The Brooklyn Rail

Centered in a browser window and washed in the same mint green shade as the webpage background, a spiral bound notebook is splayed, open to two ruled paper sheets. The left page is blank, except for a few spots where the ink bleeds through from the other side and, about halfway down the page, a squiggle where someone has tested a ballpoint pen. By contrast, the right page is dominated by a web-like geometry of two concentric circles, cut into sectors by four diametrical lines. Bold crayon marks spider along radii and arcs, inscribed at points by alphanumeric tags (“1F,” “3F”). Below, a legend correlates numbers with styles of movement (“taut,” “relaxed”) and letters with sounds (“moan,” “grumble,” “gargle”). The drawing describes the itineraries of a dance—Yvonne Rainer’s Watering Place (ca. 1960)—as if seen from above.

The URL that corresponds to this page is that of The Scores Project, a digital and print publication focusing on textual and visual scripts for time-based compositions by artists practicing across dance, avant-garde music, Fluxus, mail art, concrete poetry, and happenings from the 1950s to the 1970s. On every refresh, the project’s landing page reveals a different score, each with its own hermetic inscriptions, in an algorithmic indeterminacy that rivals John Cage’s aleatory use of the I Ching: in the place of Rainer’s choreography, the viewer might instead encounter the hopscotch gridlines of Morton Feldman’s Intersection 3 (1953), the tilting lettering of Benjamin Patterson’s Paper Piece (1960), or another score altogether. From this amorphous origin, a click carries us to the table of contents, where we may navigate the editors’ introduction; eleven essays, each dedicated to a discrete work; and a hefty object index of over two thousand digitized scores, books, letters, press clippings, videos, and audio recordings drawn from the Getty Research Institute.

The book’s physical incarnation openly accedes its essential linkage to the website. Select images intersperse and illustrate paper pages of text—in all, eighty-four scans, photos, and archival documents, a far cry short of the couple thousand multimedia assets available online. Indeed, the opening page of each chapter and the caption for every image bear URLs to the associated webpages. Conceived foremost as a born-digital, web-based book, The Scores Project proposes a methodology for presenting writing on time-based media that toggles as nimbly between physical and digital formats as its subjects do between drawing and dance, text and performance, geometry and music.

Edited by Michael Gallope, Natilee Harren, and John Hicks, the project characterizes the cultural conditions that produced intermedia scores and the expanded field of possibilities that arose from their conception—not least figurative ambiguity, performative unfixity, and participatory response. The editors’ introduction sets the scene with an account of the intermedia entanglements that preceded their period of study: musical shorthands that expansively foster performers’ interpretations; Futurist, Dada, and Surrealist notations and diagrams; and the age-old oral tradition of poetic recitation. This prologue at times willfully complicates narratives sanctioned by the practitioners central to the book, querying the legitimizing relationships between score, its performance, and the resulting documentation. For example, the editors suggest jazz improvisation and lead sheets as one of several prehistories for musical indeterminacy—a genesis that Cage spurned for its orientation toward intuition, choosing instead to espouse formalist autonomy and fidelity to the score that, ironically, underwrote traditions of European classical music against which he outwardly rebelled. Conversely, the editors suggest that midcentury American poets’ repudiation of verse for prose—the articulation of which was not self-evident from meter or rhyme—prompted a need for validation. This, in turn, displaced private audiences of readers-aloud in favor of the writer as ideal orator. In both cases, a turn away from conventional technical markers of skill or beauty created a need for new types of authority, with their own potential to exclude on racial and classist terms. These arguments persuasively locate the seemingly iconoclast intermedia score within a longer lineage, while also hinting at covert conservative impulses that persist in the arts to this day.

My own first encounters with event scores were in archives, where such works as Mieko Shiomi’s Spatial Poem (1965–75) continue to enact themselves in acid-free armatures and humidity-controlled rooms. Like the authors of The Scores Project, my study of time-based work has taken me to strange corners of the web and world, from flipping through contact sheets in basement reading rooms to listening to decades old radio broadcasts on the Internet Archive. In a sense, The Scores Project explodes the research method to its component parts, making visible the scholarly labor of archival sleuthing, the amalgam of hearsay, light-sensitive chemicals, and scribbled incantations that amount to our understanding of a work at the moment of its first presentation. Gifting us visuals of rare notations, press clippings, recordings, and photographs, The Scores Project invites the reader into the manifold encounters that characterize the aftermath of any given performance.

Implicit in the easily-clickable buttons for linking to or citing an object or chapter is a conviction that the research continues and that the writing a given score can engender is not yet complete. Pedagogically, the editors pose questions—left deliberately unanswered—about authorial intent, reader response, the identities and skillsets of ideal performers, and rubrics for successful interpretation. They appeal to us to challenge omissions and expand the history alongside the contributors in the chapters that follow. The archival materials are in our hands and under our cursors. We may do with them what we will.