Experimental Scores in the Visual, Literary, and Performing Arts, 1950s–1970s: The Scores Project

FAIN: FEL-283047-22

Natilee Harren
University of Houston (Houston, TX 77204-3067)

Research and writing leading to a digital book on experimental music scores by avant-garde artists of the 1950s to 1970s. 

The Scores Project is a free, open-access, web-based, media-rich digital publication that will present and analyze a curated selection of groundbreaking experimental scores composed by avant-garde artists in the 1950s–1970s, drawn from the holdings of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Art historian Natilee Harren, leading an interdisciplinary team of art and dance historians, musicologists, and poetry scholars, will curate an illuminating array of archival and audiovisual materials accompanied by interpretive essays in order to bring experimental scores and their historical context to life for contemporary audiences. The project will make significant amounts of primary materials accessible and engaging for scholars, students, and the general public. Work on The Scores Project will also advance and improve the development of Quire, a sustainable, multiformat digital publishing framework that will be released as open source leading up to the launch of The Scores Project in 2023.

Associated Products

"The Time of Diagrams: a theory of notation" (Article)
Title: "The Time of Diagrams: a theory of notation"
Author: Natilee Harren
Abstract: Diagrams are visual structures that, while immediately spatial in appearance, invite us to confront time in its simultaneous multiplicity, outside the bounds of linear progression and development. Diagrams collapse the past into the present and afford the opportunity to imagine divergent futures. While the diagram has been adopted as a theoretical model by historians of art, music and performance in terms of its administration of materials and gestures in space, we still lack a thorough articulation and elaboration of the diagram’s peculiar relationship to time. This speculative essay expands on arguments initiated in Harren’s book, Fluxus Forms: Scores, multiples, and the eternal network (University of Chicago, 2020), regarding the fundamentally diagrammatic nature of Fluxus event scores in order to consider all experimental scores as a genre of diagram that bears a philosophically complex relationship to temporality. Moving beyond the case of Fluxus, Harren gestures to a broader range of artistic diagrams and experimental performance scores (e.g. from Dada, Yvonne Rainer, Lawrence and Anna Halprin, among others), as she considers the diagram on more theoretical grounds, moving between the diagrammatologies of Frederik Stjernfelt and Gilles Deleuze (who receives special emphasis) in order to account for diagrams’ multifaceted temporal address. Ultimately, Harren argues, the ‘real’ time of the diagram faces the past in relation to the form it describes, whereas the ‘virtual’ time of the diagram is the infinite future space to which it may connect through (actualizations of) formal correspondences. For the present, the score-as-diagram is thus both a wedge between and a bridge connecting the past and the future. Notation emerges as an applied model of becoming.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2022.2224218
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Performance Research
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

"Fluxus Forms of Activation" (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: "Fluxus Forms of Activation"
Abstract: Following the Fluxus collective’s debut festival in late 1962, leading organizer George Maciunas wrote to Nam June Paik: “One can’t just perform the same single think [sic] over & over & over & over. We try to vary every piece in each performance.” Through their experimental performance and publishing practices, Fluxus artists tested how scores and other conceptual propositions could be interpreted and received in unforeseen ways. In a presentation that expands on arguments presented in her award-winning book Fluxus Forms: Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network, Natilee Harren will consider the multitude of ways Fluxus artists and the inheritors of their legacy have activated and remade one another’s works, both in the moment of the collective’s emergence in the 1960s and in more recent decades as Fluxus works have found their way into museum collections, conservation labs, and the hands of the public.
Author: Natilee Harren
Date: 11/16/2022
Location: Online; hosted by Institute of Materiality in Art and Culture, Hochschule der Künste Bern, Switzerland
Primary URL: https://activatingfluxus.com/2022/09/24/natilee-harren-fluxus-forms-of-activation/

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