and its core principles of logic and causality in favor of researching a set of values indigenous to the eco-social relations, oral and mystical traditions, production of musical instruments from natural materials, and concepts of time in Southeast Asian culture26—in short, a decolonization of Filipino music and its forms of notation in the context of Southeast Asia.
One of Maceda’s most ambitious works, entitled Ugnayan (Correlation, 1974), is a composition of Filipino village music that was scored and recorded on twenty channels that were then broadcast simultaneously on twenty of Manila’s radio stations. Hundreds of thousands of the city’s residents gathered in public spaces with portable transistor radios to listen to the different tracks created for each station, with the citizenry collectively assembling the composition in a massive public ritual of converging indigenous history, time, and space in the urban fabric.
“Performance, as an act that exists momentarily, has been generally discussed within an archival logic that privileges materiality over immateriality, celebrating its ephemerality, impermanence, and ontological unicity—“performance’s being … becomes itself through disappearance,” as Peggy Phelan initially put it.32 In his catalogue essay for the 1998 exhibition Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Paul Schimmel even goes so far to say that performance is constituted by a drive towards destruction, marking an “underlying darkness” in performative work that is informed by a seemingly Freudian death drive.33 The definition of performance as that which cannot remain and thus “disappears” relies on a rationale that considers performance as antithetical to history, memory, and the archive, an unjust fate it shares with other immaterial practices, such as oral histories, storytelling, and gestural practices, that are also always incomplete, always reconstructive, and thus escape lineage to a singular original.”
“Under this new understanding of the archive as including the corporeal, the body is no longer the object on which a choreographic notational device is projected. The flesh becomes the score, the muscle, and the tissue—the languages through which a work is interpreted, transmitted, embodied, and then performed. This paradigm defies an understanding of the archive as an architecture of objects or documents and opens up ways to think about it anew, as reflecting movement and sound, bodies and waves, time and variations. Within this archive structure, the flesh is activated as a “physicalized relational field of interaction, intensities, techniques, histories, traces, and relicts of experienced information … with its own history and genealogy,” as Van Imschoot argues.38 This position paves the way for a different understanding of the score, away from the terms of a material object to something that can be held in the human body, or, at the very least, exists always in connection with embodiment through enactment.”
From the late 1960s on Ladik started to publish her poems and, subsequently, to perform and record them as speech acts. During these performances, which often included music and choreographed movement, she transformed the language of her written poetry, which necessarily adhered to a linguistic system of regulation. Vowel prolongation, repetition of consonants, words that seem to come from her gut, her throat, her mouth; such techniques became an early repertoire that was often performed as a shamanistic ritual, enacting the poems through the artist’s body, as an extension of her voice and her language. Sentences became embodiments, words produced their meaning through ritualized gestures, letters were spat out or swallowed—a corporeal manifestation of language.
1932-2016
Pauline Oliveros’ life as a composer, performer and humanitarian was about opening her own and others’ sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Her career spanned fifty years of boundary dissolving music making. In the ‘50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. In the 1960’s she influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual.
She founded “Deep Listening ®,” which came from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation and electro-acoustics. She described Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds. (https://paulineoliveros.us/about.html)
Published in 1974, Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations is one of the most seminal, if not under-recognized, works in late 20th century avant-garde musical thought. Within it, the grande-dame of American Minimalism not only departs from standard musical notation, but with the entire conception of where music grows from, and how it can be realized. Her focus lies on the cognition of sound – largely through the practice of meditation, and group participation. She highlights the virtues of meditation for making sounds, imagining sounds, listening to, and remember sounds, and sets into action twelve text scores to help practitioners realize these new relationships. Sonic Meditations is as much a workshop for use, as it is a series of pieces. (https://blogthehum.com/2016/09/13/pauline-oliveros-sonic-meditations-1974-the-complete-text-and-scores/)
(b. 1960, Mexico City) is an experimental composer, sonic architect and performance artist.
Acrylic on polyester military blanket 152.4 × 208.3 cm (detail)
In War Map, Galindo uses a military-green blanket as the substrate for a printed composition drawn from collaged and overlayed representations of immigration patterns as digitally mapped on the website Lucify.com. The blanket was donated by Mr. Kurt Heldmann, who works in the reception camp for refugees in Calden, Germany. By combining the visual languages of maps and graphs; musical notation; and more organic, natural motifs suggesting proliferation and motion, the artist skillfully demonstrates that these strategies for visually representing movement through time and space have much in common, and that all movements — even tragic or difficult migrations of people — can be represented such that their own subtle rhythms and musicality are revealed. Galindo describes the digital representations of migration patterns as “surprisingly archaeological” in their look, yielding the sense of a surreal, Borgesian map, and explains that he manipulated the work’s various shades of blue in an effort to mimic the Aegean Sea. (http://www.magnoliaeditions.com/artworks/we_all_have_a_place_at_the_table/)
Score for We All Have a Place at the Table (2017)
Acrylic on cotton tablecloth 54.2 × 157.5 cm (detail)
His third work, We All Have a Place at the Table, is printed on a found tablecloth that still bears stains from meals at the refugee camp. All of the abstract patterns and shapes printed upon its surface were derived from the modest but sophisticated embroidery that already adorned the tablecloth – a simple pattern of repeated small modules whose uncanny resemblance to systems of notation and representation used in music or mathematics appealed immediately to the artist.
(http://www.magnoliaeditions.com/artworks/we_all_have_a_place_at_the_table/)
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