Word Events - by John Lely & James Saunders (Paperback)

About the Book

An outstanding collection of text scores from key composers and artists, as well as original essays and interviews offering guidance and lucid analysis.

Book 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.

Review Quotes

"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

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.