Fluxus / Event Score
Fluxus / Event Score music uses brief verbal instructions, simple actions, everyday objects, absurd tasks, silence, repetition, and performance situations as compositional material. Its sound may be a dripping vessel, a violin destroyed, a salad made for an audience, a single sustained interval, a body action, a spoken instruction, or no conventional sound at all. The score is often tiny, but the conceptual detonation is large.
History
Fluxus / Event Score practice developed from Cage’s classes, Dada, Zen-inflected indeterminacy, happenings, visual art, mail art, and anti-institutional performance in the early 1960s. George Brecht, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, La Monte Young, Alison Knowles, Ben Patterson, Dick Higgins, and Mieko Shiomi used event scores to collapse boundaries between music, theater, object, joke, and life action. The form influenced performance art, conceptual art, sound poetry, installation, experimental theater, participatory art, and contemporary score-based practices where a sentence can be a composition.
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- Fluxus Codex
- UbuWeb
- MoMA Fluxus materials
- Discogs