Variations on a Theme: Benjamin Patterson’s Scores Performance and conversation of the Fluxus founder’s early musical compositions

Any LA folks interested in the #scoresproject will likely be interested in this event (and vice versa) at the Getty on March 6.

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SCREAM AT THE SKY: Thurston Moore & Byron Coley talk with YOKO ONO (Arthur, 2007) SCREAM AT THE SKYThurston Moore & Byron Coley talk with YOKO ONO Photography by Eden Batki Originally published in Arthur No. 26 (Sept. 02007) Yoko Ono is a beauty. When we walk into the room f…

#scoresproject #notation “The strange thing was the homework. One day the homework was to listen to all the sounds in the city that day. And transpose that into musical notes. And so you would listen to noise and transpose it. That’s pretty good for the 1930s!”

arthurmag.com/2007/10/01/y...

The Scores Project: Experimental Notation in Music, Art, Poetry, and Dance, 1950–1975 A unique digital compilation of experimental scores, audiovisual materials, and source documents from the postwar avant-gardes, interpreted by experts on art, music, dance, and poetry.

Lots of great stuff on Tudor’s working methods (as a performer) with indeterminate scores in chapters 1-3 of the #scoresproject.

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The Scores Project: Essays on Experimental Notation in Music, Art, Poetry, and Dance, 1950–1975 The Scores Project presents 11 works or projects initiated between 1953 and 1975, that used scores within their realisation, their dissemination, their presentation, or their documentation. These scor...

Grateful for this review of the #scoresproject by @markleahy.bsky.social. Most of my colleagues have books of their own, but for me it’s a very wild new experience to have readers of the thing you worked on for a long time.

#fluxus #booksky #academicsky

leonardo.info/review/2025/...

The Scores Project: Interview with Kathleen Chalfant impersonating Yvonne Rainer (excerpt from Rainer Variations) (2001–2) A unique digital compilation of experimental scores, audiovisual materials, and source documents from the postwar avant-gardes, interpreted by experts on art, music, dance, and poetry.

In this one, Kathleen Chalfant is reenacting Rainer as interviewee. The cat appears around 3:30, is discussed by off-camera voices around 4:00 and appears to have been removed after a cut at 4:20. #scoresproject

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Whose cat is this? Richard Move is impersonating Yvonne Rainer for the purposes of reenacting an interview that is excerpted in Charles Atlas's Rainer Variations (2001-2). Is that cat impersonating Rainer's cat?

Whose cat is this? In this video from Charles Atlas's Rainer Variations (2001-2), Richard Move reenacts an interview with the choreographer Yvonne Rainer. Is the cat impersonating Rainer's cat? #scoresproject #academicsky #experimentalnotation

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The Scores Project | The Brooklyn Rail This book and website proposes a methodology for presenting time-based media that toggles as nimbly between physical and digital formats. It characterizes the cultural conditions that produced interme...

First review of the #scoresproject, by Nicole Kaack for the Brooklyn Rail.

“The Scores Project explodes the research method to its component parts, making visible the scholarly labor of archival sleuthing”

#academicsky #booksky #fluxus #arthistory #archivesky

brooklynrail.org/2025/11/art_...

The Scores Project: The Identical Lunch (San Francisco: Nova Broadcast Press, 1973) Alison Knowles has always shared authorship of The Identical Lunch with the composer Philip Corner. As she writes in the introduction to this book, “Philip midwifed if not actually preconceived The Id...

And more: "The Identical Lunch" (1973) by Philip Corner. (Both of these completely digitized btw). Plus all kinds of other documents in the "playback" and "archive" sections of this chapter. #scoresproject #academicsky #booksky #dh #arthistory #alisonknowles

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The Scores Project: “Journal of the Identical Lunch” (1968–69) Alison Knowles first published the score for The Identical Lunch in the last issue of The Outsider, a primarily Beat literary magazine published in small batches by Gypsy Lou and Jon Edgar Webb of the...

The first time the score for "Identical Lunch" was published was in a short magazine article in 1968-69. #scoresproject #alisonknowles #academicsky #booksky #dh #experimentalscores

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Link below to the chapter on Alison Knowles, "The Identical Lunch" (late 1960s-early 1970s) in the #scoresproject. The date is fuzzy because Knowles RETROACTIVELY designated her habitual lunch order as a performance work. That's not usually how a score works!
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The Scores Project: Letter from Sylvano Bussotti to David Tudor (22 May 1959) This is the letter Sylvano Bussotti included with his initial package of scores to David Tudor. It makes explicit the high level of trust the composer has in the performer’s ability to realize his ...

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#scoresproject #academicsky #experimentalnotation #dh

The Scores Project: David Tudor performing No. 3 from Sylvano Bussotti’s Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor (1959) Tudor regarded his realization of No. 3 as a personal breakthrough. After all, in providing a score that is more of a drawing and provides little of any guidance to the performer, Bussotti effectively...

This animation is a favorite from the entire project—the spotlight areas acknowledge plenty of fuzziness in relating Bussotti’s drawing-score to Tudor’s realization, but it nonetheless does risk an interpretation that is clear and falsifiable. #scoresproject #notation

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The Scores Project: Sylvano Bussotti: Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor (1959) This suite of pieces by the Italian composer Sylvano Bussotti represents some of the most visually expressive—even psychedelic—of any of the experimental notations that David Tudor performed during th...

“L’esspressione ‘for David Tudor,’ usata nel titulo, non vuole essere una dedica ma, per cosi dire, quasi un’indicazione di strumento” —Sylvano Bussotti, 1959
#scoresproject #academicsky #dh #experimentalnotation #musicology

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The Scores Project: Ursonate, in Merz 24 (Hanover, 1932) (1922–32) Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate is a forty-minute phonetic poem and is representative of Dadaism. It was first published in the magazine Merz in 1932. Schwitters coined the term Merz based on an advertisem...

Still, I often get "Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu" stuck in my head for long periods of time. #scoresproject #musicology #experimentalnotation #arthistory #dada #neodada #merz #schwitters #academicsky #archivesky #booksky

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The Scores Project: Introduction In the decades following World War II, the musical score emerged as a unique and powerful medium for experimental art. A new movement of visual artists, composers, poets, and performers reimagined the...

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Thinking about Schwitters's "Ursonate" today. For a good chunk of its gestation, the #scoresproject was going to have full chapters on two Dada precursors, "Ursonate" and "Karawane," but we narrowed the scope and now they only appear in introduction figs. 0.5, 0.6.

The Scores Project: Promotional collage of clippings and scores for a concert at the First Unitarian Society, Minneapolis, MN, printed in The Potboiler (January and February 1962) (22 January 1961) The author of this mock review collages together a Harper’s Magazine feature article on David Tudor, and includes a score reproduction, commentary on Tudor’s work, information about the performance, a...

"The author calls Tudor’s performance an indeterminate 'thing,' and compares experimental notation to a tradition of formalized diagraming that is more familiar but equally complex—a football playbook."
#scoresproject #academicsky #DH #notation #musicology #johncage

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The Scores Project: Object edition of Spatial Poem No. 3 (a fluxcalender) (1968) Departing from the map-based designs of Spatial Poem No. 1 (1965) and Spatial Poem No. 2 (1965), George Maciunas designed for No. 3 (Falling Event) a day calendar made of four simple bolts driven thro...

Follow the link for a complete digital reproduction of this calendar-cum-performance-documentation. Mieko Shiomi is the artist. George Maciunas the designer. The work is Spatial Poem no. 3 (Falling Event). #scoresproject #arthistory #dh #performanceart #academicsky

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The Scores Project: Simone Forti reading from her book Handbook in Motion (1974) as part of Meaningless Work, Get to Work, curated by Sarah Cooper and Tashi Wada (4 December 2021) A unique digital compilation of experimental scores, audiovisual materials, and source documents from the postwar avant-gardes, interpreted by experts on art, music, dance, and poetry.

Simone Forti reading from her book Handbook in Motion (1974) as part of Meaningless Work, Get to Work, curated by Sarah Cooper and Tashi Wada at the Getty Center in 2021.
#scoresproject #arthistory #experimentaldance #academicsky #booksky #DH

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The Scores Project: Unboxing video of George Brecht’s compendium of event scores, Water Yam (2024) The Getty Research Institute holds three 1960s Fluxus editions of Water Yam, each with a different style of container and a different number of cards included (between seventy-three and ninety-one). W...

Unboxing George Brecht's Water Yam. Best viewed at 2x speed, imo. #scoresproject #arthistory #fluxus #academicsky #booksky #DH #performanceart #archivesky

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The Scores Project: 7 Kinds of Sympathy (1976) 7 Kinds of Sympathy was sponsored by Vienna’s Museum of the 20th Century and realized there by a few couples in March 1976. The videotape of the program was shot and edited by Peter Kirby, an alumnus ...

Watch this 8 min instructional video for Allan Kaprow's "7 Kinds of Sympathy" (1976). "The tape is a notation system of that event. It is meant to be read like music or a game plan." #scoresproject #DH #arthistory #academicsky #booksky #happenings #fluxus #notation

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The Scores Project: Program for a performance by the group Theatre of Eternal Music, with La Monte Young, John Cale, Marian Zazeela, and Tony Conrad (ca. 1965) A unique digital compilation of experimental scores, audiovisual materials, and source documents from the postwar avant-gardes, interpreted by experts on art, music, dance, and poetry.

Program for a performance by the group Theatre of Eternal Music, with La Monte Young, John Cale, Marian Zazeela, and Tony Conrad, ca. 1965, a 2pp primer on listening to #drone music.

#scoresproject #academicsky #booksky #johncale #fluxus #arthistory #musicology

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The Scores Project: Notebook sketches for Three Satie Spoons and Satie for Two (1961–62) These notebook sketches show Yvonne Rainer combining multiple forms of scoring and description in order to articulate the dances Three Satie Spoons (1961), The Bells (1961), and Satie for Two (1962). ...

A window into Yvonne Rainer’s mind at work, in this case for a dance work set to Satie’s Gymnopédies.
#scoresproject #academicsky #dance #musicology #booksky #yvonnerainer #notation

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The Scores Project: Piece for Violins, Violas, and Sopranino Saxophone (January 1963) The composer and saxophonist Terry Jennings had gotten to know La Monte Young during the late 1950s as a saxophonist. During the late ’50s and early ’60s, both Jennings and Young were composing tradit...

Dynamics in this piece range from pp to pppp, which must count as extended technique for the saxophone.
#scoresproject #minimalism #terryjennings #onoloftconcerts #academicsky #lamonteyoung #booksky #musicology

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The Scores Project: X for Henry Flynt (April 1960) If one were to reconstruct a style history of the avant-garde of the 1950s and ’60s, one could mark this piece as an important intersection of the Neo-Dada avant-garde precipitated by John Cage, and t...

An ur-text for the #scoresproject. A single chord on traditional staff plus extensive text instructions for dynamics, attack, articulation, silences, rhythm, tempo, # of repetitions, etc. Young also sent Tudor a personal letter and audio recording.
#academicsky

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1st page of La Monte Young’s score for Integer Piece for Henry Flynt. A single chord on traditional staff notation plus extensive text instructions for dynamics, attack, articulation, silences, rhythm, tempo, # of repetitions, and how to format the integer in the (changeable) title for a specific performance.

An ur-text for the #scoresproject. A single chord on traditional staff plus extensive text instructions for dynamics, attack, articulation, silences, rhythm, tempo, # of repetitions, etc. Young also sent Tudor a personal letter and audio recording.
#academicsky

www.getty.edu/publications...

The Scores Project: String Music (1960) This score for a solo string instrument doubles as a work of visual art. Its imaginative and inventive four pages propose a novel symbolic system of musical notation. Each circle is a sound event: a l...

Quite the inventory of techniques in this score for “String Music” (1960) by Benjamin Patterson. Subsequent pages are worth a look—wd love to hear a performance of this!

#scoresproject #musicology #blackcomposers #fluxus #academicsky #booksky #arthistory #doublebass

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The Scores Project: Score plus related notes for Duet for Piano and String Instrument (August 1961) A unique digital compilation of experimental scores, audiovisual materials, and source documents from the postwar avant-gardes, interpreted by experts on art, music, dance, and poetry.

This score has notations for the use of extended technique for both piano and stringed instrument: imagine Tudor and Patterson performing this!

#scoresproject #musicology #arthistory #academicsky #booksky #fluxus #notation #extendedtechnique

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The Scores Project: Décollage Solo for Wolf Vostell, with a letter from Wolf Vostell (April 1960) Benjamin Patterson’s colleague Wolf Vostell had branded his work décollage, a technique of disassembling, deconstructing, or removing material from an object to create a work. In this score written fo...

Say it again: experimental scores are material objects. Here Ben Patterson uses layered transparency sheets (plus text instructions) to create the score for “Décollage for Wolf Vostell.”
#scoresproject #academicsky #musicology #arthistory #booksky #fluxus #openaccess

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The Scores Project: “Little Thing Like Mushroom Can Change Destiny,” Oregon Journal (5 July 1959) This article provides an overview of John Cage’s discovery of mushrooms in the forests around the Gate Hill Cooperative in Stony Point, New York, where Cage lived in a communal setting with David Tudo...

“The article narrates Cage’s explosive independent interest in mushroom identification that culminated in an appearance on an Italian quiz show where he won a considerable sum of money.”
#scoresproject #johncage #academicsky #mushrooms #arthistory #musicology #booksky

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The Scores Project: Notebook page, reprinted in George Brecht—Notebooks, ed. Dieter Daniels and Hermann Braun, vol. 3 (Cologne: Walther König, 1991), 127 (ca. late July 1959) George Brecht’s notes on this page read: We seldom find it practical to think in uni-dimensional terms, because of this situationality, this awareness of many dimensions, but analysis never seems v...

Love George Brecht’s diagrams. There should be more pentagonal concept clusters like this in art scholarship. 5 terms, 10 relations: packs a lot in!
#scoresproject #arthistory #musicology #fluxus #academicsky #booksky #performanceart #notation #diagrams #archivesky

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