In this essay, Māra Traumane guides readers through the diverse, interdisciplinary practice of the Riga-based collective Workshop for the Restoration of Unfelt Feelings (NSRD), which operated from the end of the 1970s until 1989. NSRD was involved in the avant-garde music scene as well as in architecture, and their activities ranged from concerts and the production of record albums to performances, writing, and video art. From consciously exploring the notion of periphery to developing the concept of “Approximate Art,” the group sought to question and escape disciplinary boundaries and divisions.

Over the last three decades, the notion of periphery and conceptualization of center-periphery relations have been actively explored by scholars and curators working on Eastern European histories of art. The terms “periphery” and “margins” have been applied in this context as productive concepts invigorating methods of critical geography and strategies of “provincializing” dominant artistic canons coined at alleged centers.¹ Recent research has proposed a critique of the binary logic and directionality of the center-periphery model, challenging the legitimacy of a “a preconceived notion of centrality”² and inviting reconsideration of cultural phenomena within geographically peripheral milieus as active agents in cultural entanglements.³ Yet even before the notion of periphery became an urgent topic in art historical theorization and discussions, it was both actively and implicitly addressed by artistic practices emerging in Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s that explored geographic peripheries through performance actions and drew attention to processes of perception activated by artistic actions conceived in off-center locations.

Possibly one of the best documented and most researched examples of such an approach is the work of the Moscow–based Collective Actions Group, which beginning in 1976 and continuing for more than a decade, carried out a series of actions in Kievogorskoe Field outside of Moscow. In their extensive discussions of and writings on their outdoor actions, the group introduced a number of original topographic and perceptual terms—including “zone of indistinguishability,” the moment, when performers of an action appear in the field of vision of spectators but are still too distant for details of their activity to be distinguishable, and “demonstrational field,” which describes apprehensible arrangements and settings, as well as the course of an action and its perceptive effects.⁴ Other examples are the collective exploratory walks and happenings undertaken in neglected urban areas in the 1970s by a group of Tallinn architects and artists who drew inspiration from city outskirts and urban sites “forgotten by modernization.”⁵ Likewise, in the 1980s, peripheral environments and ambient, borderline modes of perception were actively explored by the Riga–based artists’ group Workshop for the Restoration of Unfelt Feelings (Nebijušu sajūtu restaurēšanas darbnīca, or NSRD). Members of this transmedia collective brought semi-abandoned sites and other transitional spaces—city outskirts and railway lines—as well as unspectacular daily events, marginal gestures, and multisensory perceptive states into focus in their early writings, and these interests later played a key role in the actions and video-performances undertaken by the group. In the late 1980s, in the last years of their collaboration, NSRD members outlined their aesthetic engagement with peripheral processes and transitory states of perception in their “Manifesto of Approximate Art” and three accompanying essays, all of which were written in 1987.⁶

The Workshop

NSRD, formally founded as a music group in 1982, was an association of friends active in Latvia—then a republic of the Soviet Union—from the end of the 1970s until 1989. Long-term members included architecture theorist Hardijs Lediņš (1955–2004), poet and translator Juris Boiko (1954–2002), architect Imants Žodžiks (born 1955), musician Inguna Černova (born 1962), and architect Aigars Sparāns (1955–1996), but on many occasions, this core group was joined by a wider circle of collaborators.⁷ NSRD member activities extended across a variety of media, including poetry, song lyrics and collaborative writing, new-wave and experimental music recordings, architectural proposals, actions realized outdoors in both nature and urban spaces, and in the second half of the 1980s, multimedia exhibition events, performances, and video-performances. Although the name “Workshop for the Restoration of Unfelt Feelings” initially described the group’s activities in the field of music and, later, in visual art, it is now considered more of an umbrella term covering the entire scope of the collaboration. Collective ways of working, the original aesthetic program developed by the group, and their interest in the creation of time-based aesthetic experiences and pursuit of “a philosophical process,”⁸ invite comparison to other collectives originating in the 1960s and 1970s in Eastern Europe, including the Slovenian group OHO and the Moscow–based Collective Actions Group.

Given the diversity and experimental nature of NSRD’s activities, one might question how it was possible for the artists to carry out their practice in the Soviet Union, where until the mid-1980s, the cultural field was not only subject to rigid ideological control but also opportunities for public artistic expression were mainly given to members of official unions of creative workers, or to those affiliated with amateur clubs. Indeed, some of NSRD’s activities in the first half of the 1980s, for example their outdoor actions, were carried out without an audience—that is, with only members of the collective present. This is why NSRD has sometimes been described as an “unofficial” or even “nonconformist” art phenomenon. However, this characterization is only partially fitting, because even in the early 1980s, within the daunting climate of the Brezhnev era, members of NSRD found opportunities to present their work and aesthetic interests to a wider audience. For example, for recording and distributing their music albums, the artists relied on friendships with other semiofficial music bands and on an expanding network of underground tape-recording culture.⁹ There were also institutional niches that enabled the artists to revise and present their ideas in exhibition spaces in Latvia. Several NSRD members were professionally trained architects and also members of the Architects’ Union of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic. Between 1980 and 1985, annual exhibitions of experimental projects by young architects, organized by the Architects’ Union, served as frameworks for the public display of inventive conceptual proposals by NSRD members related to the organization of space and living environments.

The ongoing presence of NSRD in public and semipublic spheres raises questions regarding the distinction between the “first,” or official public sphere, and the “second,” or alternative or unofficial public sphere—categorizations that are sometimes used in descriptions of the cultural environment in the Communist bloc.¹⁰Instead, attention should be drawn to the loopholes, structural gaps, and individual agendas that permeated the cultural field at that time, interrupting the controlling regimes of state institutions and facilitating visibility of independent initiatives such as NSRD.

Peripheries as Sites of Action

“There can’t be such a thing as a center of culture, there can only be a periphery of culture,” NSRD cofounder Juris Boiko pronounced in an interview published in 1988.¹¹ While the group was active, their interest in peripheral spaces and multisensory experience manifested in a variety of genres and media—in literary writings, actions, experimental music recordings, conceptual architectural proposals, and video-performances. In their practice, the notion of “periphery” evolved from its role as a site of physical immersion, contemplation, and performance action to a more productive notion related to the multisensorial contingency of human perception. As Hardijs Lediņš and Boiko outline in the group’s “Manifesto of Approximate Art”: “We identify ourselves with borders. We orientate ourselves in the relationships between the center and the periphery. The processes of identification and orientation lead and guide all our activities.”¹²

Themes of immersive wandering through a desolate, semi-abandoned landscape permeate the absurd novel Zun (the title referencing both “Zen” and the Latvian word for “buzzing”), cowritten by Lediņš and Boiko in 1976–77 and not published until 2005.¹³ In this early text oscillating between poetry and prose, and reflecting the influence of writings by Dada artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) and American poet E. E. Cummings (1894–1962), lonely protagonists traverse a snowy rural landscape, each engaged in solitary action and random, fleeting encounters with other human and nonhuman beings. Programmatic in structure, Zun sketches out the themes of atmospheric wandering in nature and contemplative perceptive states that would characterize the future practice of NSRD.

At the time Lediņš and Boiko were writing Zun, and in the years after, they and other members of NSRD were influenced not only by Dada and the artistic avant-garde but also by the musical avant-garde, most notably the Second Viennese School, new jazz, John Cage (1912–1992), Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007), and minimalist music. The ideas the group discovered in new music informed their own DIY recording sessions as well as their outdoor actions. Retrospectively, Boiko recalled that NSRD’s actions in the early 1980s can be seen as a “transposition” of the impulses they found in avant-garde music into the surrounding environment. Indeed, Cage’s ideas about silence as well as Stockhausen’s improvisational principles and intuitive music echo in the structure of one of the group’s most extensive cycles of actions: Walks to Bolderāja (Gājieni uz Bolderāju, 1980–87). In this particular work, NSRD addressed notions of geographically peripheral zones and changing modes of perception through ritual-like “walks” undertaken at dawn or dusk, once a year, each time in a different month, along the twelve-kilometer-long railway line connecting the outskirts of Riga, where the participating artists lived, with the distant port district of Bolderāja. Along their path, which took them across meadows and fields to the industrial surroundings of Bolderāja, they observed the changing landscape and weather, and the breaking or fading daylight—as well as interacted with objects they found along the way and the soundscape of the railway line—the rumble of passing trains and their own musical interventions. As was characteristic of their practice, the group captured the ambience and experiences of the “walks” in photo and video documentation of the action, and in other mediums, including in lyrics and music recorded on the album Bolderāja’s Style (Bolderājas stils), which they released on their own home-record label Seque in 1982.

The group also drew attention to neglected territories and vernacular suburban structures through conceptual architectural proposals, which members submitted to annual exhibitions at the Architects’ Union of experimental projects by young architects. In these submissions, conceived as creative responses to the general themes of the exhibitions, they presented conceptual interpretations of particular spatial situations—rather than practical architectural solutions. For example, the photo-montage Spatial Action 1m x 1m x 1m (Telpiska akcija 1m x 1m x 1m), which the artists presented in the exhibition Foregrounds of Architecture (1980), is made up of a sequence of photographs of Hardijs Lediņš and Imants Žodžiks excavating a one-meter-square hole in a stretch of land alongside a Soviet concrete wall and the corner of an old wooden building typical of the area. This ironic take can be seen as targeting both formal submission requirements—the standard one-by-one-meter architectural board, and the neglected state of the urban periphery. In 1984, in a submission to the exhibition Nature—Home to Man, the group integrated photographs taken during a Walk to Bolderāja action called A House in Bolderāja (Māja Bolderājā), in which Lediņš engaged with derelict allotment garden sheds and greenhouse structures situated along the railway line. In both proposals, the artists directed attention toward the unspectacular, marginal, vernacular spaces and architectural forms that were given visibility through their own performative gestures.

From Postmodernism to Approximate Art

Postmodernist theory and the aesthetics of new-wave culture played crucial roles in the development of the artistic language of NSRD in the mid-1980s—following the group’s interest in the legacy of the modernist avant-garde. Postmodernism, which the artists first encountered through architecture and design theory, in particular the publications of Charles Jencks (1839–2019) and Alessandro Mendini (1931–2019), proposes an alternative to the prevalent uniform functionalism that some members of NSRD were confronted with as architects working for state-run construction bureaus and thus provided the basis for the group’s critique of standardization in architecture and design. Charles Jencks’s thesis on “double coding” was appropriated as a programmatic statement by Lediņš who, in numerous articles dedicated to architecture and art, writes about “the spirit of the time and atmosphere of place,”¹⁴ meaning the search for a balance between technological and stylistic innovation and the traditional cultural “code” embedded in the specificity of a site. Postmodern use of narrative and semantic forms, abolishment of a distinction between “high” and popular culture, multimediality, irrationality, and emphasis on atmosphere of a particular site and individual expression resonated with the group’s interest in music, design, art, and architecture. At the same time, they drew inspiration from contemporary trends in music—from ambient music and the work of Laurie Anderson (born 1947) and Philip Glass (born 1937) integrating poetic narrative structures into multimedia performance events. In 1985, NSRD recorded what would be considered one of their musical masterpieces—the conceptual sound-play Kuncendorfs and Osendovskis (Kuncendorfs un Osendovskis), a sonic tale in which the narrative plot and compositional structure revolve around the experiences and feelings of its main protagonist, the reclusive forester Jūlijs (July), who is envious of his friend Augusts (August), a mulled-wine merchant traveling to distant countries.

Members of NSRD explored postmodernist ideas in proposals presented in exhibitions of experimental projects of young architects as well as in the artists’ first solo exhibition The Wind in the Willows (Vējš vītolos).¹⁵Held at the House of Architects in 1986, The Wind in the Willows featured staged settings of a living environment synthesizing colorful, asymmetrical, expressive objects (table, dressing screen, tableware) inspired by designs by Memphis Milano and Studio Alchimia and motifs of nature—marsh reeds and wallpaper painted in a pattern of birch trees. Poetic exhibition text invited viewers to disperse the “clouds of rationalism” and “clouds of stereotypes” with the help of diverse kinds of wind—“south-green wind,” “wind of the willows,” and “the wind of your eyelashes.”¹⁶  The display incorporated a recording of NSRD reproducing the howling sounds of wind. A similar aim to introduce qualities of subjective expressivity, individualism, and intimacy, this time as a tool of critique of standardized designs, informed the artists’ first video-action Man in a Living Environment (Cilvēks dzīvojamā vidē), which Lediņš and Žodžiks produced in 1986. Analyzing the architectural shortcomings of prefabricated mass housing in Riga, video footage features a small group of performers traveling through neighborhoods of newly built block-house dwellings, interviewing inhabitants of these suburban districts, and staging delicate performative interventions introducing spontaneity and intimacy into the monotonous, standardized surroundings of the newly constructed city outskirts. In the video, analytical text on modern urban developments, read by Lediņš, is intermixed with the eclectic soundtrack of Latvian choir music, compositions of Laurie Anderson, and music by NSRD.

Following the success of The Wind in the Willows, NSRD members began to position themselves as an art collective, expanding their network of participants in the group’s performances, video-performances, and exhibitions, and revising their theoretical premises. Although still acknowledging expressive means of postmodernism, they became critical of superficial, formal applications of postmodern aesthetics. Instead, the group re-addressed themes present in their early writings, actions, and music albums—motifs that explore transient states of perception and the atmospheric ambience of particular locations. From 1986 onward, newly accessible video technology allowed them to combine the narrative, sonic, and visual elements of a time-based performance action. In a group statement, they explained, “For the Workshop, video is a means of expression necessary to encompass those sensations, for the restoration of which music, the written word, and actions are insufficient.”¹⁷ This aspect of video led the group to use it in the creation of works that put into focus the interrelations of performance actions, often staged in rural, peripheral locations, with universal and cyclical processes in nature. In 1987, they recorded a number of semi-improvised, playful, or ritual-like performance actions unfolding before a backdrop of natural settings: Iceberg’s Longing / Volcano’s Dreams (Aisberga ilgas / Vulkāna sapņi, 1987), Grindstone of the Spring (Pavasara tecīla, 1987), Walk to Bolderāja (Gājiens uz Bolderāju, 1987), and Dr. Eneser’s Binocular Dance Lessons (Doktora Enesera binokulāro deju kursi, 1987).

The group’s video-performances were informed by the newly coined original concept of Approximate Art developed by NSRD in 1987. The idea of “approximation” was seen as in opposition to the alleged precision of technological advancements and the systemic approach to indeterminacy of human experience and accentuated ambient, borderline states of perception. It substantiated the group’s transmedial practice by highlighting the disappearing boundaries between art genres and forms, and arguing for individual, subjective understanding of a polysemic artistic action. As Lediņš explains in one of the texts on Approximate Art: “Since practically all natural phenomena and processes are perceived by the brain as approximate things, it can be argued that approximation is one of man’s most human characteristics. . . . Applying the notion of approximation to art, we arrive at a phenomenon that is very characteristic of today’s world and that the critics find impossible to resolve. The boundaries between different art genres are very blurred, they cannot be defined, just like the boundaries between different cultures. The question often arises—is it art or is it already not art?”¹⁸ Liberalization during the perestroika period, which began in 1985, made it possible for NSRD to access public exhibition and concert venues. The concept of Approximate Art served as a basis for the group’s first exhibition realized in the visual art context—The First Exhibition of Approximate Art,held in the House of Knowledge in Riga in spring 1987. The six-day event featured a designed environment, a multichannel display of video-performances by NSRD and other artists, and daily performances and musical interventions by NSRD as well as by invited musicians and artists.

In the years that followed, the group revised their concept of Approximate Art, as is reflected in the Second Approximate Art Exhibition: Mole in the Hole, which was held in Riga in 1988, and in the display that the group prepared for the exhibition Riga. Lettische Avantgarde (Riga: Latvian Avant-garde), which took place in West Berlin, Bremen, and Kiel in 1988–89. NSRD ceased collaboration in 1989. The oft-cited reasons for the breakup of the group are the sociopolitical and economic changes that affected society during the years of dissolution of the Soviet Union and that led members to seek their own, individual creative paths. Yet it could be argued that NSRD’s encounter with the framework of professional art institutions through their participation in Riga. Lettische Avantgarde also contributed to this process—the time-based, multimedia artistic practice of the collective and the idiosyncratic concept of Approximate Art proved to be difficult to adapt to the institutional, white-cube context—and to international art circulation. Still, since the rediscovery of the full scope of the group’s transmedial, collaborative artistic legacy in the mid-2000s, their work and ideas continue to inspire younger generation of Latvian artists and musicians, who on their own initiative, have engaged in reenactments of the Walks to Bolderāja, reconsidered the storyline of the novel Zun, and continue to reinterpret the performances and architectural proposals of the members of NSRD.  

The author would like to thank the Latvian Centre for Contemporary art for their cooperation during the preparation of this essay.

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Hendricks began his career as an artist. In the late 1950s and early ‘60s he spent time in Paris and traveled elsewhere in Europe. During this period Hendricks had his first encounters with the emerging Fluxus movement and some of its leading figures, although the significance of these events didn’t register with him fully until several years later.

In 1959 I went to Paris and enrolled in Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 [a renowned print shop established by Hayter in 1927]. I worked with Bill [Hayter] on and off for about three years. I wasn’t interested in printmaking in general—I love making plates, but, to this day, I have a disinterest in technological things and in multiplicity of that sort. Being at Atelier 17 was more about being with people who were very serious about making art. It was a place where artists from all over the world came, from Japan, from Germany. Hans Haacke came while on a fellowship to Paris. Leon Golub came by, so I got to know him and Nancy Spero. And I got to travel. I had wanted to go to Spain after reading books about the Spanish Civil War, and I had the great opportunity in Mallorca to visit Joan Miró, first at his home and then in his studio, and later to hang out with real live artists and writers in Ibiza, which was very exciting to me.

When I was not in Europe, I spent time in Vermont at my family’s house. Bob [Robert] Watts often passed through the area—I think he had some friends there—and he would stop by. I first became really aware of Fluxus through him. My brother [Geoff Hendricks] introduced us. He was teaching at Douglass College, which is part of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Douglass was an extraordinary place. Roy Lichtenstein was also a teacher there, along with Bob Watts and others. The students included Lucas Samaras, Jackie Ferrara, and many others. George Brecht was a friend of Bob’s and often spent time around New Brunswick; George Segal was too. And don’t forget Allan Kaprow had taught there for a long time. It was a pretty hot place.

At one point, I got a Fluxus newspaper—this was probably ’64, ’65—and it had all of these incredible things listed. Things you could buy for five dollars. I was very impressed with that newspaper.

I also remember going down to an event on Lispenard Street. I don’t know whose loft it was, maybe Lette Eisenhower’s, but you walked up these stairs to the top floor and there was this incredible sound. They were performing La Monte Young’s 2 Sounds [1960], where you sustain two notes, and you could hear it throughout the whole event. That was pretty exciting. I don’t know that it was the first Happening that I’d seen, but it was one of the first. So, I guess I did go to some events related to Fluxus, but I missed the big ones, like the 1962 concert in Paris, when I was living there, or the 1964–65 concerts at Carnegie Recital Hall [New York].

Hendricks returned to the U.S. in 1964 and the next year began working at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. His many responsibilities there eventually included running the Judson Gallery, located in the church’s basement. The gallery had been an important exhibition space from 1959 to 1962, with artists such as Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, and Claes Oldenburg showing work there. Then it went dormant until Hendricks reopened it in 1966.

When I came back to the U.S. in 1964, the war in Vietnam was getting worse, and I was drafted. As a Quaker, I applied for conscientious-objector status, which was granted in 1964 or ‘65. With this status, I needed to find civilian employment, and I was very fortunate to get a job at the Judson Memorial Church in New York City. It was an incredible moment in postmodern dance, and Judson was really the center. Yvonne Rainer and others were performing; it was so exciting to come to a place like that.

I had many different responsibilities at Judson: I worked in the office doing mailings, in the theater, taking tickets at the front door, but also making sets and being house manager. For a period, I ran the student house, which became a residence for artists. After a year or so, the church let me reopen the Judson Gallery. We did a lot of shows there, including an installation environment of Yoko Ono’s and a series called Manipulations that went on for three or four weeks. Each artist had one day and could do anything within the space—the theme was oriented around destruction. I was very interested in installations and environments, which I thought hadn’t been explored enough. Then my own personal work moved more directly and closely into political art activities, and I welcomed many politically oriented artists, like Carolee Schneemann, who did a great installation performance [Ordeals, 1967], Kate Millet, Ralph Ortiz, and many others.

In my mind, Fluxus was already sort of historical by that time. It had already happened. But there were some artists I knew, like Kate Millet, that I didn’t know were sort of “Fluxus artists.” It’s curious what you know and what you don’t know.

After Judson, I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have a degree, and I didn’t have training. But, having worked so closely with artists over the years, I became very involved in political art activities, initially as part of the Art Workers’ Coalition. Then Jean Toche and I formed a separate group called the Guerrilla Art Action Group, or GAAG, in 1969. Our idea was to bring an awareness of the horrendous things that our government was doing to the Vietnamese people and also, in general, to support free speech and human rights. We wanted to approach problems in a more direct way than just picketing—which we had all already done plenty of—so we did a series of actions, some of which, of course, took place right here at MoMA. After that, we moved away—I think at least I did—from the art activity and were more involved in organizing for human rights causes and things of that sort, but I also needed to make a living to support my family.

In 1976, Hendricks and Barbara Moore opened Backworks, a bookstore specializing in postwar and contemporary artists’ books as well as ephemera and editions, including Fluxus works. The small shop started out in the Hendricks’s home on Greenwich Street in Tribeca, before moving to its own quarters a few blocks north, at Greenwich and Spring Streets.

I had known Barbara for some time, since Judson, or even earlier—maybe through Dick Higgins? The world was much smaller then. Barbara’s husband, Peter Moore, was an important photographer and had shot many fantastic photographs of performance works, including Fluxus events. We modeled Backworks in a way on Ex Libris, the great bookstore founded by Arthur and Elaine Lustig Cohen [in 1972, in their Upper East Side townhouse]. Arthur was a publisher, writer, and scholar, and he loved experimental art of the twentieth century like Dada and Bauhaus, especially its documents and ephemera. He wasn’t really interested in later materials from the ‘50s, ‘60s, or ‘70s, and this is what we thought Backworks could cover—artists’ books, records, and ephemera from Happenings and Fluxus and all that. We started with books and ephemera—materials that were marginal in a way but also essential to understanding the artistic activity.

Arthur was extremely generous and shared his mailing list with us; he also introduced us to collectors he knew that were interested in more contemporary things. And we, of course, contacted George Maciunas, whom Barbara had known for many years, and I had known of a bit through my brother and also through Kate Millet. We’d done a show of hers at Judson, and I would go over to her place on the Bowery and remember her speaking with this Lithuanian guy who wanted to manufacture her furniture—that was George. George was very happy to have an outlet at Backworks to sell Fluxus works. He even designed our stationery.

I was very interested in groups—in what happens with artists work within a group or when you have a group artwork. Looking back on Dada, Futurism, Constructivism, and all those movements of the early twentieth century, I felt there were great possibilities for the ‘60s. I was not so interested in the individual star system. Ernst Benkert of the Anonima Group [an artists’ group founded in 1960] was very important to me in my thinking in this regard. We discussed the radicality of groups in the early twentieth century and also the Situationists and others. I was always interested in a different kind of art, so my work with Fluxus was a natural fit.

It was through a chance encounter that Gilbert Silverman, the Detroit businessman, philanthropist, and art collector, first came to Backworks and met Hendricks.

The year was 1977, probably late fall. My brother was in Europe, and his boyfriend, Brian Buczak, was selling some of Geoff’s blue-painted paper bags with sky on them [Sky Paper Bags, 1976], out on the street on the corner of West Broadway and Spring Street in front of René Block’s gallery. Gil [Silverman] went to SoHo frequently during that time; he’d see the galleries, enjoy a bowl of soup at Food, the restaurant that Gordon Matta-Clark had opened earlier, and he would certainly have gone to René Block’s gallery. As Gil was walking down the street, he saw the paper bags and said “Oh, those must be Geoff Hendricks’s,” and Brian said, “How do you know that?” Geoff wasn’t that famous then, and what are the chances that a stranger walking down the street would know him? Gil said “I have two of his paintings.” So they started talking. It turned out that Gil and Brian were both from Detroit, and Brian knew of Gil’s support for many local artists there. Gil bought the whole group of paper bags, which I think were $10 or $25 apiece. Brian said, “Well, you know, we have a friend, a Fluxus artist who is very sick with cancer, and we’ve formed a medical fund. If people give an amount of money, say $1,000, they will get $1,000 worth of Fluxus works.” This was George Maciunas, of course. Gil liked the idea of supporting an artist who was ill and also getting artwork in return. So he agreed to participate, but asked, “By the way, what’s Fluxus?” Brian said, “You should talk to my friend’s brother, Jon, who has a shop and can tell you about it.”

Brian brought Gil over to the house, and we talked for several hours—literally maybe three hours—about Fluxus. He bought one book, Hanns Sohm and Harald Szeemann’s Happening & Fluxus, the little black book. So that’s how we met Gil, and that’s how Gil and Lila’s collection started. Just to complete the story, Gil did give $1,000 to the medical fund, and this helped George get medical attention he needed and also allowed him to continue making Fluxus editions. Gil never met George, although George certainly knew about the gift and was very pleased about it.

At that time, Barbara and I became very involved with helping George and finding people to buy Fluxus works. I even went up to New Marlborough [Massachusetts] with Joe Jones and sometimes others, where George had his farm, and helped him put together some of the Fluxus works. Well, George wouldn’t let us make the things exactly, but we would help him get the materials or lay them out. He was pretty fussy about putting the editions together himself. This all reminds me: each person who gave money was supposed to get a name box [a small artwork assembled by Maciunas that plays on the letters of the subject’s name], but I don’t know if there’s a Silverman name box? That’s something we should look into.

So, when Gil was in New York, he would come to Backworks and buy works, mostly inexpensive things. He liked the objects, the multiples, the games. His first purchase, by the way, was Ben Vautier’s God Box [Fluxbox Containing God, 1966]. He loved Ben’s idea that “if god is everywhere, then he is also inside this box.”

Gil was interested in how things tick—he was curious about everything. He had traveled to Japan for the World’s Fair [1970], and that’s where he first saw works by Hi-Red Center, Ay-0, and also my brother Geoff. Gil and Lila bought works by Ay-O and Geoff in Japan before they ever met Geoff or me, or even knew about this thing called “Fluxus.” They had also bought Ben Vautier’s work in France. For Gil, art wasn’t about being a precious thing but rather capturing creativity—the messier, the better! He liked the idea that art could be an idea, and he pursued that.

Gil also liked provocative things. He and Lila have one of Manzoni’s “shit cans” [Merde d’artiste, 1961] in the entrance to their home in suburban Detroit. If someone came into the house and said “eesh!” he would know not to go into it further. But if they said, “Wow, a Manzoni shit can!” then he might show them other things. Gil would buy challenging pieces. We had done a show at Backworks of Henry Flynt’s work, his early Conceptual work, and Gil came and bought the whole show. He understood that the group of works formed a unit, and he was right. We were grateful to keep it all intact, and now it’s here at The Museum of Modern Art.

During the time that Gil and Lila were beginning to form their collection of Fluxus, they had an important conversation following a lecture in Detroit. Since I’ve known them, the Silvermans have always been active in the Detroit Institute of Arts: Gil on the board and Lila as president of the Friends of Modern Art, among other things. The critic and art historian Robert Pincus-Witten had been invited to give a lecture for the Friends [in March 1978], and after the talk—maybe Pincus-Witten mentioned Fluxus or something?—Gil went up to him and asked, “What about this Fluxus? Is this something?” And Pincus-Witten said, “Yes, it is important.” This encouraged Gil; he had a feeling about it. Gil likes to say that if he were wealthy, he would collect Dada, but it was too late. Yet he could understand Fluxus through Dada. He could put together a substantial collection of smaller things, and he saw Fluxus fitting into the ‘60s in an important way.

When Gil and Lila said that they wanted to start a real collection of Fluxus, I sort of laughed, because I thought, well, you already have Hanns Sohm and Jean Brown, who have both amassed great collections of Fluxus, and there’s just not that much of it around. We had the shop; we knew there wasn’t much available. But once we started digging . . . .

Around that time, Gil asked me to curate an exhibition based on the material he had collected, primarily from our shop but also from other places. My work towards this show ultimately created a conflict of interest between the shop and other customers, so Barbara and I ended our partnership, and I started working for the Silvermans. That was 1981.

The Silvermans’ Fluxus Collection continued to grow in the following years, with Hendricks as its curator. It also gained recognition very quickly through a series of exhibitions and publications. The first was Fluxus Etc., at the Cranbrook Art Museum in 1981.

The Silvermans were very active supporters of Cranbrook, and the director, Roy Slade, had invited them to show their collection there. Fluxus would be just one part; the Silvermans collected much more than that. They have great works by Hans Haacke, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and others. They also have a brilliant collection of “instruction drawings”—Gil used this term. For him, these capture the first emergence of the artist’s idea, and, in many cases, they constitute the work itself. Instruction drawings were distinct from drawings or working drawings and really came out of Gil’s understanding of Sol LeWitt’s work as well as his training as an engineer.

For the Cranbrook show, Roy’s idea was that the different parts of the Silvermans’ collection would take up the T-shape of the museum: the major works—their George Segal sculpture of Allan Kaprow, for example—would be in the center, their instruction drawings in the left-hand part of the T, and then Fluxus in the right-hand part.

Well, the Silvermans and Roy had no problem organizing the paintings, sculptures, and instruction drawings, but they weren’t so certain what to do with the Fluxus works. They invited me out to Detroit to help, and that must have been my first trip out. We designed modular display cases, and Gil’s master carpenter, George Tater, built these beautiful wooden tables and glass cases that we still use today. But the space looked enormous, and I thought, “Oh my god, what am I going to do?”

I don’t believe in hierarchy, and Fluxus didn’t either, so I decided we should show everything. We had twenty or so display cases and we put it all in—just everything. This was also when we starting the first numbering system for the collection, which became the “Silverman Numbers” that we used in the publication for the show. Gil loves those numbers. He said it was like the numbering system for postage stamp collectors used in the Scott catalogues. It quickly went from one, two, to three hundred, four hundred, five hundred. It was so jammed in the gallery you could hardly walk through the room.

Part of the idea with doing the show was to make a publication. I was always very impressed by George Wittenborn’s Documents of Modern Art series, which included material not available elsewhere as well as original writings by the artists. I think it’s very important to have the artist’s voice heard, not just critical voices. Based on that, we started Fluxus Etc. with George’s [Maciunas’s] texts [such as the Fluxus Manifesto, 1963], and then Gil had the idea of asking all of the artists whose works were in the collection to write a history of Fluxus in ten words or less—he didn’t like long things. Gil thought of it as a commission, so he wrote $100 checks to each artist and sent them along with his letter asking for their contribution. Some are literally ten words [e.g., Mieko Shiomi’s “How to view and feel the world with innovated perception”], but most are not. Tomas Schmit’s was, I think, two pages, and La Monte Young’s was really a work, a set of pages printed on translucent paper, which is, by the way, only in the first edition.

I also thought it was important to reproduce all the Fluxus newspapers along with some other publications, so that—with a loop—you can actually read all of the text. We succeeded. Although the binding on the book was crummy, the printing was good! Actually, the book designer, Katherine McCoy, won an award for the design.

Then I thought, well, while we’re at it, it would be nice to have a chronology of Fluxus performance. The book was already getting pretty big, and Gil saw that we were already going way over what we had planned. He asked me, “Is this important?” And when I said, “Yes, this material doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Gil, after some discussion, said, “Let’s do it.” That’s how Gil was. He put his support into it. He believed that doing a book was the highest accomplishment and that it should be something you’re proud of and has real meaning. And that book was really important. I still use it all the time. I’m sure there are errors, but it’s a really useful tool.

The organization of Fluxus Etc. was one of the first steps towards Hendricks’s compilation of the Fluxus Codex (1988), a massive, 616-page reference volume that began as a series of lists of artworks, file cards, and notes sheets compiled by Hendricks and grew into a major project with a small team of researchers working to answer some basic questions about Fluxus. The lists made in preparation for the Codex also served as a guide for building the collection. The Codex was, according to Hendricks, “the beginning of our attempts to identify what a Fluxus work was.”

There’s a temptation when you’re collecting to say, “Oh, wow, this Viennese Actionist stuff is really interesting!” or, “How about John Cage, or Ongaku Group?” Gil felt that one could become so easily sidetracked. One thing that he was good at and I was not was focusing. Gil would always say “Focus, focus!” There were limited resources, limited facilities, and if you opened up the collection too much, the main objectives would become totally diffused. Gil and I both agreed that George Maciunas was the central figure in Fluxus, and that was where the collecting focused—works that were either produced by Maciunas or that were somehow distributed through Fluxus by Maciunas.

When Gil was beginning to form his collection, he had asked, “Well, how many Fluxus works are there?” Ah, the fatal question! And I really didn’t know. Maybe 100, 200? I basically doubled what I knew existed. This question led to making two lists, or really one list with a line dividing it: you’d have works in the collection above the line and works that I knew (or thought) existed below the line—those were the works we would try to find. Like, for Milan Knížák, you might have Flux Snakes but not Flux White Meditation. If we could find the Flux White Meditation, we’d buy it. And we just kept adding to the list.

Of course, in Fluxus, there are often many variations of the same work. While some works were meant to be mass-produced, Maciunas really made them by hand, and sometimes he would get bored or just decide to try different variations. So, even though you have three different Flux Snakes, there could be a fourth.

We wanted to form a collection of a movement, not of individual artists. It wasn’t about whether we liked a piece or not. The criteria were: “Is this Fluxus? Did it have a bearing on Fluxus? Is it significant to an understanding of the movement?” And we wanted the collection to be complete and to show that there might be many different examples of one idea. So we collected these variations and also tried to collect as much other material around the objects as possible, especially material generated within the movement or around the movement. This meant that, in addition to the Fluxus editions or publications, we would collect correspondence of George Maciunas, photographs of performance, sound recordings, scores, newspaper clippings, descriptions, anything that we could find that would fill out the picture to kind of triangulate the movement, to see it more fully.

Gil’s original questions about Fluxus and our ideas about how to structure the collection led in a very direct way to the Fluxus Codex. The Codex was a ten-year project, and many worked on it: Fatima Bercht, Nancy Bialic, Melanie Hedlund, Cindy and Eva Lee, Alice Weiner, and Trevor Winkfield. Sara Seagull and Peter Downsbrough were involved in the design and layout. Margaret Kaplan and Sam Antupit at Abrams supported the project from early on, even when it took much longer than expected. The book won the George Wittenborn Award. I can’t tell you how thrilled I was about that.

Of course, exceptions were made to the rule of collecting works only if they fit within the strict Fluxus focus.

There are a few works in the collection by artists associated with Fluxus but that are not Fluxus works exactly, and we got them either because Gil liked them or I would persuade him that they somehow had a connection. Gil had always liked Ben Vautier’s work, so we got a lot of that, including the prototypes or idea pieces that eventually became Fluxus works. Ben was very generous in letting us buy those works. A few Robert Filliou works also snuck into the collection, probably because of their connection with Maciunas. His Telepathic Music [no. 5, c. 1975], for example, consists of music stands with the little blue cards and the playing cards; those cards had been typed up by Maciunas, so that’s the connection there.

I’m very fond of the work of Addi [Arthur] Koepcke, and Gil let me buy some Koepcke works from the time that Addi was most involved with Fluxus (’62, ’63), but there was one great work I wanted—a three-dimensional collage with this bicycle wheel. It was fabulous, but Gil felt it was too disconnected from Fluxus. So, sometimes he would say no, but other times he might go along with me.

In some cases Gil and Lila bought things with only a loose connection to Fluxus for other parts of their collection. For instance, they like the work of Yoko Ono very much and ended up buying her instructions for paintings that had been shown at the Sogetsu Art Center. You couldn’t really say that these were Fluxus works, but they certainly involved important concepts in the development of Fluxus.

Once in a while we felt it was important to buy material that had influenced Maciunas and Fluxus, such as Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-Valise [1935–41] or issues of [Aleksandr] Rodchenko and [Vladimir] Mayakovsky’s Novyi LEF [Zhurnal levogo fronta iskusstv (New LEF: Journal of the Left Front of the Arts, 1927–28)], which Maciunas cited as a kind of paradigm of Fluxus. There was also the Dada Première Visite broadside [1921] and one of [Piero] Manzoni’s Cartes d’ authenticité [Certificates of Authenticity]. But we only acquired work like this in rare instances and instead spent much more effort in building the library, where we could include books that were historically relevant to Fluxus.

The Silvermans had a broad outlook and collected widely. They supported artists from the Detroit area and from further afield when traveling in other parts of the U.S., Europe, Asia, and South America. For their Fluxus collection, they sought out artists in Eastern Europe, which was, at the time, still rather difficult to visit as a tourist.

Gil loved the work of Milan Knížák, and there is a lot of work of his in the collection directly related to Fluxus, but there’s also a lot about the Aktual Group [formed by Knížák in Prague in 1963] and some of Knížák’s independent projects from the 1960s through the ‘80s. I’d actually known Knížák since the late 1960s, when he stayed at my brother and his wife’s [Bici Forbes] home during his trip to New York. Gil was genuinely interested in the work, and he and Lila even traveled to Prague in the early 1980s and bought works through rather difficult circumstances.

There’s a great story, in fact, about how some of the Fluxfilms were brought out of Prague. When they were in correspondence [in the mid-1960s], Maciunas had sent Milan a complete Fluxfilm Anthology, consisting of three 16-mm films—perhaps the first set he ever put together. Gil and Lila were of course very interested in having these in the collection. Milan sold the films to them with the understanding that we would make a copy for him, so that the films could come into the collection but he would still have a copy. Well, customs in both countries could be pretty complicated at that time. Gil and Lila had packed the film canisters in their luggage, and when they were leaving Prague, the customs authorities started going through their bags. They found some glass crystal that Gil and Lila had bought—Czechoslovakia is known for its fine crystal— and the inspectors got so interested in getting a duty for that, that they didn’t find the three films, which could easily have been seized.

I then went to Prague in 1983 and met with Milan and his wife, Maria, to talk about Fluxus-related material that he had and also about his activities in Prague. That’s when we bought the large concrete book [Book Document, 1962–80]. He also showed me three films that he had made, which we later bought through Art Zentrum, and I purchased as much documentation about his and Aktual Group’s activities as I could. I asked that he look for more, and that’s when he prepared for us the amazingly thorough Performance Files.

We tried to make further connections with many artists in Eastern Europe. We had some contacts through Knížák and also Jonas Mekas, who, like Maciunas, was Lithuanian. Through her Spatial Poems, [Japanese artist] Mieko Shiomi had been in contact with many artists from the region, such as Gabor Attalai, Jaroslaw Kozlowski, and others. And, of course, [Czech artist] Jirí Kolár’s Poem R was part of the Flux Shop.

Other artists were listed as part of Maciunas’s planned “Eastern European Year Box”—“M. Joudina,” “Zofia Lissa,” “J. Patkowski”—and it was really at Gil’s instigation that we tried to contact these people whose names Maciunas had recorded. We eventually corresponded with Vytautas Landsbergis, and when he visited New York, we had a gathering of as many Fluxus artists as we could contact, including Mekas, Almus Salcius, perhaps Adolfas Mekas, and of course Nijole Valeitis, Maciunas’s sister. Soon afterward we started seeing Landsbergis’s picture on the front page of The New York Times; our friend the Fluxus artist had suddenly become the leader of the revolution for independence in Lithuania. In fact, his movement was called Sąjūdis, which can translate to mean “Fluxus.” Nam June Paik liked to say that Landsbergis and Fluxus brought down the Soviet Union.

A little later, Kestutis Kuizinas came to New York. He was about twenty-three years old and had been named the director of the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius. He wanted to plan a Fluxus show for his museum, which he eventually did at that same time that René Block’s enormous Fluxus in Deutschland took place there [1995]. A year or two later, the Silvermans donated Fluxus works to form a permanent collection of Fluxus in Vilnius, known as the George Maciunas Fluxus Cabinet. Landsbergis attended the opening together with the Silvermans and Nijole Valeitis.

What we never had a chance to do was trace down a number of activities that happened in Eastern Europe, as Petra Stegmann did later for her excellent exhibition and publication Fluxus East, broadening an understanding of Fluxus.

Hendricks described the collecting strategies used in building the collection as follows.

Sneak up behind them, grab ‘em, throw ‘em in a bag, beat ‘em on the head! Collecting strategies? It was not quite like that. But we did have an advantage over some other collections because we could buy things. Hanns Sohm, for instance, built most of his collection either by trades or through gifts. And at the time [mostly the 1960s and ‘70s], he could do that; nobody else was collecting so he had an advantage. He would say, “May I have this?” and they would say, “Oh, of course, we’re glad that somebody wants it.” But we could say, “Could we buy this?” This was one effective way we could seek out and fill in gaps. There were always areas that we wanted to strengthen, and we set out to find every object. Obviously that wasn’t totally possible because some were unique, but we got pretty much everything—some just by luck and some by design.

I was particularly interested in photographic documentation of performance because there are very few ways that you can capture performance: it’s ephemeral—it’s there and it’s gone, but a photograph is one way.

Another way is through sound recordings. There are very few sound recordings of Fluxus concerts—very, very few. We have recordings from a couple evenings of the Wiesbaden festival in 1962, and we have one of the Amsterdam concerts from the same year, something from Copenhagen, something from Paris. I’m sure there are others out there, but they’re rare. And there are practically no films of Fluxus performance, just a few.

I quickly realized that the scores were like conceptual artworks, and they’re the essence of the piece. You could read it, you could perform it, and having the score would give you insight into a whole aspect of Fluxus. For the collection, we’d try to get the original score, either something the artist wrote out, or some form of it that was written out, and also any variations of that, developments, revisions, or printed versions.

I always wanted to make a companion book to the Fluxus Codex that would focus on Fluxus performance and use the same kind of structure. So, you’d have a page or two on [Nam June Paik’s] One for Violin, for instance, and it would have photographs, scores, descriptions of concerts from publications or newspapers, and so on. You’d be able to see that if you are thinking about One for Violin, you’d have the score and ten different performances of it, interpreted in different ways, and the public’s reaction to it, how it was discussed by Paik and Maciunas, and more. And an interesting thing about One for Violin, actually, is that there is no score. It was a score by word of mouth, if you will. Maciunas described it in a letter once, I think to La Monte Young, but that might be the closest thing. So it’s these sorts of questions that we asked—how you can track down and capture these histories of performance.

The participatory aspects of Fluxus—including the importance of publishing and distributing materials—were also significant to the collection.

At one moment, we began to see traces of the Flux Shop [also known as the European Mail-Order Warehouse/Flux Shop, based in Amsterdam] emerging in strange ways, and we thought it would be great to piece it back together. After trying to track down Willem de Ridder [who coordinated Flux Shop in Amsterdam] for some time, Hanns Sohm very kindly gave me some contact information for him. I went to Amsterdam, but he wouldn’t see me. Finally after several attempts we met in the Hilton Hotel bar, and I described what we were trying to do. First he said he didn’t have anything, but as we continued talking, he mentioned that maybe he did have a few things, even though he wasn’t interested in selling them.

We knew this photograph of the European Mail-Order Warehouse/Flux Shop, and I said, “What if we bought what you have and try to put back together.” I avoided the word “reconstruct” and just described the whole thing as a semblance of the Flux Shop, not individual pieces, but something kept altogether. He liked that idea and agreed to sell us what there was, more or less. So I bought seven metal suitcases, loaded everything up, and carried it back on the airplane.

It turned out that Dorothea Meijer, his friend who had worked closely with him on the Flux Shop and on other projects, had a lot of material, too. That took another year or so of meeting with her and describing our intentions. With Willem’s encouragement, she agreed to sell us her material too, which pretty much formed the Flux Shop in the collection. We did need to replace a few works that had been sold, such as a Flux Kit and a few other things. A replica of the shop’s sign was made by the Gerlovins, Rimma and Valeriy; they also did the photo blow-up/cut-out of Dorothea that we use in presentations of the Flux Shop today. Willem also provided a new version of his P.K. Shirt. And I cheated by buying a new Mason Pearson hairbrush that appears in the original photograph but had later been lost. One wonderful thing about the Silvermans was that they weren’t afraid of large or awkward or ugly or uncomfortable works.

Along with that material, we’re also very fortunate to have a lot of the correspondence that Willem had done, along with Dorothea, with people all over the world as part of the Flux Shop. And this was always the aim of the collection: to give the work substance, to give it depth.

A very important portion of the collection came from the estate of George Maciunas, which was ultimately divided through an agreement between the Silvermans and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. The Silvermans wanted to fill out certain parts of their collection, and Stuttgart, which had purchased the Archiv Sohm in 1981 (Hanns Sohm’s personal archive of intermedia art since 1945), hoped to strengthen its Fluxus holdings. The process of dividing the estate was based on the particular strengths and interests of each collection and the understanding that the two collections would continue to collaborate and share resources as needed.

After George’s death in 1978, there was a lot of material that remained in his estate. His heirs were his wife, Billie Hutchings Maciunas, his sister, Nijole Valeitis, and his mother Leokadija Maciunas. George had been living up on his farm in Massachusetts, where he’d wanted to make a community—a Fluxus community—selling shares to different artists and making it an educational and performance center. George was a wonderful dreamer. After he died, the pipes froze and everything else. It was very, very hard. Eventually things calmed down, and the estate began to take inventory. But it was quite complicated.

There were basically two institutions that were interested—the Silverman collection and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Maybe there were other bidders, but I’m not aware. Gil and I obviously had a number of discussions about it, and we looked through the inventory and decided there was a great deal of important material.

Gil likes to say that it was a kind of competition—collectors can be a little competitive—and at that point we were ahead of the collection in Stuttgart. But if they got the Maciunas Estate, then they would be ahead. So, when the Silvermans were in Europe, they went to Markgröningen, where Hanns Sohm lived, and spent some time with him.

After many hours of conversation, Gil made a proposal. He said, “You know, we both want this collection, and we can keep bidding it up, but in the end it’s just going to hurt us both. Since we’re both trying to do basically the same thing—to preserve the idea of Fluxus and the material of Fluxus—why don’t we buy it together and share it?” Sohm liked that idea, so a plan was worked out to jointly offer the estate a substantial amount of money, and, most importantly, we and Stuttgart agreed to agree. Without that, the idea of sharing would have been meaningless.

When the offer was accepted by the estate, all of the material was brought down to my studio, at my house on Greenwich Street, and Hanns Sohm and Thomas Kellein [then curator at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart] came over from Europe. We started going through it together and discussing the interests of each collection.

Hanns and Thomas were eager to get the correspondence from artists to Maciunas, because they already had strong holdings in correspondence between Fluxus artists. They also wanted to have some more substantial objects, partly because of gaps in their holdings and partly, I guess, because that would be easier to show to their board. So they got George Brecht’s For Any Direction [c. 1960], a Joe Jones birdcage, an early Ay-O painting [The Red Landscape, 1959], a Flux Kit—they needed an early Flux Kit—and things like that. If you put them all in a room, it looks like quite a lot.

Gil was always very interested in process—how you get from here to there—so he was interested in Maciunas’s notes, mechanicals used to prepare works, and the source material. He felt that these were extremely valuable for the collection, and I did too. We also got some of the “makings”—materials related to projects that Maciunas was working on but had abandoned or discarded. In addition, the Silvermans had a strong interest in the real estate papers and materials related to the Flux House Cooperatives. We didn’t have anything like this in the collection at that point, so this was very interesting to us. And I was very interested in photographs and the negatives for performance, so we were able to get a lot of that.

In some cases, when material was interesting to both collections, we tried to share in various ways. Sohm got the sound tapes, for instance, and later gave us copies of some of them that I thought contained material that was crucial to our holdings. In fact, it turned out it wasn’t so important; Maciunas had mislabeled the boxes. George also had a lot of microfilms. At a certain point, he had this brilliant idea to reduce size—he was a very efficient guy—so he photographed all this stuff and threw away the originals. Several of these microfilm rolls went to Stuttgart, and they very kindly gave us inventories of those materials, such as the scores and other things that I thought would be important for the Silverman’s collection. Another group of material that I always wished we had gotten was a group of 3 x 5 cards with George’s notes about Fluxus, and we did receive copies of all of these.

So that’s how we divided the material up, and it worked out very well. We strengthened what we had, and they strengthened what they had. And we continued to cooperate in areas that we could.

In 1988, Hendricks organized an exhibition of Fluxus material from the Silverman Collection at MoMA, in the Museum Library.

Clive Philpott [then Head of MoMA’s Library] invited me to do a Fluxus show at the Library. It was great because we kind of infiltrated the Museum. First of all, it was a free show because it took place in the Library. Nobody knew it, but you didn’t have to pay to get into the Museum in order to get into the Library. Clive managed to get a lot of the different departments at MoMA together: the Film department did a screening of Fluxus films in the collection (including Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film [1965], the Education department got involved, and the Publications department allowed us to publish a little catalogue, with some previously unpublished materials. Yoko Ono designed the front cover, Milan Knížák designed the back cover, and Ben Vautier did an intervention on every page. That was very fun. It was also done at a time when departments were maybe more rigid about what is shown where, so Clive may have gotten a little flack for crossing departmental lines.

Twenty years later, in 2008, MoMA acquired the Fluxus Collection.

A lot of consideration was given by the Silvermans and me as to where the collection should ultimately go, ideally a public institution that could care for it so that people in the future could understand Fluxus. It was clear very early on that the collection should be kept intact, not broken up in any way. The Silvermans never considered the idea of opening their own Fluxus museum or anything like that. They have a good relationship with the Israel Museum and had entertained the idea of perhaps putting it there because it could be seen in context with the great Dada and Surrealism collection that Arturo Schwartz had donated. So a small group of works was given to the Israel Museum and another to the Detroit Institute of the Arts, but the main, primary collection was intentionally kept intact. Ultimately the Silvermans felt that The Museum of Modern Art was the best able to maintain and house the collection, and it would have the most exposure here. We knew that the collection required a lot of resources: it needed conservation, archiving, storage, and expertise, and MoMA has the ability to give it that.

Hendricks has been openly critical of MoMA over the years, most notably in his political art activities with GAAG in the 1960s and ‘70s. He was asked to share his views on the Museum today.

I think that the Museum still has problems, but I think they’re willing to consider some of the problems, think about those issues. There are renewed efforts to be less rigid curatorially in exhibitions, bringing together materials from multiple departments and also the Library and Archives. There are also great efforts to be more inclusive of women, artists of color, and different nationalities; you can see this effort for change in exhibitions, education and other programming, and in the C-MAP groups. These shifts are all necessary, otherwise the whole thing atrophies and becomes something of a wonderful but dead old institution that a few people wander around in. I don’t know where it’s all going, but I know that it’s not standing still.

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Album 1 begins with a photograph of Cage and Tudor being greeted at the airport by violinist Kenji Kobayashi and Yoko Ono. At the time, Ono was married to Toshi Ichiyanagi, a composer who had studied with Cage in the U.S. and was instrumental in organizing Cage and Tudor’s trip. The next images show the visitors at a meeting at SAC and then enjoying various welcoming events, including a “geisha banquet.”² Cage found his hosts “unbelievably imaginative in finding ways to make our visit enchanting,”³ and Tudor sent a similar report to his then-partner, M. C. Richards: “They are treating us wonderfully & also it seems that it’s also very nice for them because everything here has to be specially arranged & we are thus sometimes introducing them to their own culture—(geishas & all that).”⁴

Following their two initial concerts at Tokyo Bunka Kaikan (October 9 and 10), Cage and Tudor traveled south, accompanied by Ichiyanagi and Ono and by Cage’s friend Peggy Guggenheim. They gave a concert in Kyoto (October 12), and another in Osaka (October 17). In their free time the group visited temples in Kyoto and Nara. Ryōan-ji, a Zen temple famous for its rock garden, left a profound impression on Cage, but he was not convinced that the placement of the fifteen stones within it was in any way particular. Whether or not he was informed that the stones had been arranged with the utmost care to make it impossible for a viewer on the veranda to see all fifteen of them at once, Cage opined to a Japanese critic “that those stones could have been anywhere in that space, that I doubted whether their relationship was a planned one, that the emptiness of the sand was such that it could support stones at any points in it.”⁵Cage still held this view twenty years later when he composed the score of Ryōan-ji (1983) by tracing the contours of fifteen rocks whose positions he determined by means of chance operations.

At Ryōan-ji Cage was drawn instead to the apparent “emptiness” of the sand: “I was now coming to the realization that there was no such thing as non-activity. In other words the sand in which the stones in a Japanese garden lie is also something.”⁶ His interest in the invisible micro-activity of the sand rather than in the rocks’ conspicuous visual array reflected a general shift in the composer’s aesthetics. In his own work, he was abandoning parametric measurements and using amplification to convert incidental sounds from daily life into “music.” These features would form the basis of 0’00’’ (4’33’’ No. 2), composed in Japan and dedicated to Ichiyanagi and Ono. The original score consisted of the following statement: “In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action.” Cage himself premiered the work at SAC on October 24; his action consisted of writing out the instructions for the very piece he was performing, with contact microphones attached to his pen, eyeglasses, and other objects.

Album 2 starts with photographs from the first two Tokyo concerts, documenting performances of Cage’s Music Walk and Atlas Eclipticalis with Winter Music. These images are followed by photographs from the Osaka concert: Ono singing Cage’s Aria alongside Tudor, who is performing Cage’s Solo for Piano and Fontana Mix simultaneously; and a shot of Tudor and Cage performing Cage’s Variations II. A few photographs from the October 23 and 24 concerts at SAC are included, all showing Tudor performing Theatre Piece.

Ironically, one of Cage and Tudor’s most significant encounters in Japan, their meeting with SAC sound engineer Junosuke Okuyama, took place off-camera. Cage held Okuyama in high esteem, later describing him as “one of the finest engineers I’d ever encountered”⁷ and “who if the Lord knew His business would be multiplied and placed in every electronic music studio in the world.”⁸ One particular conversation with Okuyama inspired Cage to extend the approach taken in 0’00’’ toward the micro-activities of apparently mute objects: “[Okuyama] remarked one day that he thought using contact microphones in musical compositions was very interesting, but what seemed to him more interesting yet was the use of such fine microphones that one would be able to place one on a piece of wood, for instance, and . . . make audible the interior vibrations of the wood itself.”⁹ Like the stones and sand at Ryōan-ji, this idea would make a lasting impression on Cage.

The American composer found something “typically Japanese” in Okuyama’s thinking.¹⁰ Like the shifting of his gaze at Ryōan-ji, Cage’s view of what constituted “Japanese” fluctuated. On the one hand, Cage felt that, just as the fifteen stones could have been placed anywhere in the garden, it did not really matter from which country a composer came. “The situation music finds itself in in the United States and Europe, it also finds itself in in Japan. We live in a global village.”¹¹ Those who connected “the accident that they’re Japanese”¹² with their music were therefore fixating on a particular outcome of chance: the circumstance of their birth. On the other hand, Cage also maintained that, like the sand supporting the stones, being Japanese amounted to “something” that persisted beneath the constant relativization of the global village. He expressed this view mostly in relation to Ichiyanagi, the only Japanese composer who, according to Cage, had “found several efficient ways to free his music from the impediment of his imagination” (including any connection Ichiyanagi might have drawn between his music and the fact that he happened to be Japanese).¹³ For Cage, this achievement made Ichiyanagi’s work something of a paradox: “The world now has a Japanese music which is universal in character, but which is Japanese and not European.”¹⁴ Perhaps by accident, this assessment echoed a “typically Japanese” notion about being Japanese proposed by none other than D. T. Suzuki, Cage’s teacher of Zen. According to Suzuki, Zen was not only the spirit of Buddhism but also comprised the universal ground of all religious truths. At the same time, it typified the unique essence of Japanese spirituality—a koan-like claim that was developed in complicity with Japanese nationalism.¹⁵

Tudor maintained his usual reticence in Japan, but the recordings of his performances there seem to bespeak a distinct concern.¹⁶ In contrast to 0’00”, in which the level of amplification was preset to exclude feedback so that accidental sounds could be made audible, Tudor’s realization of Variations II, (using the amplified piano) foregrounded real-time control of the process of amplification and the manipulation of its resulting feedback. In other words, his focus was on the particular (electronic) devices and instruments that came between, and mediated, the sand and the stones. During the final days of the Americans’ visit, Yoshihara documented a pertinent encounter Tudor had in Japan. Album 2 ends with photographs of the rehearsal and performance of Ichiyanagi’s piece Sapporo in the city of the same name. Tudor is seen here playing the biwa, a short-necked “Japanese” lute that was imported from China in the seventh or eighth century, and whose roots can be traced further back to India. As a musical instrument, the physical specificity of the biwa Tudor came in contact with was neither globally interchangeable nor universally Japanese, but rooted in the particular history of its trajectory. Tudor indeed brought the biwa back to the US, and played it at least on one occasion (the performance of Sapporo during the Tudorfest held at the San Francisco Tape Music Center in April 1964). Throughout his life, Tudor revisited Japan on numerous occasions, but temples were not where he spent his time. Concealed inside many electronic instruments Tudor built are material evidences of these trips: components and kits that he purchased in Akihabara Electric Town every time he returned to Japan.

The author would like to thank Rosaly Roffman for kindly sharing her memory of the Hokkaido trip with Cage and Tudor.

Album 1

Album 2

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Although postwar Japanese avant-garde art is considered to have ended in the year 1970, Julian Ross contends that projection installations in the 1970s took on many of its characteristics, namely, an engagement with the concepts of “environment,” “intermedia,” and “display.” These critical concepts were not merely debated in Tokyo, but were also reflected in artists’ practices in Kyoto and Osaka. Ross discusses case studies, including film installations presented in the exhibition Equivalent Cinema (Kyoto, 1972) and other intermedia pieces that involved projection, kinetic art, synthesis art, video, film, sound, etc., in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Projection Installations in Japan, 1960s–1970s, Part I

Projection Installations in Japan, 1960s–1970s, Part II

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In addition to autonomous pieces of music, the Experimental Studio at the Polish Radio in Warsaw produced incidental music for radio broadcasts and soundtracks for movies and TV. In fact, this utilitarian task was the Studio’s first and main mission. See some of the films whose soundtracks were produced at the Polish Radio Experimental Studio below and read the essay “Colors of Joy and Sadness: Polish Electronic Music in Service to Cinematography” to learn more.

Zupa (Soup)

Zbigniew Rybczyński, 1974.

Screenplay, Direction and Photography: Zbigniew Rybczyński, Music: Eugeniusz Rudnik. 8 mins. Production: SE-MA-FOR Film Studio in Łódź, 1974© Filmoteka Narodowa (National Film Archive). Courtesy of Filmoteka Narodowa

Podróż (Trip)

Daniel Szczechura, 1983.

Screenplay and Direction: Daniel Szczechura. Photography: Waclaw Fedak. Music: Eugeniusz Rudnik. 7 min. Production: ZODIAK FILM STUDIO in Warsaw, 1983© Filmoteka Narodowa (National Film Archive). Courtesy of Filmoteka Narodowa

Prostokąt Dynamiczny (Dynamic Rectangle)

Józef Robakowski. 1971

35 mm short film. Music: Eugeniusz Rudnik. 2:30 min. Production: Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Filmowa, Telewizyjna i Teatralna w Łodzi, Warsztat Formy Filmowej, Łódź 1971. Collection of Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź.© Józef Robakowski. Courtesy of Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź

Akademia Pana Kleksa (Mr. Blot’s Academy)

Krzysztof Gradowski

Screenplay and Direction: Krzysztof Gradowski Photography: Zygmunt Samosiuk Music: Andrzej Korzynski

Excerpt. Production: ZODIAK FILM STUDIO in Warsaw, 1983© Filmoteka Narodowa (National Film Archive). Courtesy of Filmoteka Narodowa

Polska Kronika Filmowa: Studio Eksperymentalne (Polish Newsreel: Experimental Studio)

Wladyslaw Forbert

Excerpt of Polish Newsreel 2A/63 Photography: Wladyslaw Forbert, Documentary and Feature Film Studio, 1963© Documentary and Feature Film Studio

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The first concert of Polish electroacoustic music, also often called “music for tape”, took place in 1960. It was as if the magnetic tape itself was the instrument. On arrival, the audience encountered an almost-empty stage, and in place of live musicians with their string, brass or percussion instruments – they found only loudspeakers. The concert included the premiere of Włodzimierz Kotoński’s Study for One Cymbal Stroke (1959), whose 2 min 41 seconds were based solely on a single, pre-recorded sound. “The sound material of this study has been produced” – as the composer later explained – “from single sound obtained by striking a medium-sized Turkish cymbal with a soft stick”. Kotoński then filtered this material into 5 different bandwidths and transposed it into 11 pitches, as well as methodically regulated the length, for the complete Study to emerge.

The concert was held at the Warsaw Autumn Festival of Contemporary Music, whose program favored experiments. Born out of the relative loosening of strict cultural policies in the Soviet Block around the year 1956, the festival attracted and welcomed renowned international composers. It was there that in 1958 Karlheinz Stockhausen presented compositions of his elektronische Musik to the Warsaw audience five years after it premiered in Cologne, and where Pierre Schaffer gave a concert of his musique concrète in 1959. Polish electroacoustic music was the effect of the marriage of these two techniques, which merged the purely synthetically-generated sounds of Stockhausen’s electronic music with the pre-recorded, “concrete” sounds from the real world, employed by Schaffer.

Composers who visited Warsaw on the occasion of the Festival often used the facilities of the Experimental Studio at the Polish Radio. It was there that over 300 autonomous pieces of electroacoustic music were produced since its inception in 1957, in addition to numerous film soundtracks and music for radio broadcasts. The composers worked closely with Bohdan Mazurek and Eugeniusz Rudnik, the sound technicians employed at the Studio, whose extraordinary music production skills – cutting and pasting of music tape as well as transformation of the pre-recorded sounds – led them with time to create their own compositions.

Here you can listen to 23 music compositions (some in multiple versions) created at Polish Radio Experimental Studio by both the foreign and local composers. Starting with Kotoński’s Study, the first autonomous piece of music for tape produced at PRES in 1959, the presented selection leads through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The first decade at the Studio was marked by experiments similar to Kotoński’s: Most prominently, with multiple compositions by Andrzej Dobrowolski that employed magnetic tape together with traditional instruments: the piano, violin or oboe (Music for Magnetic Tape and Oboe Solo, 1965; Music for Magnetic Tape and Piano Solo, 1972). As well as the only electroacoustic piece ever composed by Krzysztof Penderecki, for which the composer used recordings of sung and pronounced basic elements of speech – single vowels and so-called “whistling” consonants, typical for the Polish language (Psalmus, 1961). In 1966 Bogusław Schaeffer, a composer as well as artist and playwright, created multiple versions of his Assemblage. Keeping up with the Zeitgeist both in the work’s title and the openness of its structure, Schaeffer recorded 3 versions, each with the same number of elements, recorded at a different speed.

The Studio’s production over the next decades was marked by the introduction of new equipment, especially the 1970 acquisition of the Moog synthesizer (available commercially since 1964). It was often used by the KEW group – Krzysztof Knittel, Elżbieta Sikora and Wojciech Michniewski – three young composers, who debuted in Warsaw in 1973. In Orpheus Head (1981) Sikora – who had studied with Pierre Schaeffer and Francois Bayle at Groupe de Recherche Musicales – used just one concrete, pre-recorded sound in addition to the synthesizer. It was the sound of a female voice, used to evoke the scream of Eurydice’s reverberating in the depths of inferno.

In order to popularize compositions written for magnetic tape, PRES published seven sets that included the music’s original score and the record. Most interestingly, at the time when tape recorders were not widely used, the music composed for – and produced with – magnetic tape had to be circulated on vinyl.

Audio recordings presented here come from the archives of Polish Radio in Warsaw, where they were transferred from tape into digital files. Courtesy of the Polish Radio.

Etude for one Cymbal Stroke Włodzimierz Kotoń ski

Duration: 2’40”. Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1959, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Psalmus 1961 – Magetic Tape Krzysztof Penderecki

Duration: 5’05”. Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1961, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Mikrostructures – for Magnetic Tape Włodzimierz Kotoński

Duration: 5’20”. Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound production, Bohdan Mazurek – sound production, Krzysztof Szlifirski– sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1963, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Music for Magnetic Tape and Oboe Solo Andrzej Dobrowolski

Duration: 9’00”. Janusz Banaszek – oboe, Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1965, Warsaw, Studio S-2. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Collage – for Magnetic Tape Eugeniusz Rudnik

Duration: 5’01”. Eugeniusz Rudnik– sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1965, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Assemblage I – for Magnetic Tape (Master Version) Bogusław Schaeffer

Duration: 8’31”. Bohdan Mazurek – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1966, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Assemblage II – for Magnetic Tape (Master Version) Bogusław Schaeffer

Duration: 4’07”. Bohdan Mazurek – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1966, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Assemblage III – for Magnetic Tape (Master Version) Bogusław Schaeffer

Duration: 18’01”. Bohdan Mazurek – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1966, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Hommage a Strzemiński – film score (Concert Version) Bogusław Schaeffer

Duration: 5’48”. Bohdan Mazurek – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1967, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Bozzetti – for Magnetic Tape (Version I) Bohdan Mazurek

Duration: 4’59”. Bohdan Mazurek – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1967, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Bozzetti – for Magnetic Tape (Version II) Bohdan Mazurek

Duration: 5’02”. Bohdan Mazurek – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1967, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Phonomorphia I – Etude for Magnetic Tape Dubravko Detoni

Duration: 4’10”. Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 14 Jan 1967, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Dixi – for Magnetic Tape Eugeniusz Rudnik

Duration: 4’45”. Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1967, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Epitafium – for Magnetic Tape (Version I) Bohdan Mazurek

Duration: 6’35”. Bohdan Mazurek – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1969, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Epitafium – for Magnetic Tape (Version II) Bohdan Mazurek

Duration: 6’38”. Bohdan Mazurek – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1969, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Epitafium – for Magnetic Tape (Version III) Bohdan Mazurek

Duration: 6’39”. Bohdan Mazurek – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1969, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Aela. Electronic Music Włodzimierz Kotoński

Duration: 10’32”. Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound recording maker. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1967, Warsaw, Studio PR.Courtesy of Polish Radio

Symphony (1966) – for magnetic tape/version from 1970 Bogusław Schaeffer

Duration: 17’24”. Bohdan Mazurek– sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1970, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Heraklitiana – harp solo and magnetic tape Bogusław Schaeffer

Duration: 20’45”. Mazurek Urszula – harp, Bohdan Mazurek – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1970, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Lux et tenebrae (Osaka impression) – for Magnetic Tape Arne Nordheim

Duration: 19’30”. Rudnik Eugeniusz – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1970, Experimental Studio. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Music for Magnetic Tape and Piano Solo Andrzej Dobrowolski

Duration: 11’55”. Dutkiewicz Andrzej – piano, Mazurek Bohdan – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1972, Experimental Studio. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Ekecheirija – for Magnetic Tape (music composed for the opening ceremony of the 20th Olympic Games in Munich in 1972) Krzysztof Penderecki

Duration: 3’11”. Józef Bok – conductor of the National Philharmonic Choir in Warsaw, Jerzy Dukaj – declamation, Zygmunt Listkiewicz – declamation, Bernard Ładysz – bass, Włodzimierz Press – declamation, Mieczysław Voit – declamation, Tomasz Zaliwski – declamation, Andrzej Żarnecki, Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1972, Warsaw, PWSM. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Ekecheirija II – for Magnetic Tape (music composed for the opening ceremony of the 20th Olympic Games in Munich in 1972) Krzysztof Penderecki

Duration: 2’39”. Józef Bok – conductor of the National Philharmonic Choir in Warsaw, Jerzy Dukaj – declamation, Zygmunt Listkiewicz – declamation, Bernard Ładysz – bass, Włodzimierz Press – declamation, Mieczysław Voit – declamation, Tomasz Zaliwski – declamation, Andrzej Żarnecki, Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1972, Warsaw, PWSM. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Ekecheirija III – for Magnetic Tape (music composed for the opening ceremony of the 20th Olympic Games in Munich in 1972) Krzysztof Penderecki

Duration: 3’06”. Józef Bok – conductor of the National Philharmonic Choir in Warsaw, Jerzy Dukaj – declamation, Zygmunt Listkiewicz – declamation, Bernard Ładysz – bass, Włodzimierz Press – declamation, Mieczysław Voit – declamation, Tomasz Zaliwski – declamation, Andrzej Żarnecki, Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1972, Warsaw, PWSM. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Concerto for piano and magnetic tape Szabolcs Esztenyi

Duration: 28’10”. Esztenyi Szabolcs – piano, Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded on 7 July 1973, Warsaw, Studio M-1. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Robak zdobywca – for magnetic tape Krzysztof Knittel

Duration: 12’00”. Krzysztof Knittel– sound production, Barbara Okoń – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1976, Warsaw, Studio PR.Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Orpheus’s Head – for magnetic tape Elżbieta Sikora

Duration: 17’08”. Barbara Okoń-Makowska – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1981, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Homo ludens – radio ballet, not without autobiographical elements Eugeniusz Rudnik

Duration: 32’29”. Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound production, Barbara Okoń-Makowska– sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1984, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Diario ‘87 – electronic sounds with spoken text Music: Tomasz Sikorski/ Text: Jorge Luis Borges

Duration: 7’31”. Jerzy Kamas – declamation (voice-over), Barbara Okoń-Makowska– sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1987, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Ptacy i ludzie – etiuda koncertowa na 4 artystów, 3 skrzypiec, 2 słowiki, nożyczki i garncarkę ludową (concert étude) Eugeniusz Rudnik

Duration: 15’49”. Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1992, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

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Graphic scores visibly and sonically changed contemporary music in the late 1950s and ’60s. The new notation unleashed a torrent of fundamental questions about music, sound, and composition: What counts as music? What distinguishes musical sound from non-musical sound? What is the time of music, and can there be alternatives to industrial clock-time? What assumptions about performance and skill underlie formal musical training? As Akiyama Kuniharu and Ichiyangi Toshi brought their knowledge of music and graphics from their experiences in Germany and the United States to Japan between 1959 and 1961, excitement surrounding graphic notation and its aesthetic possibilities spread rapidly among experimental composers, critics, and composers working around Tokyo. This annotated bibliography presents a selection of essays and articles about the new notational forms. Some, like Donald Richie, wrote scathing criticisms of the scores and performances linked to the aesthetics of chance and indeterminacy. Others, like Takahashi Yuji, questioned the motivation for using graphic notation: is it employed merely as a utilitarian tool for making writing easier, or is it viewed as the basis of a new aesthetic?

Two exhibitions presenting graphic scores in Tokyo in 1962 and the surrounding discourse attest to the high level of interest generated by the new form not only among musicians, but also among artists and designers. In about 1962 the critic Akiyama began using the term “graphic scores” to refer to the scores that used graphic notation. This reflects a profound change in the concept of the score itself, first as a combination of musical practice and graphic design using new forms of notation, and then as a hybrid object that stands on its own, potentially even independently of music and performance.

After the early 1960s, many of the pioneers of graphic scores returned to traditional notation, while others stopped writing scores in favor of instructions or embraced free improvisation. It’s difficult to say why the popularity of the form was so short-lived. One way to approach the question is to return to the conversations that took place in the early 1960s. Another is to turn to composers and performers working today and ask about their relationship to scores and notation. How might scores operate with a new, contemporary significance in tandem with the abundance of recorded sound available online today?

Source contents

Of Theory, the Aleatoric, and Space
by Nam June Paik, December 1959

Paik discusses recent developments in music theory and composition, notably the use of chance operations and indeterminacy in the music of John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff. The essay is by a young Paik, still deeply immersed in the study of contemporary Western classical music and the debates that surround it. Includes excerpts of graphic scores by Cage, Feldman, and Earle Brown.

Publication: 「セリー・偶然・空間など」  Ongaku Geijutsu 17(13), 82−101
Language: Japanese

Notation and Graphism: New Tendencies in Modern European Music
by Akiyama Kuniharu, March 15, 1960

Akiyama writes about his encounter with graphic notation during his European travels from August to October 1959. He is particularly impressed by the idea of notation and musical graphics as representations of “moving forms” in Stockhausen’s music. He reports that the European experiments with graphic notation are tied to efforts to conceptualize “new senses of time and space.”

Publication: 「記譜とグラフィズムーーヨーロッパ現代音楽の新傾向」 The Yomiuri Shimbun
Language: Japanese

New Directions in Sound and Image (Round Table) 1
by Akiyama Kuniharu, May 1960

In conversation with the artist Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, musician and critic Akiyama Kuniharu discusses his recent trip to Paris and Germany, commenting on the state of contemporary music (particularly musique concrète and electronic music) and the music festival circuits in Germany. Yamaguchi draws Akiyama out on the subject of Moving Forms, a new approach to composition that he encountered at the Domaine Musical concerts in Paris. Akiyama explains that among the composers featured in Domaine Musical, the aim of music composition is shifting from forming melodies and harmony by arranging a succession of pitches to creating acoustic space and time through movement. In the second half of the interview, Akiyama speaks with great excitement about his encounter with the new graphic notation used by composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, and Sylvano Bussotti, among others. Contains images of graphic scores by Stockhausen, Berio, and Bussotti.

Publication: 「音と形のあたらしい展望(対談)-1-」 Bijutsu Techo 173, 69–79
Language: Japanese

New Directions in Sound and Image (Round Table) 2
by Akiyama Kuniharu, June 1960

Part two of the conversation between Akiyama and Yamaguchi takes up the topic of new entanglements of sound and image, with a focus on jazz and action painting. Yamaguchi opens the conversation with the statement “I think abstract art and electronic music are related in the sense that they are both deeply invested in rationalism.” This is followed by a discussion of the relationship of rationalism, anti-rationalism, indeterminacy, and improvisation in music and painting. Akiyama notes a concentration of new and exciting electronic music coming out of Poland: “I am fascinated by the search for a new musical language in Poland in the midst of building a new social state, and a new society.” Contains images of graphic scores and notation by Stockhausen, Boulez, and Cage.

Publication: 「音と形のあたらしい展望(対談)-2-」 Bijutsu Techo 174, 62−75
Language: Japanese

Toward a New Approach to Time and Space 1
by Akiyama Kuniharu, March 1960

Part one of a report following Akiyama’s trip to Europe and his encounter with the idea of Music and Graphics (Musik und Graphik) during a five-part talk on the subject by Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Publication: 「音楽の新しい時間と空間への試み I 」 SAC, no. 1, n.p.
Language: Japanese

Toward a New Approach to Time and Space 2
by Akiyama Kuniharu, April 1960

Part two of a report following Akiyama’s trip to Europe. Akiyama writes about Musikalische Graphik, an exhibition of graphic scores held at the Donaueschingen Music Festival, along with performances of graphic score pieces by Roman Haubenstock-Ramati and Sylvano Bussotti, conducted by Pierre Boulez. These new notational forms, he argues, are attempts by young avant-garde artists to create a new sense of time and space through the intersection of music and graphics. Illustrations include photographs of a rehearsal in Cologne and an excerpt of Bussotti’s score.

Publication: 「音楽の新しい時間と空間への試み II」 SAC, no. 2, n.p.
Language: Japanese

John Cage
by Ichiyanagi Toshi, February 1961

An introduction to the music and thought of John Cage, focusing on his work since the late 1950s and exploring concepts such as indeterminacy, chance, natural sounds, and the musical approach to silence. Also includes a discussion of graphic notation and instruction-based scores.

Publication: 「ジョン・ケージ」 The Ongaku-Geijutsu 19(2) , 10−16
Language: Japanese

Music of Chance
by Ichiyanagi Toshi, October 1961, 48−50

Ichiyanagi introduces readers to chance operations in his own music and in the music of others, including Morton Feldman, Richard Maxfield, and Sylvano Bussotti. He credits John Cage with establishing chance operations as a compositional method. Cage’s method is groundbreaking, he writes, because the music of chance begins with the premise that “beauty happens in all sounds that occur in the environment.” Illustrations include images of scores by Cage and Ichiyanagi.

Publication: 「偶然の音楽」 Geijutsu Shincho 12(10)
Language: Japanese

Design (A Proposal for New Scores)—From This Year’s JAAC Exhibition
by Akiyama Kuniharu, October 25, 1961

Akiyama writes about an experiment undertaken at the Nissenbi (Japan Advertising Artists Club) exhibition of 1961, where designers rather than composers presented visual proposals for making musical notation suitable for contemporary musical sensibilities.

Publication: 「デザイン〈新しい楽譜のための提案〉——ことしの日宣美展から」 SAC Journal, no. 19, n.p.
Language: Japanese

Design (A Proposal for New Scores)—From This Year’s JAAC Exhibition
by Akiyama Kuniharu, December 8, 1961

In his review of Ichiyanagi’s concert at the Sogetsu Art Center on November 30, 1961, Akiyama writes for the general public about the new graphic notation. “There is the sense that music is an aestheticized form that is incapable of violently attacking people.” With this statement, he implies that the new music might possess the capacity for violence. Another idea to ponder: “The ‘work’ does not exist a priori [before performance].” Includes an image of Ichiyanagi’s graphic score for “Stanzas” and a description of his piece “IBM.”

Publication: 「現代音楽の自由と冒険　一柳慧の作品発表会をきいて」 Yomiuri Shimbun, Evening edition, 7
Language: Japanese

Nature and Music
by Ichiyanagi Toshi, February 1962

Part one of a three-part series. Writing about the ecology of everyday sounds in the city, Ichiyanagi opens with Cage’s questions: “Is music just sound?” and “Is the sound of a truck passing also music?” Arguing that traditional notation (using a five-line staff and notes) privileges the authority of the composer while de-emphasizing the natural environment, the essay follows the trajectory of European and American composers such as Varèse and Cage, who “reintroduced” into music the material and acoustic reality of sound.

Publication: 「自然と音楽」 Ongaku-Geijutsu 20(2), 6−9
Language: Japanese

The Meaning of Changing Signs: Looking at Graphic Scores
by Takiguchi Shuzo, March 1962

Beginning with descriptions of graphic scores realized as collaborations between composers and designers (Takahashi Yuji and Wada Makoto; Takemitsu Toru and Sugiura Kohei), and of a then-rare example of musical performance in an art gallery (Group Ongaku at an exhibition of paintings by Hiraoka Hiroko), Akiyama proceeds with a discussion of new undertakings by composers, performers, and designers working together on the creation and performance of graphic scores. He writes of concerns shared by composers Pierre Boulez and John Cage: “Problematizing the idea of chance, [the new graphic scores] afford performers a certain freedom of choice, and a site of possibilities.” On an optimistic note, Akiyama concludes: “If putting signs in a white space means producing a new acoustic space, what a free painting that is.” Illustrations include part of Takemitsu Toru’s score for “Corona for Pianists.”

Publication: 「記号変革の意味——グラフィズムの楽譜をみて」 Yomiuri Shinbun, Evening edition, 7
Language: Japanese

Nature and Music 2
by Ichiyanagi Toshi, March 1962

In part two of a three-part series of essays, Ichiyanagi discusses his own graphic scores as well as scores by John Cage, Matsudaira Yoriaki, Takahashi Yuji, Yuasa Joji, and Takemitsu Toru. Ichiyanagi argues that this new form of notation places a premium on process and experience (the “natural way of music,” as he puts it) rather than on the inscribed score as the final product by the composer as author. Includes images of scores by Ichiyanagi, Cage, Matsudaira, Takahashi, Yuasa, and Takemitsu.

Publication: 「自然と音楽 2」 Ongaku-Geijutsu 20(3), 14−19, 47
Language: Japanese

Corona for Strings II
by Takemitsu Toru & Sugiura Kohei, April 1962

Devoted to the theme “Contemporary Image,” this issue of the journal Bjutsu Techo includes a graphic score co-created by composer Takemitsu Toru and graphic designer Sugiura Kohei. The reproduction is notable in that it is a facsimile copy of the score rather than a partial or reduced illustration.

Publication: 「弦楽のためのコロナ II」 Bijutsu Techo 203, 34−41
Language: Japanese

Nature and Music 3
by Ichiyanagi Toshi, May 1962

In the final part of a three-part series of essays, Ichiyanagi focuses on the notion of time in contemporary music. Asking what kinds of time besides clock-time are possible, he writes about the endeavors of musicians such as John Cage, Yoko Ono, Tone Yasunao, Takehisa Kosugi, and LaMonte Young, who are seeking new conceptions of time through practices involving graphic notation, chance, and indeterminacy. At the end of the article, an announcement of an exhibition of graphic scores at the Tokyo Gallery includes a list of works by the four featured composers. Includes illustrations of scores by Cage and Tone, respectively, and installation views of works by Yoko Ono and Gruppo T.

Publication: 「自然と音楽 3」 Ongaku-Geijutsu 20(5), 23−27
Language: Japanese

Exhibition of 4 Graphic Composers
by Akiyama Kuniharu, May 1962

Setting aside his customary enthusiasm, Akiyama pans the exhibition of graphic scores at Tokyo Gallery (4 Composers—Exhibition of Graphic Scores). He describes the exhibition as hedonistic and opportunistic, overly focused on visual prettiness and spectacle (“Real live tadpoles! Toys hanging on strings!”), and missing the opportunity to engage with the new creative possibilities afforded by graphic scores.

Publication: 「4人のグラフィック楽譜展」 SAC 24, n.p.
Language: Japanese

From the Exhibition of Four Composers—An Adventure in Signs of Sound and Vision

by Akiyama Kuniharu, June 1962

A reflection on the exhibition 4 Composers—Exhibition of Graphic Scores at Tokyo Gallery featuring images of scores by Ichiyanagi Toshi, Mayuzumi Toshiro, Takemitsu Toru, and Takahashi Yuji, and accompanied by brief explanations of how to interpret the works. One of the illustrations includes guitarist Ibe Harumi playing Mayuzumi’s “Tadpole Music.” Adopting a more positive tone than the one he used in his review of the same exhibition, published in the May issue of the SAC Journal (see above), Akiyama discusses the profound significance of graphic scores for new ways of thinking about music. However, he reiterates his desire for the show’s four composers to translate these new concepts into audible musical results rather than fixating on the heightened visual interest in the scores.

Publication: 「『4人の作曲』展より　音と視覚の記号の冒険」 Bijutsu Techo 205, 39−43
Language: Japanese

Tripping up at the Front Lines: Yoko Ono’s Avant-Garde Show
by Donald Richie, July 1962

In this essay Donald Richie, working in Japan as a filmmaker and active participant in the experimental arts scene, launches a vitriolic attack against Yoko Ono’s concert at the Sogetsu Art Center. Richie accuses Ono of lacking originality and stealing from the work of others. The program consisted of pieces performed using instruction-based scores that challenged conventional ideas about music, originality, and aesthetic judgment.

Publication: 「つまづいた最前線——小野洋子の前衛ショー」 Geijutsu Shincho 13(7)
Language: Japanese

A Voice from the Front Line: A Response to Donald Richie
by Ichiyanagi Toshi, August 1962

In an eloquent response to Donald Richie’s harsh critique of Yoko Ono’s concert at the Sogetsu Art Center (see above), Ichiyanagi defends Ono and explains her position within the international avant-garde, citing established artists such as John Cage and Morton Feldman, who have expressed admiration for her work, and noting her recent invitations to participate in concerts and exhibitions in Europe and the U.S. Ichiyanagi describes the contributions her work has made to current conversations about temporality and the roles of the audience, performer, and composer in avant-garde and experimental music.

Publication: 「最前衛の声—ドナルド・リチイへの反論」 Geijutsu Shincho 13(8), 60−61
Language: Japanese

Seeing Music
by Sugiura Kohei, August 1962

Writing from the perspective of a designer, Sugiura regards his contributions to the creation of Takemitsu’s “Corona for Pianists” and “Corona for Strings II” as visual solutions to the composer’s ideas. For Sugiura, it doesn’t matter if the result is called a “score”; what is important is that the result be seen and handled by the interpreter, who may produce one of many possible orderly systems based on the object. The ideal design, he writes, is “a site that allows a person to explore freely the possibilities of self-expression.”

Publication:「見る音楽」 Geijutsu Shincho 13(8), 112−113
Language: Japanese

I Am Tired of Avant-Garde Art
by Hariu Ichiro, August 1962

Revisiting a panel on “The Present and Future of the Avant-Garde” moderated by the critic Hariu Ichiro, the article begins with excerpts from starkly contrasting statements by Yoko Ono and Takahashi Yuji about the current avant-garde. Other panel participants include composer Ichiyanagi Toshi and members of the Neo-Dada group. Noting the proliferation of conflicting statements about the avant-garde, Hariu expresses doubts about the usefulness of “avant-garde” as a label as well as about the role that avant-garde art plays in contemporary society. Includes images of performances by Ichiyanagi at the 4 Composers exhibition at the Tokyo Gallery, including “Tadpole Music” by Mayuzumi and works by Shinohara Ushio, Kikuhata Mokuma, Yoshimura Masunobu, and installation views of the Yomiuri Independent exhibition.

Publication:「前衛芸術に疲れました」 Geijutsu Shincho 13(8), 148−153
Language: Japanese

Announcement for Exhibition of WGS: Body text—”An exhibition of more than 100 new works by John Cage and more than 40 composers from around the world”
November 1962

A newspaper announcement for the Exhibition of World Graphic Scores. A clipping of the announcement, along with a fragment of a news page dated November 19, 1962, was inserted into the notebook in which Akiyama Kuniharu laid out the plans for this exhibition.

Publication:本文より「ジョン・ケージら世界各国の作曲家40数名の新作百数十件の展示」 Shukan Shincho, 18
Language: Japanese

An Exhibition of World Graphic Scores—A Return to Zero
By Yano Junichi, November 25, 1962

In a review of the Exhibition of World Graphic Scores, Yano Junichi celebrates the event for bringing together works by important figures in experimental music from Japan and around the world. Comparing the new form of notation to work by action painters, Yano writes that graphic notation allows composers to “return to primary sensations” and access the nature of sound itself.

Publication:「世界の新しい楽譜展——ゼロへの回帰」 SAC Journal, no. 27, n.p.
Language: Japanese

Round Table: An Inquiry into Graphic Scores—Around Recently Performed Works
By Ichiyanagi Toshi, Kobayashi Kenji, Kumagai Hiroshi, Takahashi Yuji, Yamaguchi Koichi, Akiyama Kuniharu July 1963

Performers, composers, and critics participating in the roundtable discussion address the significance of recently performed works that employ graphic notation. Violinist Kobayashi speaks of practical issues surrounding performance, while Takahashi wonders about the aesthetic and philosophical significance of graphic notation for the new music of chance and indeterminacy. They discuss pieces performed on July 3, 1963, at the Sogetsu Art Center (Sogetsu Contemporary Series 21, New Direction ensemble, second concert), including “Phrase à Trois,” by Sylvano Bussotti, “Zyklus,” by Stockhausen, “Drip Music,” by George Brecht, and “Sapporo” by Ichiyanagi Toshi.

Publication:「座談会 図形楽譜の問題——今回の作品を中心に」 SAC Journal, no. 32, n.p.
Language: Japanese

New Direction’s Second Concert, Or, A Critical Reflection on Graphic Scores
By Tone Yasunao, September 1963

Reviewing the July 3, 1963, concert by the New Direction ensemble (see above), Tone suggests that graphic scores such as Sylvano Bussotti’s, which depends on expert performers like David Tudor, harbor regressive tendencies. He contrasts this with Ichiyanagi’s “Sapporo,” which he praises for employing minimal signage and privileging actions by performers engaged in forms of creativity that are not centered on self-expression.

Publication:「ニューディレクション第２回演奏会または図形楽譜への反省」 Ongaku Geijutsu, *in Kagayake, p. 284
Language: Japanese

An Unusual Exhibition
By Hariu Ichiro, April 1974

Reviewing the July 3, 1963, concert by the New Direction ensemble (see above), Tone suggests that graphic scores such as Sylvano Bussotti’s, which depends on expert performers like David Tudor, harbor regressive tendencies. He contrasts this with Ichiyanagi’s “Sapporo,” which he praises for employing minimal signage and privileging actions by performers engaged in forms of creativity that are not centered on self-expression.

Publication:「異色の展覧会」 Geijutsu Seikatsu 296 , 148−149
Language: Japanese

The post Moving Forms: Writings on Graphic Notation appeared first on post.

Miki Kaneda: I’d like to ask you about your music activities since the 1960s, and about some of the pieces you performed in the concert at MoMA last month [January 2013].

Tone Yasunao: That reminds me . . . I was invited by Peters Edition to publish a score. After I received the invitation, Peter Peterson, whom I learned was the president of Peters Edition, came to Japan looking to publish scores by Japanese composers. There was a music school called Ueno Gakuen, which was run by the father of Fukushima Hideko and Kazuo. They were having a party there and I was told to go, and so I did. Then the guy from Peters saw me and thought I was this kid, and so he asked me, “How old are you?” That pissed me off, and so I ignored him completely.

Kaneda: When was that?

Tone: Around 1963 or ’64, I think, after John Cage went back to the U.S. So I think the people who Cage named were asked to go to that party. The younger brother of Fukushima Hideko, Kazuo, was there, too. Ichiyanagi Toshi was also there. Mayuzumi Toshirō, too. When Mayuzumi saw that I was upset, he made sure that the guy knew I had graduated from Geidai. Apparently, he thought that that was my alma mater even though it actually wasn’t. Now that I think about it, George Maciunas wrote me a letter saying something along the lines of “the Cage school” is going to be over soon, and so don’t bother publishing in a place like Peters Edition.

Kaneda: Is that a reason you declined?

Tone: Well, that, too, but also, my English wasn’t that good. I thought it was too much work to translate all the instructions into English.

Kaneda: But Maciunas published your scores in English. How did that work out?

Tone: Oh, that was Yoko [Ono]. I think she did those for me. We didn’t have access to a typewriter, and so I think Maciunas took her handwritten text and typed it out. That score of Anagram that you have at MoMA has a Fluxus Edition stamp on it. So Maciunas probably reproduced it on the basis of the score that I sent to him. Also, you know the scores that have textual instructions, such as the Music for Reed Organ piece? Those were translated by Yoko as well. But the longer and more complicated ones, like Geodesy, I didn’t send. For the ones that did make it to Maciunas, Yoko suggested having a GI guy send the scores by the military mail because it was the cheapest way. It turned out the GI was Jeff Perkins.¹

Kaneda: Speaking of Fluxus Editions, did you ever make any money from being involved in that?

Tone: Not at all! I received a letter from Maciunas saying that one score would sell for something very little . . . under a dollar. And he said that we would split the profit evenly.

Kaneda: Well, that doesn’t sound like such a bad deal for Maciunas!

Tone: But I’ve been thinking, if I had taken the opportunity to publish through Peters, I might have been labeled as part of the “Cage school,” and it might have been harder for me to start doing my original work.

Kaneda: Is that something that you were thinking back then, too?

Tone: No. When I was younger, I used to go back and forth and think that maybe I should have accepted the offer to publish through Peters. Once I arrived in America, though, I had it in my head that I had to do something completely new and different from the past. One of the first things that I did was to work with Merce Cunningham. But at Mills College I did do some of the things that I had been doing in Japan, like the cutting piece Music for a Painting. Bob [Robert Ashley] was at Mills College. At that time it was a women’s college, and they had a graduate music program. Among the graduate students at Mills, Paul DeMarinis, “Phil Harmonic” [aka Kenneth Werner], and Jon Bischoff were also there and performed my pieces for my concert. The interesting thing was that even with my poor English, people understood easily what I was trying to do.

Kaneda: How do you think the most recent performances of Smooth Event and Anagram at MoMA compare to performances of your work in the past?

Tone: You know, I think it might be better now. Before, it used to be too “musical.” For example, in something like Anagram, the glissandi are supposed to flow like a river.

Kaneda: Do you mean sonically?

Tone: Well, I was thinking of it more as a concept, like the monochromes of Yves Klein or the achromes of Piero Manzoni—something that doesn’t change, that isn’t allowed to progress. In Anagram, well, I think there were some people who were trying to make ugly sounds on purpose, and I’m not sure about that, but when you listen to it, it’s not “musical.” I like that.

Kaneda: Anagram and Smooth Event have been performed a number of times since you first composed them. Can you talk about some of the other recent performances of these pieces?

Tone: Joan Jeanrenaud, a former member of the Kronos Quartet, performed Anagram. Also, a video documenting Smooth Event was shown along with Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Hans Haacke, etc. at the exhibition Iron Works at the Anne Reid Gallery in Princeton, New Jersey, in 2003. When Anagram and Smooth Event were performed at the Minami Gallery in 1962, I also presented pieces called Silly Symphony and Drastic. For Drastic, the idea was to take drastic laxatives and then bang on a drum to hold off from going to the bathroom during the performance. The title Drastic is a combination of drumstick and drastic laxatives. Mizuno Shūkō, who performed the piece at that time, took about five to eight minutes. It’s a good thing there was a bathroom right behind the wall next to where the performance took place at Minami Gallery! The audience could hear the flushing sound.

Kaneda: I received some feedback from people who attended the recent concert at MoMA, and while Fluxus concepts are quite well-known and understood, some people mentioned that having to sit through it and experience it was a very different thing. Grasping something intellectually is totally different from being put in a situation where you have to deal with your own reaction to the experience of the piece, whether it’s boredom or frustration.

Tone: Well, if you want boredom, it should have gone on longer! But that wasn’t the goal. The idea was that it’s just one thing and unchanging.

Kaneda: At your MoMA performance, everyone except for Lary Seven was playing with you for the first time. I was interested in your process—that there was no rehearsal and only minimal discussion leading up to the event. It seemed like a purposeful decision.

Tone: If someone takes a piece that I wrote a long time ago and does it the same way now, well, that’s fine by me, but I was wondering what it means for me to also be committed to the performance as a performer. But if there are young people who aren’t intimately familiar with my old work, instead of telling them how to play it, I wanted them to interpret the score based on what they’ve experienced and what they’ve learned in their lives so far. It’s kind of an experiment to see how they would respond to it, and I was really interested in seeing how that panned out. So it’s not that I didn’t tell them what do on purpose, but rather that I was curious to see what would happen, and I didn’t want to give the impression that they had to do as I said.

Kaneda: All the pieces in the concert were from the 1960s, but there was one piece that was paired with you performing MP3 Deviation, a much more recent project, along with the rest of the ensemble improvising. Could you please explain how MP3 Deviation works?

Tone: There is a sound source and a computer program for the piece. The sound source is related to the idea that I wanted to do something totally new when I came to the U.S. I decided, “Now that I am here in America, I don’t want to make works for somebody else, just for myself.” Anyway, around that time I also went to Paris. That’s when David Behrman was the music director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He sent me a letter asking me to do something for the next year’s season. That was probably Cage’s idea. Behrman had also heard about the Mills College concert and told me, “I heard that you did something really interesting at Mills.” He probably heard about it speaking on the phone with Bob [Ashley]. It hadn’t even been a month since I had come to New York.

I went to New York at the end of 1972, and before that, in November, I did my concert at Mills. In January or February, Cage and David Tudor had a concert at the State University of New York Albany campus, and I went with a bunch of friends in a car rented by the management company Performing Art Services [a not-for-profit management organization which represented Robert Ashley and other artists]. Ay-O and, I think, David Behrman were also in the car. Nam June Paik and Shigeko Kubota and my wife were in the car, too. Shigeko used to be Kosugi’s girlfriend. Then she married Behrman. After she divorced Behrman, she became Paik’s girlfriend. Kosugi didn’t come because he had gone back to Japan around 1967. He didn’t come back to the U.S. until 1977. Eventually, Shigeko married Paik. It was funny because in the car Paik was joking about making a band with Kosugi and Berhman and calling it something like the “Shigeko Brothers.”

Kaneda: Was Shigeko-san laughing?

Tone: That kind of thing doesn’t faze her at all. She was complaining that it was all Japanese guys in the car, and then Paik protested that he wasn’t Japanese. But she ignored it. This was around the beginning of 1973. In the summer of 1973, Kudo Tetsumi was in Paris. He wrote to tell me that New York is nice enough, but why didn’t I come to Paris. And so I went to Paris with my wife. This was around the time of the Bastille Day festival, le quatorze juillet in French. The first thing I did after coming back from Paris was the Avant-Garde Festival at Grand Central. At that time I did two pieces that were just instructions based on the idea of a counter–Doppler effect because I had heard that we were going to borrow train cars and do the concerts inside them. But then it turned out that they didn’t move; they were just boxcars, and so it didn’t go according to my plan.

Tone: For the counter-Doppler piece, the idea was to make a sound with your voice each time the train passed another train. The voice was supposed to do the opposite of the Doppler effect. With the Doppler effect, when a moving vehicle approaches, the sound gets louder, but in this case, you were supposed to do the opposite and make your voice softer when the train passed and raise your voice gradually again as it moved away. So it’s a hard piece.

Kaneda: But the trains didn’t move, and so then what happened?　

Tone: We just pasted the instructions on the wall of a boxcar, along with instructions for the piece titled One Day Wittgenstein, which I performed with two other participants at Grand Central Terminal Main Concourse. That was all! It was simply conceptual. That was kind of leaning toward a kind of text-based music, right? Next was a piece for the Merce Cunningham concert. There is a book called Dada by Hans Richter, and I made a piece looking at that. This was a video piece that I made for a two-day Cunningham event. Using a pulley system, I used three turntables, each moving, respectively, according to the second, minute, and hour hands of a clock. The turntable going according to the seconds would make a full rotation every minute. I placed a video camera on the turntables. This idea came from the space of the Cunningham Studio, which has a stage on one side and a full mirror on the other side. I put the turntables right by the mirrors and the image goes around half in the real space and half in the virtual space of the mirror. All the while, the camera is reflects both real and virtual spaces. I had this visual idea first, and then I made a text based on “Theatrum Philosophicum,” Latin for the “theater of philosophy.” This was a text by Michel Foucault on Deleuze. I took some passages from Foucault’s text and combined them with a text of mine called “On Looking at Photography” (Shashin o miru koto ni tsuite), which appeared in a magazine called Shashin Eizō. It’s also in my book Gendai Geijutsu no Isō (1970).

After this, when I was asked to do this piece again, I didn’t use this text but instead used a nude woman videotaped in three parts: the head was one part that was rotating once an hour, the body was another part, and the legs were moving once a second or something like that. Those images were projected onto a monitor and each piece was rotating at a different rate; once every hour, they would come back together. The piece is based on René Magritte’s painting of a nude woman’s body divided into three separately framed images, I called this piece Clockwork Video à la Magritte. Then I added a new text for the piece. So these are the beginnings of my work with “text” in music, or so-called textual music.

Then I did a piece at Phil Niblock’s Experimental Intermedia Foundation. I thought of using text, and so I thought about the title Voice and Phenomenon. The title is the same as Derrida’s book, but the rest is totally different. Mine was based on the Tang poems in the collection Tōshisen.

This was what I consider my really original project that no one else had done. I decided that now that I had come all the way to New York, I would not work for anyone but myself, and I would not do things that someone else had already done.

Around that time, Shirakawa Shizuka, an East Asian Studies scholar, published a book called Kanji through Iwanami Shinsho that I found at Tokyo Shoten, a Japanese bookstore on Fifth Avenue near 50th Street in New York. Shirakawa talks about how kanji [Chinese characters] came to be from an ancient ethnographic perspective. Shirakawa was a very esteemed scholar. After I came across this book, Nam June Paik told me that Shirakawa was a very important person, and that since he was getting old, he should make a video while Shirakawa was still alive. But then Nam June died before Shirakawa, who lived into his mid-nineties and was an honorary professor emeritus of Ritsumeikan University. Reading Shirakawa’s book, I started thinking about how I might use this idea of Derridian grammatology for myself. I found the analysis of kanji to be very interesting. Normally, when you think of the kanji character for sky, you think the character is just a representation of the sky. But think about it—if you made an image of the sky with a cloud in it, how are you going to tell if the character is supposed to represent the sky or a cloud, right? So when you look at the term sora 空 (sky) it’s the word ana (hole) 穴 combined with kō 工 as in kōgu 工具 (tool). Shirakawa explains how these parts came to mean “sky” by going back to ancient Chinese bronze inscriptions and oracle bone script.

Kaneda: What were the images that you projected?

Tone: The images were based on the kanji. I researched all the origins of the parts of the characters based on Shirakawa Shizuka. Some of them were not in his first book. There is a set of hardcover books by Heibonsha called Kanji no Sekai, and two volumes about the history of ancient Chinese bronze inscriptions and oracle bone script called Kōkotsu-bun no Sekai and Kinbun no Sekai, also from Heibonsha. I also used Setsumon Kaiji, a five-volume Chinese reference book about the origin of characters, which dates back to the early second century. I used both of those sources to look up all these characters. This took a very long time!

Then, I developed this piece to turn the images into sounds by putting CDS light sensors on a screen. They are sensors that detect light and convert it into an electric signal. I connected that to an oscillator to make it into sound, and I amplified that through a PA system. When you screen that, the kanji turns into a sound.

Kaneda: So this is the basis of all of your music since the early 1970s!

Tone: Yes. When I released Musica Iconologos in 1993, I had already been working in this way for a while, and my question was whether I could do something similar using a digital process on a computer. This was right after Steve Jobs got kicked out of Apple and made the NeXT Cube on his own, not at Apple. It was all black and a very cool-looking computer. I used this machine. I wanted to make digitize an image and use the computer to turn that into sound. I had to find someone who could write a program to do this kind of thing. Tudor introduced me to one of his assistants, who was a student at McGill University in Montreal. At McGill there was an electronic music studio that I was free to use. I had an assistant, because I wasn’t very proficient at using their system. McGill had developed a program that recognized patterns, like pitches, or English characters. There was a Japanese-Canadian scholar, Fujinaga Ichiro, at McGill who made that program. Using that program to read images and characters, I then generated histograms—a kind of bar graph. Fujinaga’s program was combined with another program called Projector to read the wavelike shape of the histogram as a sound wave. Scanning an image, the program would read the digitized result and produce sound. One image becomes one histogram, which produces sound. The outcome of this project was released by Lovely Music as Musica Iconologos (1993).

Kaneda: What I find fascinating and perplexing is how in all these stages before the sound that we as listeners have access to, you are dealing with very concrete objects like images and characters and their histories. But when you hear the resulting sounds, which are very noisy, there is no way to hear any reference or connection to the original images and texts. How can we make sense of this relationship between the sound and the images that generate the material for the sounds?

Tone: First of all, if you wanted to create completely random sounds, that’s actually very difficult to accomplish because of habit and taste: if there are things that you found while you were messing around and that you liked, you might want to produce them again. I wanted to remove those tendencies but still remain very precise about my method. When I make music, I don’t start with an idea about a sound I want to make. Rather, I want there to be both rigor and differentiation in the sounds. If you start worrying about references between sound and the source, then it starts to be no different than what old-fashioned composers do, namely, representation as re-presentation.

Kaneda: But what do you make of a situation like your recent performance of Improvisation with MP3 Deviation? Your own contribution was based on MP3 Deviation, and so you could say that you yourself were not responding to the other players, but what about the interactions between others in the group?

Tone: We just happened to be in the same place at the same time. It was juxtaposition. This was true of when Group Ongaku members were working with Kuni Chiya’s dance company. When we were making the music, we weren’t looking at the dance at all.

Kaneda: That’s the method that Cunningham and Cage used in their collaboration.

Tone: Exactly. And so when I learned about that, it was not a surprise at all. As Group Ongaku, we were doing the same thing in the early 1960s. But it wasn’t that much of a conscious choice. It was also all we could do.

Kaneda: Why did you choose to work specifically with MP3s as opposed to any other digital format?

Tone: Before MP3s, I developed an idea while working on a project called Solo for Wounded CD. The CD wasn’t released until 1997, but the piece has been performed live since 1985. While I was preparing for the concert, I found a Japanese paperback titled Mijikana Kagaku Zeminaru (A science seminar for the familiar) by Hashimoto Hisashi, and I was intrigued by the author’s remark on digital recording. According to the author, digital recording is an excellent device, but a mistake in the numeric value will lead to a totally different and unusual sound. This became an idea for the new piece. When there are scratches or other marks of damage on the CD, the CD reader or CIRC [Cross-Interleaved Reed-Solomon Code], an error-correcting system, “corrects” these spots. I had a friend—a rich Chinese guy, who had a Swiss-made CD player from early on. I wanted to know how to override the correcting function of CD players. An engineer friend of his told me that if you poke tons of pinholes on the surface of the CD and then put little pieces of Scotch Tape on the CD’s surface and hit “play,” the CD player tries very hard to “fix” the files. But if there are too many errors in the original, then the errors will override the player and cause unexpected sounds. And so I tried it, and it worked. It took some time, but I figured out how to make different kinds of sounds this way. I would make twenty CDs, and maybe one would work. Sometimes the machines would just spit out the CD. Maybe I’m inefficient. Everything takes a lot of time for me. But it’s like that for things like Japanese pottery, too. The craftsmen make hundreds, and only one or two of them make the cut.² Back then, in 1985, there were no CD burners and no CDRs, and so I used commercial CDs.

Later, as an alternative to using the program made by Dr. Fujinaga, I tried going more directly from the characters using a sound-editing program called Sound Designer II. You can see what it looks like if you look inside the CD cover of my self-titled album released on Asphodel. This process makes things sound very good. In addition, you can do very detailed manipulations. Using a WACOM tablet with a stylus with the pencil function, I wrote out the characters in the Man’yōshu [the oldest existing collection of Japanese poetry]. So I used the flow of the characters as the sound-wave forms. I used this process for one of the tracks on the album. These sounds became the main source sounds for my later work, the album titled Yasunao Tone, released by Asphodel in 2002.

With MP3s, I figured out how to corrupt the file between the encoder and decoder using a program developed in collaboration with researchers at the New Aesthetics in Computer Music research group (NACM) at the University of York, in the U.K. When a file is corrupted, you get an error message inside the program, and so we used the program errors. The program converts the error messages into designated numbers. We used twenty-one different categories of error messages, and so we made the numbers one through twenty-one of the messages convert to designate the sample length for the sounds. When a sound file is corrupted, we made it so that degrees of corruption are adjustable with percentages ranging from 1 to 100. For example, if a text is converted to the number 2346, then that becomes the length of a sample sound of the original. Then there is another parametric change we use, and that determines the speed of the designated sample played. If the number is one, then it plays at the same speed as the original sample. If it’s two, then the playback speed is twice as fast, and so on. Another device in the program is inversion of polarity; in one sample, you invert the polarity with a certain duration of the waveform, and it produces a completely different timbre. This process makes it so that the original sounds are converted into something completely different. That’s the main idea—there’s no way to predict what kind of sounds this is going to produce. I wanted each corruption to produce a different sound, but at first, the resulting sounds weren’t very varied, so we had to experiment a bit.

Basically, I want to be able to not repeat the same sounds. And I don’t want habits of representation to get in the way of the music that I’m making. In other words, “representation” is “re-presentation,” which I want to avoid. I want to find sounds that I’ve never heard before.

Kaneda: Some critics who write about you focus on the fact that your music is about the destruction of technology. Related to this, the “noise” that you produce is sometimes described as the sound of this destruction.

Tone: That’s simply incorrect! I just added an important function to the way we use machines—producing errors.

Kaneda: This leads some people to place you in the lineage of noise music, but the processes and concepts behind your music make it seem as if you’re coming from a very different place. It seems like those kinds of connections are based on listening to the sonic product of your work without taking into account the processes or concepts, or the scenes that you’ve been affiliated with. But what has been important in your work for a very long time is this idea of media.

Tone: I’ve been influenced by Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” The reason this essay resonated with me so much is that I always felt that technologies of reproduction are not merely tools for playback. I see them as technologies for production or creation. Also, when I was young, I read a lot of modernist poetry. There is a poet named Kondo Azuma, and one poem of his that I felt was particularly interesting is a poem called Aoi Shigunaru (The Green Light). This is a poem that is meant to be read out loud. He wrote it to be played on radio. There are some naïve Marxist elements to this, but the main idea goes something like this: Right after the title, before the poem is heard, the listeners are invited to close their eyes and listen. The text of the poem itself is something along the lines of “Ladies and gentlemen, do you know what the green signal means?” At the very end, though, it says, “Ladies and Gentlemen, to those of you who have closed your eyes! / In the depths of your eyes, / What do you see? / Can you see the green light? If you can see it, let us depart / If you can see it, let us go / If you can see it, let us move / If you can see it, all aboard! / But if you cannot see it, there’s nothing that can save you. / You might as well enter into a deep sleep now.”³ This was amazing to me, because the act of the listeners closing their eyes is outside the text of the poem, but it’s of utmost importance to how the poem works. I’m interested in the things outside music in the same way. Here’s an example. In a piece titled Days, a tape music piece I composed in 1961 and performed for a dance piece by Kawana Kaoru, I tried to accomplish something similar for music. I started by reading the numbers, one, two, three, four . . . all the way to one hundred or two hundred. Once I had finished reading them, I recorded the same recitation of numbers onto a tape at a very low volume. Next, I played back that recording at a very loud volume while recording that plus a new layer of recitation. I repeated this a number of times, always recording low and replaying high. On an open-reel tape, this process produces so much distortion that the tape recorder (an old-fashioned reel-to-reel) placed on the stage literally starts jumping around. I remember somebody commented in a blog that Alvin Lucier did the same thing much later [I Am Sitting in a Room, 1969].

Kaneda: How many repetitions did it take for that to happen?

Tone: More than ten repetitions. At that point, you are not just dealing with sounds. It’s about the action produced by the overstressed tape recorder physically moving as a result of the layering of the tracks.

Kaneda: When this event took place, was the tape player visible to the audience?

Tone: Yes, they could see it shaking.

Kaneda: I noticed that in many of your pieces, including those like Smooth Event, which you recently performed, visible actions and things beyond the idea of music as sound figure prominently.

Tone: That’s right. Normally, when you think of playing the piano, you move your hands in order to make sound. I was more interested in specifying the action. Graphic scores are ideal in that sense because it’s about entering through action, and that’s the piece. Sound is merely a result.

Kaneda: Based on your interest in what is happening around the exterior of a piece, what is the role of the audience for you? Do you consider their reactions as part of a performance? For example, when you performed Geodesy at MoMA, I think there was a general sense of fear from the audience as we watched you ascend a tall ladder to drop things into the piano. I didn’t realize how intense that physical, visceral element of the piece would be in a performance.

Tone: Do you mean because I’m old?!

Kaneda: No. I was afraid for your co-performer, Ning Yu, as well.

Tone: Well, sound doesn’t exist as some kind of abstract entity. In addition, listening to re-presentation of sound is the same thing as listening to a record many times. As a composer, that’s meaningless to me. There are some people who like to listen to the same thing many times, but personally, I think it’s a bit strange that people don’t get bored of doing something like that. It would be great if you could write something that, even if it’s the same sound, turns out sounding different each time you hear it. There are certain things that sound is good for, but it’s very imprecise. In terms of the senses, it’s much rougher than something like vision. You can’t do the same things with sound that you can do with image or text. So there’s always the danger of sound becoming mere representation, which is what I try to avoid.

Kaneda: You’re talking about other ways to understand the idea of music as more than just “sound.”

Tone: Sound is vibrations, and so sometimes people describe things as “noise,” but in a sound coming from speaker cones, there’s already extra sound there, because of the physical movement of the cones. That’s why I think it’s wrong to want to design a concert hall where the audience members will hear the same sound, regardless of where they are sitting in the hall. These kinds of desires are driven by people’s world views, which are informed by certain assumptions about what “music” is.

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Producing sound effects for radio, film, and television propagated new trends in audio art. Whereas concerts of autonomous music organized by Polish Radio attracted audiences of a few dozen people, popular new movies pulled in far larger crowds.

In the popular children’s movie¹ Akademia Pana Kleksa (Mister Blot’s Academy, 1984) about a boys’ boarding school run by the eponymous Mr. Blot, there is a haunting scene involving a pack of wolves seeking revenge. The wolves sing a scary song that was performed for the soundtrack by the Polish heavy metal band TSA. Even more frightening than the song and the animals’ sinister, anthropomorphic appearance are the strange hissing sounds evoking lupine speech. If someone were to ask me to name an emblematic example of Polish electronic music in the service of cinematography, I would choose the sounds that Bohdan Mazurek created for that scene with the wolves, which haunted me for months. Eerie effects like these were what many filmmakers were after when they commissioned work from Polish Radio Experimental Studio (PRES).

Even though most of our generation growing up in the 1980s first encountered PRES through productions such as Akademia Pana Kleksa, the work the Studio carried out for the radio and film industry has not yet received serious analysis. This lapse is particularly surprising since the autonomous electronic music production for which PRES is renowned grew out of the same experimental environment where soundtracks for radio, TV, and film were created. Aiming to heighten the credibility of actions unfolding in radio dramas and films, PRES sound engineers used various novel techniques—tape manipulation, added reverberation—that in some cases resulted in miniature musical compositions. Just as French musique concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer drew on his experience in radio production when developing his experimental sound techniques, the production of autonomous electronic music at PRES owed much to its engineers’ experience working on projects rooted in other media.

Building the Basics

Before PRES was established in 1958, soundtracks made for Polish Radio productions were recorded in Warsaw University of Technology’s Department of Electroacoustics and then produced in Warsaw’s Documentary and Feature Film Studio (WFDiF). The composer Włodzimierz Kotoński worked with those two institutions when making the soundtracks for Barwy radości i smutku (Colours of Joy and Sadness, 1957), Ryszard Golec’s documentary film about the painter Zbigniew Kupczyński, and Dom (House, 1958), an experimental film by Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk. The production of Barwy relied on an array of catchy tricks. For example, Kupczyński is filmed through a glass plate on which he paints with his trademark, vivid colors. In Dom, which employs a plethora of animation techniques, sound plays a key role, guiding the viewer through the narrative. Indeed, for me, Dom’s soundtrack is essential: if I watch the film with the sound muted, I lose all sense of orientation. Moreover, the electroacoustic passages always occur at moments when various objects are brought to life. The composer not only endows these objects with a voice but also with something like a soul, since their individual characters can be discerned from the sounds they emit.

The very first production executed at PRES was the soundtrack by Kotoński, who was by then affiliated with the Studio, to the film Albo rybka… (A Fish or…, 1958), by leading Polish animators Hanna Bielińska and Włodzimierz Haupe. The striking electroacoustic effects harmonize with the filmmakers’ surrealistic motifs. As Kotoński himself later wrote, his aim was to create an “integral soundtrack” in which the surrealist sounds combined to form a kind of meta-music. Kotoński was so intrigued by the manipulation of recorded cymbal sounds that, after completing Albo rybka…, he embarked on what would be the first autonomous tape piece produced in Poland, Study for One Cymbal Stroke (1959). Conceived in the spirit of total serialism, the work was produced by manipulating in multiple ways (filtering, transpositions and tempo alterations, etc.) a recording of the sound produced by a cymbal when struck just once by a soft stick.

As noted above, PRES had the dual mission of producing radio and TV soundtracks in addition to autonomous pieces of music. Such was not the case at cutting-edge electroacoustic studios in Cologne and Paris, where electronic music—indeed music of any kind—made for film, radio dramas, and television was regarded as subservient to words and images, and therefore held in low esteem. In London, however, critics and producers recognized the dramatic potential of electronic music and likened the bizarre dissonance of its language to sounds of rage, madness, and suffering associated with paranoia and fear of the unknown. In 1958, the British Broadcasting Company set up the Radiophonic Workshop to produce soundtracks for the company’s audio dramas as well as for its comedy and science-fiction broadcasts. Although the Workshop was a division of the BBC’s Drama and Features Department rather than of its Music Department, autonomous pieces were developed there.²

Józef Patkowski, PRES’s founding director, must have realized that in the People’s Republic of Poland, a studio stood a stronger chance of gaining government support if it was to be multi-functional rather than dedicated to a single purpose. Immediately after the onset of the “Thaw” of 1956³, the Communist authorities agreed to fund the project citing, among other things, its potential contribution to the development of culture, including filmmaking, both at home and across the entire Socialist Bloc, and to boosting the region’s cultural profile abroad. In the years that followed, the Studio was often presented as a showpiece and received frequent visits from foreign delegations.⁴

PRES was also meant to perform an educational role by keeping its employees on the frontline of new technology. One way of doing this was by attracting outside commissions on which its composers and engineers could hone their skills. Producing sound effects for radio, film, and television not only brought in revenue but also assured distribution of PRES “products,” which propagated new trends in audio art. Whereas concerts of autonomous music organized by Polish Radio attracted audiences of a few dozen people, popular new movies pulled in far larger crowds.⁵

Spontaneous Development

At the end of the 1950s, PRES carried out a commission that demonstrated the vast potential of electronic music in soundtracks. The production was Der schweigende Stern (Silent Star, distributed in the U.S. as First Spaceship on Venus, 1960), a feature film based on the novel Astronauci (The Astronauts), by Stanisław Lem. The movie was directed by Kurt Maetzig and shot in the GDR. Andrzej Markowski was in charge of the soundtrack, and PRES employee Krzysztof Szlifirski was entrusted with the production of the “electron” fragments—strictly electronic sounds—at PRES. The film is a robust adaptation of the story, which presents a world where all nations work together, venturing into outer space in an attempt to decipher a message sent to the Earth from the planet Venus. The sound effects generated at PRES not only evoke the cosmic nature of the journey in futuristic machines, but also and above all function as the audio counterpart to the written language used in the mysterious message. As the composer and longtime PRES employee Eugeniusz Rudnik recalls, he and his colleagues who worked on the project came to be regarded as the people behind the languages of the cosmos and of hell.⁶ After Der schweigende Stern, they were approached by Polish filmmakers whenever a soundtrack was needed for a scene set in a remote, alien, or unknown territory or on a site that was to intended to induce horror.

In PRES productions it is often impossible for listeners to distinguish film score from sound effects, as the two functions were sometimes combined to memorable effect. One remarkable example is Krzysztof Penderecki’s soundtrack for Wojciech Has’s Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie (Saragossa Manuscript, 1964), for which Penderecki, assisted by PRES sound engineer and composer Bohdan Mazurek, composed both the instrumental and the electronic music. The film is adapted from a novel by Jan Potocki, the 18th-century traveler, politician, and Poland’s first archaeologist. Penderecki’s rather austere soundtrack is based on a small number of repeating musical motifs. Owing to their regular recurrence and recognizable features, they introduce a certain order into the complex narration, which interlaces the protagonist’s journey through Spain’s Sierra Morena mountains with retrospection, daydreams and bizzare events. Castanets and lute make direct reference to the geographic setting, while the electronic passages—mainly various sorts of multiplied reverberation—evoke the uncanny.

At PRES, Penderecki created more than a dozen soundtracks but just one autonomous composition, Psalmus (1961). But as music critic Ludwik Erhardt suggests⁷, Psalmus outrivaled other tape pieces of the time in the precision of its production, an achievement that can be ascribed to the experience Penderecki had acquired making soundtracks.

Following the success of Der schweigende Stern, PRES received a steady stream of commissions to create soundtracks for science-fiction films. Among the productions of 1964 was the soundtrack by Eugeniusz Rudnik and others for Janusz Majewski’s TV film Docent H., the story of a mysterious scientist working in isolation on a new, ideal race of people. Electronic music is heard each time the protagonist refers to state-of-the-art inventions or scientific investigations, and it accompanies images of electronic equipment dotted with diodes and knobs, culminating in a scene in which the eponymous docent launches an audio attack on a professor in order to seize control of his brain. Rudnik also created the music to Marek Nowicki and Jerzy Stawicki’s short TV film Przyjaciel, (Friend, 1965). The story, based on the novel of the same title by Lem, centers on a man controlled by an immense electronic brain striving to take control of the world. As in the films mentioned above, the electronic soundtrack is keyed to images of futuristic devices and thus seems to convey their voices and language.

PRES’s work for film included commissions from the Łódź-based Wytwórnia Filmów Oświatowych (WFO, Educational Film Studio), which made documentaries about art, including contemporary practices. In 1967 alone, PRES’s Bogusław Schaeffer completed the soundtracks for Bohdan Mościcki’s film on Polish abstractionist Władysław Strzemiński and Witold Żukowski’s documentary on EL Gallery, founded in 1961 in Elbląg by the artist Gerard Kwiatkowski, organizer of the Biennial of Spatial Forms. Schaeffer’s electroacoustic contribution to Mościcki’s film, like Kotoński’s to Albo rybka…, led directly to the making of an autonomous piece, Hommage à Strzemiński (1967).

In the 1970s, the Studio began to attract visual artists working in experimental film and seeking “new style.” The artist Józef Robakowski first approached PRES in 1971 in his role as the producer of the WFO-sponsored film Kompozycje przestrzenne (Spatial Compositions), on the artist Katarzyna Kobro. Robakowski wanted a soundtrack for the work and gave the job to Rudnik. Their collaboration resumed later that same year on the production of Robakowski’s short experimental film Prostokąt Dynamiczny (Dynamic Rectangle), from which all literary elements were eliminated. The plot consists of coordinated rhythmical elements of sound and abstract images.

About the same time, Daniel Szczechura made his animated film Podróż (Journey, 1970) with a soundtrack by Rudnik. The work depicts the filmmaker’s commute by train from Warsaw, where he lived, to Łódź, where he worked. As Szczechura recalls, he realized that when a shot is extending beyond a certain critical span it generates a new quality, as in John Cage’s music. Rudnik also collaborated with Zbigniew Rybczyński on the film Zupa (Soup, 1974), which differs greatly from Podróż in formal terms but is similar in its inspiration. Rybczyński describes the origins of Zupa as follows: “It’s a film about my life, my situation at the time. I’d just gotten married and was living in Warsaw. Three times a week I commuted to Łódź, where I worked as a director, cinematographer, screenwriter and special effects artist.”⁸ Thus, both Szczechura and Rybczyński created unique works based on autobiographical themes.

Rudnik, the sound producer on both projects, had by this time developed a rich acoustic language that would soon come to be widely recognized as an art form in itself. In the 1960s, Rudnik started to develop his own autonomous compositions. In almost aleatory fashion, this meticulous interpreter and producer of the ideas of filmmakers and others created his first tape collages from rejected snippets salvaged from the projects of others. And so it happened that soundtracks contributed to the development of a unique form of artistic expression, one that Rudnik continues to practice to this day.

Phase-out

In 1985 Patkowski was replaced as PRES’s director by Ryszard Szeremeta, who was faced with the complex challenge of reversing the Studio’s economic decline. Established as a state-funded center for art and research, PRES in the late 1980s was expected to become financially self-sufficient. Yet work at PRES continued: music was produced for the three-part children’s movie series about the eccentric Mr. Blot. Bohdan Mazurek composed and performed the electronic sound effects, which are contrasted in stereotypical fashion with instrumental pieces, especially in the final part of the series. While instrumental music accompanies scenes featuring people and other living creatures, the sounds produced at PRES serve as the “voices” of odd machines. A similar marginal role is assigned to electronic music in Sztuka kochania (The Art of Love, 1989), the popular erotic comedy by Jacek Bromski that includes three short pieces by Krzysztof Szlifirski. It is sad that after thirty years electronic music was finally subordinated to cinematography. In The Art of Love, it plays a marginal role, appearing in comical scenes to emphasize the clumsiness of the characters’ behavior.

As seen in the majority of the productions discussed above, what was launched as a service and training operations of PRES bore fruit in more ways than might have been expected. Music commissioned by the Polish film industry often provided opportunities for technical and artistic experimentation that later could inform innovative autonomous compositions. Thus, PRES ushered into Poland a new artistic language and new musical genres.

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During the late 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, many prominent composers on the international avant-garde music scene began producing graphic scores that employed new forms of notation and inscribed them on sheets that deviated radically from convention in size, shape, and color, as a new way to communicate ideas about music. In contrast to scores representing sound in traditional notation, graphic notation emphasized concepts and actions to be carried out in performance itself, resulting in “unexpected sounds and unpredictable actions” that may not even include the use of musical instruments. In 1962, two exhibitions of graphic scores were held in Tokyo, bringing together the work of Japanese and international experimental composers. The first, 4 Composers, presented scores by four Japanese musicians: Mayuzumi Toshiro, Ichiyanagi Toshi, Takahashi Yuji, and Takemitsu Toru. The second, An Exhibition of World Graphic Scores, was organized by Akiyama Kuniharu and Ichiyanagi Toshi to coincide with John Cage and David Tudor’s first visit to Japan. Crammed into a small gallery, that ambitious show featured close to 150 scores by dozens of Japanese and international composers and artists. Some of the works, such as the collaboration between designer Sugiura Kohei and composer Takemitsu Toru, were clearly made with exhibition display in mind.

This Curated Selection on post presents documentation of the exhibitions, primarily in the forms of scores, photographs, flyers, and planning materials from MoMA’s collection. Ironically, although scores typically function as instructions for musical performance, in the context of an exhibition, the sounds themselves of performance exist only as ideas. The double function of a score—both a means for performance, and a visual object—presents an interesting challenge to exhibiting graphic scores. Does it make sense to display scores in the same way as other printed matter or drawings? Where and when should performances take place? Why don’t the performances receive as much veneration as the scores? The answer to these questions depends on more questions: Where is the “work” (is it the material object, the duration of performance, or both)? What do we privilege as artists, musicians, curators, viewers, and listeners? Check out our selections below and send us your comments, ideas, and interpretations of the scores.

With many thanks to Sen Uesaki of the Keio University Art Center for research guidance.

4 Composers

An Exhibition of World Graphic Scores

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