We are pleased to share that the open-access digital repository "The Scores Project: Experimental Notation in Music, Art, Poetry, and Dance, 1950–1975" has recently been launched by the Getty Research Institute. The Scores Project is a unique digital compilation of experimental scores, audiovisual materials, and source documents (nearly 2,800 items in all) from the postwar avant-gardes, interpreted by experts on art, music, dance, and poetry, edited by Michael Gallope, Natilee Harren, and John Hicks, with Contributions by Emily Ruth Capper, George E. Lewis, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Benjamin Picket, and Nancy Perloff.
 
The Scores Project is a piece of genre-busting scholarship—a research archive, interactive teaching tool, and virtual exhibition all in one. As such, I’m hoping you can help me reach its many relevant audiences by spreading the word to colleagues, students, arts professionals, and friends, as well as artists, writers, and composers whom we hope it will inspire.

Individuals working in and across the fields of visual art, music, poetry, theater, and dance in the mid–twentieth century began to use experimental scores in ways that revolutionized artistic practice and opened up new forms of interdisciplinary collaboration. Their experimental methods — associated with the neo-avant-garde,neo-Dadaism, intermedia, Fluxus, and postmodernism — exploded in notoriety during the 1960s in locales from New York to Europe, East Asia, and Latin America, becoming foundational to global trends in contemporary art and performance.

The Scores Project provides an in-depth view of this historical moment. Through expert commentaries from an interdisciplinary team of scholars with accompanying illustrations, this publication examines a series of experimental scores by John Cage, George Brecht, Sylvano Bussotti, Morton Feldman, Allan Kaprow, Alison Knowles, Jackson Mac Low, Benjamin Patterson, Yvonne Rainer, Mieko Shiomi, David Tudor, and La Monte Young. Ambitious, provocative, and playful, The Scores Project is an illuminating resource to scholars and students who seek to understand this innovative and historically complex moment in the history of art.
 
“The Scores Project is an essential research tool for anyone interested in the intersection of musical notation, art, poetry, and dance from 1950 to 1975. For the hundreds of digitized objects, each has a carefully researched and easy-to-understand caption that implicates other works and artists in its sprawling information network. The Scores Project’s flexible and accessible design offers a treasure trove of primary documents that will help researchers at all levels produce historically grounded and open-ended scholarship.”
—Hannah B. Higgins, Professor of Art, University of Illinois Chicago, and author of Fluxus Experience (2002) and The Grid Book (2009)

“This extraordinary digital publication illuminates the future of performance scholarship by helping us see, read, and hear the history of its scores. Wrestling some 2,000 historical documents, as well as audio and video files, The Scores Project transforms and enriches our understanding of the experimental, interdisciplinary furor of contemporary art from the 1950s to the 1970s. Drawn from the remarkably wide-ranging and fascinating archive assembled by the Getty Research Institute, The Scores Project demonstrates the possibility of reaching beyond traditional art historical blind spots that have overlooked not only artists of color, women, and gender nonconformists but also the unruly sources of experimental art more broadly."
—Peggy Phelan, Ann O’Day Maples Chair in the Arts, Professor of English and Theatre and Performance Studies, Stanford University

If you have any questions about The Scores Project, don’t hesitate to reach out to us!

Contact information:
Natilee Harren
Associate Professor of Art History
University of Houston School of Art
noharrenuh.edu