Natilee Harren, M.A. '07, Ph.D. '13

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A book co-edited by Natilee Harren, M.A. '07, Ph.D. '13, "The Scores Project: Experimental Notation in Music, Art, Poetry, and Dance, 1950–1975," has recently been published by the Getty Research Institute.

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.

The work 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. It is available in its complete, open-access form online; readers can purchase the companion print volume or download a free PDF or free eBook. Harren recommends engaging with "The Scores Project" online for the best experience of all it has to offer.

"'The Scores Project' is a piece of genre-busting scholarship," she said, "an open-access digital publication, research archive, interactive teaching tool, virtual exhibition and print book all in one. It comes out of my Ph.D. work in art history completed at UCLA and work in the Getty Research Institute archives."

"'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," wrote Hannah B. Higgins, professor of art, University of Illinois Chicago. "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. [Its] 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."