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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 score-traditionally defined as the written representation of a musical composition-as a tool for structuring experimentation in the nascent fields of performance art, conceptualism, and intermedia. They drew inspiration from unconventional musical notations devised in the early to mid-1950s by the composers Earle Brown, John Cage, and Morton Feldman. The new movement's use of experimental scores spread during the 1960s through publications, festivals, concerts, classrooms, networked correspondence, exhibitions, happenings, and a renewed awareness of score-like antecedents in the charts, diagrams, sketches, and written instructions of earlier avant-gardes, from Dada and Surrealism to the Bauhaus. By the later years of the 1960s, diverse communities of artists, musicians, poets, and dancers had transformed the possibilities of the score into an ever-expanding universe of textual, symbolic, and graphic marks. They used experimental scores to stage a multitude of practices that dismantled and recast the traditional boundaries of artistic media.

"For this performance, an ensemble of vocalists will interpret Raven Chacon's American Ledger No. 3 (2020), a score devoted to the journalist and anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells. Chacon, an artist, composer, and musician from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, often creates compositions in the form of graphic scores, trading traditional notation for visual symbols to be interpreted by performers, whether individually or collectively. In addition to utilizing his scores in performances, Chacon presents them as artworks, calling on viewers to interpret the symbols in much the same way as musicians."

"I'm a huge fan of Joan La Barbara. Her LP The Voice Is The Original Instrument is one of my favorite documents of the 1970's NY avant-garde. La Barbara is a master of advanced vocal technique. In addition to her own remarkable creative output, she's had a long career working with many of the greatest names in avant-garde composition - John Cage, Robert Ashley, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, David Behrman, David Tudor, and her husband Morton Subotnick. In my wanderings around the internet I've come across some of her wonderful scores and images of performances etc. I thought I'd pass them along. To see and learn more visit her website.   Voice Piece: One-Note Internal Resonance Investigation (1975)   Persistence of Memory (2009)   Circular Song (1975)   In the Shadow and Act of the Haunting Place (1995)   Performing in Berlin 1981   With Gordon Mumma and David Behrman in 1974   Working on Philip Glass' Einstein on the Beach in 1976   In 1974 with Philip Glass Ensemble with Dickie Landry, Richard Peck and Jon Gibson   With David Tudor, Paris 1974   With Dana Reitz and Phill Niblock (1975)   Playing chess with John Cage   Performing in 1976   Performing in 1976   In the studio with Morton Subotnick in 1984 Share this: TwitterFacebook Related at home with morton subotnick and joan la barbara January 29, 2016 Liked by 1 person joan la barbara's voice is the original instrument reissued by arc light editions May 4, 2016 Liked by 2 people on the early immersive music of joan la barbara, via mode records April 2, 2018 Liked by 2 people Post navigation Rising Tones Cross (Full Film)at home with morton subotnick and joan la barbara 2 thoughts on "the beauty of joan la barbara (scores and photographs)" Feminatronic February 9, 2016 at 8:46 pm Reblogged this on Feminatronic and commented: Something a little different as my Todays Discovery is this webs

"How do you play a picture? Composers and artists from John Cage to Brian Eno have experimented with notation to create extraordinary visual scores that rival the best contemporary art. Here, Notations21's Theresa Sauer introduces a selection of her favourites. "

"Christine Ödlund - graphic scores inspired by plant chemistry."

"Composer, performer and band leader Anton Lukoszevieze shares a series of graphic scores, each of which takes its title from a Lithuanian place name"

"Cornelius Cardew was a fascinating figure. Both in his life, and through his music, he posed questions with which I find myself in equal sympathy and conflict. He is undeniably one of the most important figures in the Post-War British avant-garde. Cardew, by all accounts, was a prodigy. During his early twenties he worked at the highest levels of performance. In 1958 (age 22) he won a scholarship to study at the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, and was promptly asked by Karlheinz Stockhausen to serve as his assistant. Stockhausen's recollections of Cardew are drenched in respect. He was one of the few people whom he allowed to work on his scores unsupervised. During the late 50's, influenced by John Cage and other members of his generation, Cardew abandoned Serialism and began to compose scores utilizing indeterminacy and experiment. It was this period of his work for which he is most remembered, and from which Treatise (our subject) comes. In 1967 he joined the iconic free-improvisation collective AMM with Lou Gare, Eddie Prévost, Keith Rowe and Christopher Hobbs, which advanced his sense of compositional possibility. The following year with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons he formed the equally important Scratch Orchestra, which grew into a large ensemble, preforming over the following four years."

"I first encountered Guidonian hands as an extension of my interest in graphic scores from the 20th century avant-garde. Beyond their shared use of drawing, and inherent beauty, the two have few conceptual links. Guidonian hands were a medieval mnemonic device (a system of learning aiding retention) designed to assist singers sight-sing (the sung realization of prima vista, or sight-reading). Their development is generally credited to an 11th centruy Italian music theorist named Guido of Arezzo, though the graphic use of the hand as a musical guide long predates the development of his technique. Within a Guidonian hand, each section of the hand indicated a specific note within the hexachord system (six-notes), over three octaves. In the absence of a score, once the graphic hand was memorized by a singer, a conductor would need only point to a series of notes on their hand. They are a fascinating fragment from the development of Western theory, as well as being objects of sublime beauty."

"Artist and composer Tom Phillips ponders musical notation, and the brief but glorious union of art and sound"

"smallest functional unit was founded in 2020 by Ute Wassermann, Tony Buck, Mazen Kerbaj, Magda Mayas, and Racha Gharbieh with the aim of performing and publishing unconventional scores by international composers. The first published edition, under the title Graphème Vol.1 will be launch in October 2021."

When a plant reacts to a butterfly larvae feeding on its leaves, it releases chemical substances, or compounds. The characteristics of these compounds have been analyzed in collaboration with the Ecological Chemistry Research Group at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and then transposed into amplitude and intensity of sinus tones, recorded at EMS (Electroacoustic Music in Sweden), Stockholm. Thus these beautiful graphic score and soundtrack by Swedish artist Christine Ödlund are direct transpositions of "the plant's life, struggle and death"."

"is new music journal focused on improvised music, open scores in various forms like prose, graphic and action notations. "

"Treatise, which was composed between 1963 and 1967, is considered to be Cardew's greatest achievement. It's also a total head-fuck for anyone who attempts to approach it. It's a 193 page graphic score with no instruction - completely in the hands of the conductor and musicians who interpret it."

"After his friend Toru Takemitsu, Toshi Ichiyanagi is one of the most famous Japanese composers of the 20th century. He was an early member of Fluxus and a student of both Aaron Copeland and John Cage, but unlike most of his contemporaries with similar pedigrees, he is largely unknown outside of the country of birth. His important contributions to Fluxus have been largely lost within the long shadow of historical revisionism. Like the efforts of many of his peers, they are somewhat obscured by the success of his first wife Yoko Ono."

Explore these beautiful (and at times perplexing) musical works of art, with pictures from Theresa Sauer's stunning Notations21 book."

"Music sketch diary. Prototyping. Generate music and synthesizers by sketching wavetables and scores."

This call for works has a fantastic list of references for listening and aural poetics.

"Icelandic composer/cellist/choral arranger Hildur Guðnadóttir's was brought onto the show's production team in hopes of creating a score haunting enough to make viewers really feel the danger behind the spring 1986 catastrophe.... she used field recordings captured at a now-decommissioned power plant in Lithuania (where the series was filmed) to build the show's eerie and ominous soundtrack."

"This documentary was made in 2009 by the film maker Nora Meyer, and follows Jem Finer's realisation, in 2005 and 2006, of Score for a Hole in the Ground, a sculptural musical composition sited in a forest in Kent. SFAHITG was made with a grant from the PRSF and the collaboration and support of Stour Valley Arts."

"Those of you sonically inclined might be interested in the latest weekend challenge from Marc Weidenbaum's Disquiet Junto project: "Read a map of the San Andreas Fault as if it were a graphic notation score," and then post the acoustic results to Soundcloud."