Word Events: Perspectives on Verbal Notation

by John Lely, James Saunders

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.

Genres: Music

488 pages, Paperback

First published May 10, 2012

Reviews

[Kurt Gottschalk · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun and often fascinating survey of text-based musical scores. See my review at the Brooklyn Rail.