Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
“Animation of David Tudor’s realization of graph K of the Solo for Piano,” 1958, John Cage (American, 1912–92) and David Tudor (American, 1926–96)
Solo for Piano by John Cage © 1960 by Henmar Press Inc. Permission by C.F. Peters Corporation. All rights reserved. With permission of WERGO, Copyright © 1993. WERGO, a division of Schott Music & Media GmbH. Animated score developed by Michael Gallope and produced by Greg Albers
After the explosion of graph J, David Tudor inserts a silence of about fifteen seconds and then plays the eight chords of graph K around 1′20″. Graph K is visually distinctive; it is noted for having adorned the cover of C.F. Peters’s John Cage catalog. It is a grand staff, thick lined and gargantuan in its proportions, with a framework of dual ledger lines extending on either side. The clefs float off to the left, adrift from their usual positions. Instead of notes, Cage has drawn a jumble of polygons with vertices labeled as specific pitches. And the instructions for graph K are perplexing, to say the least. What does it mean to play only an odd or even number of tones in a performance? We surely know what the sided figures are, and Tudor plays them in the manner of staccato grace-like notes or punctuated attacks. But in relation to what? It may be that the logical cul-de-sac of Cage’s instructions is part of the point; the existence of a correct solution may be immaterial. Perhaps Cage is foregrounding inexhaustible esotericism—his almost mystical and naturalistic attachment to the impersonal powers of procedures, instructions, and calculations. This formalism provides discipline for all that is noble in the practice of indeterminacy. Note as well in Tudor’s performance that he uses the notation here, as elsewhere, as a guide for sequencing the tasks. Other than playing graph K relatively quickly, Tudor makes no effort to read the spacing of the chords as proportional notation (in which a timeline for a performance would move steadily from left to right). ---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/
“Animation of David Tudor’s realization of graph K of the Solo for Piano,” 1958, John Cage (American, 1912–92) and David Tudor (American, 1926–96)
Solo for Piano by John Cage © 1960 by Henmar Press Inc. Permission by C.F. Peters Corporation. All rights reserved. With permission of WERGO, Copyright © 1993. WERGO, a division of Schott Music & Media GmbH. Animated score developed by Michael Gallope and produced by Greg Albers
After the explosion of graph J, David Tudor inserts a silence of about fifteen seconds and then plays the eight chords of graph K around 1′20″. Graph K is visually distinctive; it is noted for having adorned the cover of C.F. Peters’s John Cage catalog. It is a grand staff, thick lined and gargantuan in its proportions, with a framework of dual ledger lines extending on either side. The clefs float off to the left, adrift from their usual positions. Instead of notes, Cage has drawn a jumble of polygons with vertices labeled as specific pitches. And the instructions for graph K are perplexing, to say the least. What does it mean to play only an odd or even number of tones in a performance? We surely know what the sided figures are, and Tudor plays them in the manner of staccato grace-like notes or punctuated attacks. But in relation to what? It may be that the logical cul-de-sac of Cage’s instructions is part of the point; the existence of a correct solution may be immaterial. Perhaps Cage is foregrounding inexhaustible esotericism—his almost mystical and naturalistic attachment to the impersonal powers of procedures, instructions, and calculations. This formalism provides discipline for all that is noble in the practice of indeterminacy. Note as well in Tudor’s performance that he uses the notation here, as elsewhere, as a guide for sequencing the tasks. Other than playing graph K relatively quickly, Tudor makes no effort to read the spacing of the chords as proportional notation (in which a timeline for a performance would move steadily from left to right). ---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/
