Word Events: Perspectives on Verbal Notation - Softcover

John Lely; James Saunders

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1441173102 ISBN 13: 9781441173102

Publisher: Continuum, 2012

Synopsis

Verbal notation has emerged since the 1950s as a prominent medium in the field of experimental music, as well as in related areas of arts practice involving performance and object making. Works created with this type of notation are often referred to by their authors as event scores, prose scores, text scores or instruction scores.

Word Events features over 170 scores, many printed here for the first time, representing the works of more than 50 practitioners including George Brecht, John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Michael Pisaro, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Jennifer Walshe and La Monte Young.

The commentaries in the book explore the compositional strategies and performance practice of particular works, contextualised by key essays, including previously hard-to-find texts by Lawrence Halprin and Kenneth Maue, together with many new statements and interviews from composers, artists and performers. This unique and wide-ranging collection of scores and writings will be indispensable to musicians, artists, those involved with community arts, and anyone with an interest in exploring the rich potential of the written word.

About this title

Review:

Diverse models of scoring and text-based instructions have animated experiments in music, performance, visual art, dance and poetry for over fifty years. A crucial tool in the emergence of interdisciplinary art practices, verbal notation deftly cuts across genres and categories. Short event scores, long prose pieces and enigmatic statements potentially cue actions from swinging microphones to making a salad to playing a long sustained chord. Key decisions are left to performers, and realizations may be concrete and audible or simply generate a state of awareness. It is the ultimate open form. Combining scores, statements and short critical essays, Word Events brings together classic works with more recent projects that show the continued vitality of this practice. This is a collection we have needed for a long time. --Liz Kotz, Associate Professor of Art History, UC Riverside and author of, Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art

About the Author:

John Lely is a composer and performer. James Saunders is a composer, and is Head of the Centre for Musical Research at Bath Spa University, UK. He is the editor of The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music.

About this edition

• Publisher: Continuum
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1441173102
• ISBN 13: 9781441173102
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 488