About the Book
Individuals
working in and across the fields of visual art, music, poetry, theater, and
dance at midcentury began to use experimental scores in ways that
revolutionized artistic practice and opened up new forms of interdisciplinary
collaboration. Their experimental practices-associated with the
neo-avant-garde, neo-Dadaism, intermedia, Fluxus, and postmodernism-exploded
in notoriety during the 1960s in locales from New York to Europe, East Asia,
and Latin America, becoming foundational to global trends in contemporary art
and performance.
The Scores Project provides
an in-depth view of this historical moment. Through expert commentaries from
an interdisciplinary team of scholars with accompanying illustrations, this
publication examines a series of experimental scores by John Cage, George
Brecht, Sylvano Bussotti, Morton Feldman, Allan Kaprow, Alison Knowles,
Jackson Mac Low, Benjamin Patterson, Yvonne Rainer, Mieko Shiomi, David
Tudor, and La Monte Young. Ambitious, provocative, and playful, The Scores Project is an
illuminating resource to scholars and students who seek to understand this
innovative and historically complex moment in the history of art.
About the Author :
Michael Gallope is associate professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. His most recent book is The Musician as Philosopher: New York's Vernacular Avant-Garde, 1958-1978 (2024).
Natilee Harren is associate professor of contemporary art history and critical studies at the University of Houston School of Art and author of Fluxus Forms: Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network (2020).
John Hicks is a lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota.
Review :
This extraordinary digital publication illuminates the future of
performance scholarship by helping us see, read, and hear the history of its
scores. Wrestling some 2,000 historical documents, as well as audio and
video files, The Scores Project transforms and enriches our
understanding of the experimental, interdisciplinary furor of contemporary art
from the 1950s to the 1970s. Drawn from the remarkably wide-ranging and
fascinating archive assembled by the Getty Research Institute, The Scores
Project demonstrates the possibility of reaching beyond traditional art
historical blind spots that have overlooked not only artists of color, women,
and gender nonconformists but also the unruly sources of experimental art more
broadly.
The book includes a terrific introduction as well as eleven
suggestive scholarly essays that highlight individual artists, including Alison
Knowles, Yvonne Rainer, and Allan Kaprow, each of whom extended the
experimental musical scores of John Cage, La Monte Young, and Jackson Mac Low
to develop performance art, dance, and Happenings. I was especially delighted
to see attention given to David Tudor's 1950s performances and the exuberant
starts and stops that characterized sound poetry in the 1960s and '70s. The
print book is cross-referenced with the digital publication, creating a richly
resonant text for students, scholars, and all those interested in the history
of the avant-garde.
- Peggy Phelan, Ann O'Day Maples Chair in the Arts, Professor of
English and Theatre and Performance Studies, Stanford University
The Scores Project is an essential research tool for anyone
interested in the intersection of musical notation, art, poetry, and dance from
1950 to 1975. For the hundreds of digitized objects, each has a carefully
researched and easy-to-understand caption that implicates other works and
artists in its sprawling information network. The Scores Project's
flexible and accessible design offers a treasure trove of primary documents
that will help researchers at all levels produce historically grounded and
open-ended scholarship.
- Hannah B. Higgins, Professor of Art, University
of Illinois Chicago, and author of Fluxus Experience (2002)
and The Grid Book (2009)
