Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
“Alison Knowles: Identical Lunch Symphony,” 5 May 2012 at the Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago. Courtesy of the Smart Museum of Art
This video documents the premiere of Alison Knowles’s Identical Lunch Symphony on 5 May 2012 at the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Knowles devised this realization on the basis of George Maciunas’s previously unrealized proposal to blend the components of The Identical Lunch to make a kind of fish soup. For this performance, she enlisted some friends and a group of students at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Each participant brought a blender and pressed the buttons in response to Knowles’s conducting gestures. Each blender emitted a distinct whirr, depending on age, brand, model, etc. At the end of the symphony, Knowles and the participants served the mixture in paper cups to the audience members, only some of whom were willing to try it. ---The Scores Project editors
This video is from “The Scores Project: Experimental Notation in Music, Art, Poetry, and Dance, 1950–1975,” a free and open-access digital publication examining experimental scores and source documents from the postwar avant-gardes, interpreted by experts on art, music, dance, and poetry.
Individuals working in and across the fields of visual art, music, poetry, theater, and dance in the mid-20th century began to use experimental scores in ways that revolutionized artistic practice and opened up new forms of interdisciplinary collaboration. Their experimental methods—associated with the neo-avant-garde, neo-Dadaism, intermedia, Fluxus, and postmodernism—exploded in notoriety during the 1960s in locales from New York to Europe, East Asia, and Latin America, becoming foundational to global trends in contemporary art and performance.
“The Scores Project,” with expert commentaries from an interdisciplinary team of scholars with accompanying illustrations, examines a series of experimental scores by John Cage, George Brecht, Sylvano Bussotti, Morton Feldman, Allan Kaprow, Alison Knowles, Jackson Mac Low, Benjamin Patterson, Yvonne Rainer, Mieko Shiomi, David Tudor, and La Monte Young.
This open-access publication is available for free online at https://www.getty.edu/publications/scores/ . It includes more than 2,800 images, audio/video files, and interactive features. Also available are free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book’s main texts, including the full introduction and essays on each of the eleven scores featured in the book.
Edited by Michael Gallope, Natilee Harren, and John Hicks, with contributions by Emily Ruth Capper, George E. Lewis, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Benjamin Piekut, and Nancy Perloff
Published by the Getty Research Institute, 2025
______________________________________________________________________
The Getty Research Institute is dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the visual arts and their various histories through its expertise, active collecting program, public programs, institutional collaborations, exhibitions, publications, digital services, and residential scholars programs. Its library and special collections of rare materials and digital resources serve an international community of scholars and the interested public. The Research Institute's activities and scholarly resources guide and sustain each other and together provide a unique environment for research, critical inquiry, and scholarly exchange.
Getty Research Institute: https://www.getty.edu/research/
“Alison Knowles: Identical Lunch Symphony,” 5 May 2012 at the Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago. Courtesy of the Smart Museum of Art
This video documents the premiere of Alison Knowles’s Identical Lunch Symphony on 5 May 2012 at the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Knowles devised this realization on the basis of George Maciunas’s previously unrealized proposal to blend the components of The Identical Lunch to make a kind of fish soup. For this performance, she enlisted some friends and a group of students at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Each participant brought a blender and pressed the buttons in response to Knowles’s conducting gestures. Each blender emitted a distinct whirr, depending on age, brand, model, etc. At the end of the symphony, Knowles and the participants served the mixture in paper cups to the audience members, only some of whom were willing to try it. ---The Scores Project editors
This video is from “The Scores Project: Experimental Notation in Music, Art, Poetry, and Dance, 1950–1975,” a free and open-access digital publication examining experimental scores and source documents from the postwar avant-gardes, interpreted by experts on art, music, dance, and poetry.
Individuals working in and across the fields of visual art, music, poetry, theater, and dance in the mid-20th century began to use experimental scores in ways that revolutionized artistic practice and opened up new forms of interdisciplinary collaboration. Their experimental methods—associated with the neo-avant-garde, neo-Dadaism, intermedia, Fluxus, and postmodernism—exploded in notoriety during the 1960s in locales from New York to Europe, East Asia, and Latin America, becoming foundational to global trends in contemporary art and performance.
“The Scores Project,” with expert commentaries from an interdisciplinary team of scholars with accompanying illustrations, examines a series of experimental scores by John Cage, George Brecht, Sylvano Bussotti, Morton Feldman, Allan Kaprow, Alison Knowles, Jackson Mac Low, Benjamin Patterson, Yvonne Rainer, Mieko Shiomi, David Tudor, and La Monte Young.
This open-access publication is available for free online at https://www.getty.edu/publications/scores/ . It includes more than 2,800 images, audio/video files, and interactive features. Also available are free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book’s main texts, including the full introduction and essays on each of the eleven scores featured in the book.
Edited by Michael Gallope, Natilee Harren, and John Hicks, with contributions by Emily Ruth Capper, George E. Lewis, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Benjamin Piekut, and Nancy Perloff
Published by the Getty Research Institute, 2025
______________________________________________________________________
The Getty Research Institute is dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the visual arts and their various histories through its expertise, active collecting program, public programs, institutional collaborations, exhibitions, publications, digital services, and residential scholars programs. Its library and special collections of rare materials and digital resources serve an international community of scholars and the interested public. The Research Institute's activities and scholarly resources guide and sustain each other and together provide a unique environment for research, critical inquiry, and scholarly exchange.
Getty Research Institute: https://www.getty.edu/research/
