Word Events

"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
"The 1960s and 1970s were, in the words of composer David Behrman, a time in which 'established techniques were thrown away and the nature of sound was dealt with from scratch.'   The five-line staff collapsed under the weight of innovations like indeterminacy, Fluxus, live electronic music, performance art, and sound installations.  The verbal score emerged as a pragmatic, egalitarian alternative.  Today, with Sound Art ascendant, these scores have a newfound significance for all those concerned with performance outside the continuum of traditionally notated Western music.  Sadly, the majority of these self-published documents remain exceedingly difficult to find, despite widespread webification of historical flotsam.   In this volume Lely and Saunders have assembled an extraordinary collection of important scores, ranging from the exalted to the ephemeral. The inclusion of commentary by the artists themselves, as well as the first systematic analysis of the various forms of prose score, makes Word Events an invaluable resource for scholars and practicing artists alike." - Nicolas Collins, Professor, Department of Sound, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Editor-in-Chief, Leonardo Music Journal