Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Unboxing video of George Brecht’s compendium of event scores, “Water Yam,” 2024. Jean Brown Papers. Getty Research Institute, 890164 box 127. © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
The Getty Research Institute holds three 1960s Fluxus editions of Water Yam, each with a different style of container and a different number of cards included (between seventy-three and ninety-one). Water Yam debuted in 1963, but the copy featured here—a deluxe edition housed in a wooden box with a metal clasp—was probably assembled in 1965, since it includes the slightly later score Cloud Scissors (1964–65). It contains ninety-one different scores, enough to easily fill up the entire table. As an exercise in reckoning with the vast scope of this work, readers might imagine what it would take to arrange a performance of every single score. ---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/
Unboxing video of George Brecht’s compendium of event scores, “Water Yam,” 2024. Jean Brown Papers. Getty Research Institute, 890164 box 127. © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
The Getty Research Institute holds three 1960s Fluxus editions of Water Yam, each with a different style of container and a different number of cards included (between seventy-three and ninety-one). Water Yam debuted in 1963, but the copy featured here—a deluxe edition housed in a wooden box with a metal clasp—was probably assembled in 1965, since it includes the slightly later score Cloud Scissors (1964–65). It contains ninety-one different scores, enough to easily fill up the entire table. As an exercise in reckoning with the vast scope of this work, readers might imagine what it would take to arrange a performance of every single score. ---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/
