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 scores are accompanied by contextualising essays and digitised copies of printed, audio, and video material in a web environment that mixes archive, essay collection, anthology and exhibition. Each key work is represented by multiple items including photographs, video clips, notebooks, correspondence, publicity materials, as well as drawings, notations, diagrams, instructions and other forms by which the score is presented.

“By foregrounding the materiality, social history, and performance culture of experimental scores, The Scores Project refocuses attention away from well-worn disagreements over scores, performances, and musical works in the philosophy of music.” (p. 8-9)

In their chronological order the projects featured shift the focus from music (Morton Feldman, John Cage, David Tudor) through performance and poetry (Ben Patterson, George Brecht) to film and multisite events (Mieko Shiomi, Allan Kaprow). Each of these involves a score in some variant manner.

“In its most basic sense, the score orders and organizes actions and events in time; more simply still, it can be used to conceptually frame and thus draw attention to phenomena already unfolding in everyday life.” (p. 32)

The excitement of the score and of the variant realisations or interpretations they generate is evident across the essays, as the editors and authors articulate their encounters with these archive materials and trace the different iterations and expressions they prompted.

“[Event score] notations became a remarkably powerful tool in transforming the artwork from an inert object into a wildly transmutable idea capable of migrating through any medium imaginable.” (p. 39)

The publication has an additional aim to find better ways to share and educate audiences about these complex and untidy works. These are works that in library or conservation terms involves bits of paper, cards, grainy video recordings, notes and sketches. Digital technology and an online platform allow readers and viewers to engage with these in new ways, and to encounter them in the context of framing essays and scholarship.

“[Nam June] Paik’s chart [in ‘Expanded Education for the Paperless Society’] is part of a manifesto arguing the urgent need for integrating multimedia technology into arts pedagogy – precisely what The Scores Project seeks to realize.” (p. 39)

The project also seeks to place these works in the wider sweep of the cultural history of the twentieth century, locating them at a period of dynamic creativity and social change.

“Ultimately, visual and performance artists’ embrace of scores as a generative tool was as consequential for the period of transition from modernism to postmodernism as was minimalism’s activation of the space of the beholder and pop art’s intermingling of high art with the low culture of mass media.” (p. 40)

The primary references or contexts remain Western musicology, art history, with a strong focus on US artists and works, but the essayists take care to acknowledge how these artists drew on modes and ideas from other cultures and how artists outside a white North American context were active participants in the networks and practices described.

“[The scores presented in this project] invite us to rethink how one writes history or practices theory and philosophy, and they ask us to understand how artistic practice itself dislodges the familiar and, in doing so, creates new and provocative forms of life.” (p. 55)

The authors are critical of instances of casual appropriation of elements from other cultures and of the dismissal or marginalisation of musical cultures outside the western model, but they also show through the material evidence how artists in Japan and Eastern Europe, in South America, and within the Black Arts movements in the US contributed significantly to the theorisation, development and distribution of scores.

“[W]e have included ephemera typically omitted or sidelined in traditional scholarship and arranged these materials into constellations that facilitate new understanding of the works from which they derive. In other words, The Scores Project reimagines the format and user experience of scholarship on interdisciplinary arts by taking cues from the art itself.” (p. 54)

With a project of this scale, it was not possible to read and listen to and watch everything included, so as a reviewer I have read the contextualising essays and the introduction to the project by the editors and have followed a few threads or routes through the mass of material. Some projects I have seen in live performance and some artists I am more familiar with, so these drew my attention. Jackson Mac Low’s ‘Three Social Projects’ (1963) is one small work within the large body of poetry, performance, writing and action by this writer. In his discussion of the piece, John Hicks considers how the typewritten postcards with their minimal instructions contrast with the impact of their potential realisation. Visually they echo concrete poetry, in process they belong with mail art, and in realisation they have the potential to bring about social change.

“Viewed as a group, the six postcards Mac Low mailed to [Ben] Patterson in April 1963 explore several axes along which the idea of the score was expanding: as public or collective performance, private reflection, political action, an art form of the everyday, an orientation towards process, and a tool for artistic collaboration. At the same time, these scores maintain their connection to existing genres and performance contexts such as mail art, protest art, poetry, music, and theatre. Nonetheless, their richness derives less from the pure potentiality of all these possible modes than from the need to make and commit to choices among them along the way to realization: to find a way and make it work.” (p. 170)

The discussion of Yvonne Rainer’s ‘We Shall Run’ (1963) considers a very different set of scores and a very different project. Rainer’s drawings, notes, diagrams and maps relate to a specific dance project. They operate to record her thoughts, to test out ideas for movement, and to plan sequences of action.

“[Yvonne Rainer] was experimenting not only with moving bodies but also with nimbly creating new methods of transmission as she turned to the page for choreography, communicating, and archiving gestures.

[…] As she played with different methods for chronicling action, she underlined how variable the use of the score could be in post-Cagean dance. In doing so, she revealed that the model of the textual score might have been fruitful for 1960s choreographers not despite but because of the fact that it was in some ways a bad fit for dance. Its inadequacies fuelled more innovation.” (p. 188)

The range of material offered in the project and the links and connections created among the disparate ephemeral and more stable elements give a rich resource for researchers, makers, and audiences to explore. The editors declare this as part of their intention:

“This publication is an invitation to explore. Experimental scores are philosophically and historically complex entities, a key reason they became so fascinating and popular during the 1960s. We hope the unified multisensory format of The Scores Project facilitates a comparative understanding of multiple realities and modes of existence for each score that may have been difficult if not impossible to imagine in the traditional physical spaces of an archive, gallery, or performance venue.” (p. 52)

The selection of works has a certain quirkiness that comes from an attempt to represent variety while also offering a chronological sequence and a suggestion of development. In practice, these works emerged in an overlapping, intersecting network of makers, performers, and contexts that is difficult to tie to such a structure. Therefore, the experience of wandering among the online resources may be closer to the relationship of the pieces, than the sequence of essays suggests.