A collection of essays examining experimental scores and source documents from the postwar avant-gardes, interpreted by experts on art, music, dance, and poetry.

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.

An expanded edition of this open-access publication is available for free online at www.getty.edu/publications/scores/. It includes more than 2,800 images, audio/video files, and interactive features. Also available are free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book.

Michael Gallope is associate professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. His most recent book is The Musician as Philosopher: New York’s Vernacular Avant-Garde, 1958–1978 (2024).

Natilee Harren is associate professor of contemporary art history and critical studies at the University of Houston School of Art and author of Fluxus Forms: Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network (2020).

John Hicks is a lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota.