Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
“Animation of David Tudor’s realization of graph T 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
Graph T is one of the most virtuosic of David Tudor’s graph-realizations in the first realization. Again, John Cage’s choice of words in his instructions is strange. It is not clear what an “influence” is. What is clear is that the amoebas “grab” pitch material and temporal duration that should be played as a moving cluster. As with the others, Tudor translates the amoebas into traditional notation, with sharp lines indicating swipes of the palm or finger to fill out the contours of the cluster. Cage’s system of numbered dynamics (1–64) Tudor translates to his standard conventional scale of 0.5–10.5 (in blue ink). At the premiere, as with many of the excerpts, the sonic result is something like a pianistic version of psychosis. Again, as with graph J, Tudor could have fully complied with Cage’s graph by excerpting just a few clusters and playing them at a slow speed. By playing it fast, and in its entirety, he foregrounds his own Artaudian voice—a spectacle of an abstracted, formalized, and impersonal violence. In the Town Hall performance, Tudor executes graph T between 4′20″ and 4′55″. ---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 T 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
Graph T is one of the most virtuosic of David Tudor’s graph-realizations in the first realization. Again, John Cage’s choice of words in his instructions is strange. It is not clear what an “influence” is. What is clear is that the amoebas “grab” pitch material and temporal duration that should be played as a moving cluster. As with the others, Tudor translates the amoebas into traditional notation, with sharp lines indicating swipes of the palm or finger to fill out the contours of the cluster. Cage’s system of numbered dynamics (1–64) Tudor translates to his standard conventional scale of 0.5–10.5 (in blue ink). At the premiere, as with many of the excerpts, the sonic result is something like a pianistic version of psychosis. Again, as with graph J, Tudor could have fully complied with Cage’s graph by excerpting just a few clusters and playing them at a slow speed. By playing it fast, and in its entirety, he foregrounds his own Artaudian voice—a spectacle of an abstracted, formalized, and impersonal violence. In the Town Hall performance, Tudor executes graph T between 4′20″ and 4′55″. ---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/
