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Possibility of Action: the Life of the Score

Score by Alice Santoro

MACBA Documentation Centre
17 JUNE – 05 OCT. 2008

«I sometimes think of music as a succession of sounds which on reaching the listener’s ear turns back on itself and retraces its path, in orderly disorder, until re-entering the mind of the person who thought it up», wrote the Italian artist and composer Walter Marchetti.

Together with Robert Ashley, Eugènia Balcells, Joan Brossa, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros, Lee Ranaldo and Yasunao Tone, Marchetti was one of the authors whose work was included in the exhibition Possibility of Action. The Life of the Score, curated by Barbara Held and Pilar Subirà at the MACBA Study Center.

The exhibition explored the possibilities of musical notation, loosely understood as a means for musical and visual transmission, and brought together historical and contemporary scores as well as artistic creations not strictly from the field of music. Scores became a field of action, sound became artistic material, the boundaries between art, music and life blurred, and the powers of composers, performers and audiences merged.

The exhibition was presented in conjunction with the RWM program Lines of Sight, a new space for sound experimentation.

“One of the more recent contemporary art exhibitions to provide a historical survey of graphic and experimental scores as visual as well as notational objects was Possibility of Action: The Life of the Score at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona Study Center in 2008.” Cited by Hendrik Folkerts in his text for Documenta 14, Keeping Score: Notation, Embodiment, and Liveness

http://www.documenta14.de/…/464_keeping_score_notation…

Clear Music, Eugenia Balcells

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