Overview

A collection of essays examining experimental scores and source documents from the postwar avant-gardes, interpreted by experts on art, music, dance, and poetry. Individuals working in and across the fields of visual art, music, poetry, theater, and dance in the mid–twentieth century began to use experimental scores in ways that revolutionized artistic practice and opened up new forms of interdisciplinary collaboration. Their experimental methods—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. The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at www.getty.edu/publications/scores/. Also available are free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book.

Full Product Details

9781606069332

Table of Contents

Reviews

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 Wrestling some 2,000 historical documents, as well as audio and video files, The Scores Project transforms and enriches our understanding of the experimental, interdisciplinary furor of contemporary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)

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)

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

Author Information

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.

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