journal of visual culture

Structures of Experience: On George Brecht’s

Event Scores

Gascia Ouzounian

Abstract
George Brecht, an artist best known for his associations with Fluxus,
is considered to have made significant contributions to emerging
traditions of conceptual art and experimental music in the early 1960s.
His Event scores, brief verbal scores that comprised lists of terms or
open-ended instructions, provided a signature model for indeterminate
composition and were ‘used extensively by virtually every Fluxus artist’.
This article revisits Brecht’s early writings and research to argue that,
while Event scores were adopted within Fluxus performance, they were
intended as much more than performance devices. Specifically, Brecht
conceived of his works as ‘structures of experience’ that, by revealing the
underlying connections between chanced forms, could enable a kind of
enlightenment rooted within an experience of a ‘unified reality’.

Keywords
Event scores • Fluxus • George Brecht • indeterminacy • John Cage

No Words
In a personal statement submitted as part of a collaborative project proposal,
‘Project in Multiple Dimensions‘ (1957–8), George Brecht describes his art as ‘a
deeply personal, infinitely complex, and essentially mysterious, exploration of
experience. No words can ever touch it’ (Kaprow et al., 1999[1957–8]: 159).1
The profound irony of this statement is not lost on anyone familiar with Brecht’s
most enduring works, his Event scores of 1960–2, which gave shape, using
words, and often only words, to this exploration.

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Vol 10(2): 1–14 DOI 10.1177/1470412911402894
2 journal of visual culture  10(2)

Brecht’s Event scores were brief, elemental texts that typically took the form
of lists or instructions. Many comprised only a few terms or phrases: names of
common objects or phenomena (‘chair’; ‘house number’), descriptions of states
of being (‘on/off’, ‘between two sounds’), actions (‘assembling’; ‘dripping’)
and open-ended instructions (‘When the telephone rings, it is answered’).
Over the period of a few years, Brecht produced over 100 Event scores, usually
handwriting or typing these on small cards he variously exhibited, mailed to
friends, or published.2 Lucy R. Lippard (1973) opens her landmark history of
Conceptual Art – Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966
to 1972 – by citing one of the scores (p. 11):

Three Aqueous Events (Summer, 1961)

• ice
• water
• steam

This Event score is notable for its brevity, although others were even more
concise. Two Vehicle Events (Summer, 1961) contains only two terms (‘start/
stop’), while Word Event (Spring, 1961) contains only one: ‘Exit’.
Ideally, words (even one or two) would not interfere with the ‘total experience’
that Brecht sought to manifest in his Events (Nyman, 1978[1976]: 117). ‘Art
unites us with the whole’, Brecht wrote. ‘Words only permit us to handle a
unified reality by maneuvering arbitrarily excised chunks’ (Brecht, 2004[1966]:
4). Still, words articulate, even as they fragment and delimit experience, and it is
through words – Brecht’s and others’, words written, spoken and scored – that it
can become possible to approach the personal, complex and mysterious realms
of experience that sometimes evade language.

The Field of New Music

Dieter Daniels [DD]: [Did you] also consider making a career as a musician,
or as a composer, parallel to your work in the visual
arts?
George Brecht [GB]: No ... not as a composer. I ended up composing
events rather than musical pieces.
DD: But the first pieces were still published in the context of new music.
GB: Yes, that is right ...
DD: But you never wanted to enter the field of new music more deeply?
GB: No, it’s too disgusting.
DD: In which way?
GB: Oh, in almost every way.3
 Ouzounian  Structures of Experience: On George Brecht’s Event Scores 3

Brecht’s Event scores feature prominently within histories of experimental music

and sound art (see Kahn, 1999; LaBelle, 2006; Nyman, 1974); they stemmed,
in large part, from the music Brecht composed while studying experimental
composition with John Cage at the New School for Social Research in 1958–9.
However, Brecht’s dissatisfaction with words (more precisely, his dissatisfaction
with any material that fragmented the ‘total experience’ of a ‘unified reality’)
was matched by his skepticism towards music, both as a field of production and
as a concept within a field. The limited scope of music, even in its expanded,
Cagean sense, was contrary to Brecht’s sensibilities in the same way that words,
in their fragmented and fragmenting nature, were something Brecht effectively
resorted to, a means to an altogether different end.
However, both the means and ends of Brecht’s work are worth re-examining, as
a wealth of recent scholarship and cultural interest attests. The significance of
Brecht’s contribution is acknowledged in studies by Blom (1998), Doris (1998),
Fischer (2005), Friedman (1998), Hendricks (2003), Higgins (1998, 2002),
Joseph (2007), Kaprow (1993), Kim-Cohen (2009), Kotz (2001, 2005, 2007),
Martin (1978), Smith (1998), and Robinson (2002, 2005, 2009), among others.
It is also reflected in exhibits that trace Brecht’s artistic evolution, notably
the comprehensive George Brecht Events: A Heterospective curated by Julia
Robinson at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne (17 September 2005 to 8 January
2006).
According to Hannah Higgins (2002), ‘The most durable innovation to emerge
from [Cage’s classroom] was George Brecht’s Event score, a performance
technique that has been used extensively by virtually every Fluxus artist’ (p.
2). Higgins describes the Event as it was realized in the context of Fluxus
performance: ‘In the Event, everyday actions are framed as minimalistic
performances, or, occasionally, as imaginary and impossible experiments with
everyday situations’ (p. 2).
This article revisits Brecht’s early research and writings to suggest a reading of
the Event score as a model that emerges from music and art, but also extends
beyond these, drawing upon science and philosophy in confronting larger
questions of experience and reality. As Kotz (2001) suggests, ‘when Brecht’s
role is historically acknowledged it is almost always in the context of “Fluxus”
– a critical approach, however, which unfortunately tends to “homogenize
Fluxus” production [and] flatten Brecht’s work into a preconceived notion of
“performance”’ (p. 63). The Event score was certainly used as a performance
device within Fluxus, and to radical effect. It was arguably also conceived as
a device that enabled a kind of enlightenment, one that was rooted within an
experience of the ‘unified reality’ that underlies the relationships between
chanced forms.

It Is Silent

Cage’s 4’33” (1952) is commonly regarded as a verbal score because each of its
three movements comprises a single word: tacet. This particular word, however,
4 journal of visual culture  10(2)

holds special value for musicians, one that extends beyond the linguistic or
textual: it is a musical word, a kind of notation, a word that doubles as a musical
instruction, like forte, or diminuendo, or staccato.
Translated from the Latin, tacet means ‘it is silent’. Within Western art music
traditions, this instruction is conventionally interpreted as ‘remain silent’, which
is qualitatively different from ‘perform silence’. Musicians who encounter this
word do not typically perform anything, including silence. Instead, they are
silent, meaning they will not do anything that might result in sound, meaning
they do nothing. Thus, even as 4’33” propels musical composition towards
textual models (see Kotz, 2001; Pepper, 1997; Nyman, 1974), it is not a verbal
score in the sense of being a primarily textual enterprise; it is still, first and
foremost, a musical score. It comprises an utterly conventional musical notation,
albeit one that is applied in a radically unconventional way.
By contrast, Event scores might be considered an ‘alternate poetics of deeply
prosaic everyday statements, comprised of short, simple, vernacular words’
(Kotz, 2001: 61); the structures of these words operate within a paradoxical
model, embracing more of the ‘unified whole’ of the universe as they become
more focused.

All Things that Take Place in Time

Through his studies with Cage and through his own research, Brecht
became familiar with the pressures placed upon Western art music through
experimental practices, including those that interrogated conventions of
notation and subverted musical paradigms. Brecht’s notebooks from 1958–60,
which document these studies, contain copious notes on music and dozens of
original compositions that make use of unconventional notations. This material
betrays Brecht’s fascination with a field that may have also repulsed him, and
offers a perspective on ideas about music that reflected and clashed with those
of the period.
Many of Brecht’s notebook entries, like his later Event scores, take the
form of lists. In one, Brecht indicates a number of musical works under the
heading ‘Study Material’: Anton Webern’s Symphony Op. 21 (1928), Karlheinz
Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke XI (1956), an unnamed composition by Christian
Wolff for prepared piano (probably Duo II for Pianists), and Music of Changes
(1951), Cage’s first fully indeterminate work for an acoustic instrument (Brecht,
1991–2005, Vol. II: 10). There is one non-musical element in the list, ‘Huang Po
doctrine’, which refers to the teachings of a 9th-century Chinese Zen Buddhist
master who was known, among other things, for his disdain of the written word.
Another list indicates compositions and names of composers ranging from Bach
to Brahms to Boulez, whose music Brecht singles out for analysis (p. 47). Analysis
here bears little relation to traditional models of musical analysis, and instead
means calculating the number of pitch classes that occur within a given work.
According to Brecht’s calculations, Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 11 Op. 95 in
 Ouzounian  Structures of Experience: On George Brecht’s Event Scores 5

F Minor, for example, contains ‘61 events’, meaning that the number of absolute
pitches that occur within the composition total 61 (p. 11). Brecht notes that he
plans to analyse a number of compositions with regard to frequency, amplitude
and duration, ostensibly extending the calculation of ‘events’ from pitch to
encompass other musical parameters (p. 47).
Another entry compares ‘sound variables’ to their ‘light analogs’ (p. 33). Here,
Brecht equates frequency in sound with wavelength in light, amplitude with
brightness, and so on. A single term is shared between the two categories:
‘duration’. This feature, one that belongs equally to sound and light, would come
to shape Brecht’s understanding of music, which he would eventually describe
as anything that takes place in time, i.e. as anything that endures. In a 1967
interview with Henry Martin for Art International, Brecht says:

Suppose that music isn’t just sound. Then what could it be? And thinking
this, I made a series of propositions. For example, a string quartet where
the players simply shake hands. They have their musical instruments
and they sit as they would to play a quartet, but they just shake hands.
I also wrote a score for a symphony that simply says ‘turning.’ This can
be realized either by turning or by observing something turning. If the
essential part of music is time, then all things that take place in time could
be music. (Martin, 1978[1967]: 81)

Pressed to clarify this idea (Martin asks: ‘And what about sounds? Even though
music may not be “just sound,” isn’t sound one of its essential parts?’), Brecht
reveals somewhat more uncertainty about the subject. He replies: ‘I don’t think
we know now whether or not music has to have sound – whether or not music
necessarily involves sound. And if it doesn’t, a possible direction of research is
to see what it can be’ (p. 81).

Uncertainty Principle

Among the most enduring features of Brecht’s research is its embrace of

uncertainty as an underlying principle. Uncertainty would have been familiar to
Brecht in his work as a scientist (he was a professional chemist for 15 years, and
worked full time as a researcher for the Johnson & Johnson laboratories in New
Jersey while he attended Cage’s course). As he did with other scientific concepts,
Brecht sought to find parallels to the concept of uncertainty in music and art.4
In a more general sense, uncertainty also underscored Brecht’s understanding of
his own role within these fields.
Brecht lists ‘Uncertainty Principle’ in his December 1958 notes on an unfinished
essay, ‘John Cage and the Modern World-View: Space, Time and Causality’
(Brecht, 1991–2005, Vol. II: 64–5). This essay would have collected thoughts
on a number of topics that Brecht felt were critical in shaping contemporary
cultural perspectives:
6 journal of visual culture  10(2)

The Unity of Experience

Oriental Thought
Open Systems (Homeostasis + Change)
Present State of Causality and Chance
The Universe as a Space–Time Continuum (a Consequence of Relativity)

Relativity
Space–Time Relativity
Matter–Energy Equivalence
(Gravitation – Inertia equivalence) – > Field
Changing Structure of the Universe

Unified Field Theory {Relativity; Quantum Physics}

Quantum Physics
Uncertainty Principle
Probability
Observer–Observed
Paradox as a reflection of our inability to imagine a simple model of the
universe

Psychology
Gestalt
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
Perception (Rorschach; Structure)
Field

In retrospect, it is questionable how much Brecht felt these topics were

genuinely relevant to Cage’s work (which was arguably not concerned with a
majority of the terms on the list), and how much he imagined them as framing
his own potential contributions to art and knowledge. Brecht was the son of
a professional musician (his father was a flautist with the Metropolitan Opera
Orchestra), and he was self-taught as an artist. His earliest works were chance-
based ‘paintings’ made with ink on crumpled bed sheets. They owed an
acknowledged debt to Jackson Pollock, whom Brecht regarded as a ‘focal point
of development’ within the history of chance-based art (Brecht, 2004[1966]: 4).
Brecht’s encounters with Cage propelled him away from painting and towards
composition, at least for a time in the late 1950s. In Brecht’s notebooks,
compositions variously take shape as lists, charts, graphs, diagrams, games,
paradoxes, poems, experiments and propositions. These works easily traverse
disciplinary boundaries and modalities; ultimately, they posit music as operating
within frames of reference that were entirely foreign to the usual ones.
An early work, Elements (June 1958), is composed for cellophane, voice and
mallet, and resembles a periodic table more than it does a conventional musical
score (Brecht, 1991–2005, Vol. I: 5). Burette Music (April 1959), is similarly
inspired by chemistry, and sets liquid dripping into burettes at different,
precisely calculated rates (Vol. III: 25). The score for Confetti Music (July 1958)
 Ouzounian  Structures of Experience: On George Brecht’s Event Scores 7

is distributed on cards, and comprises a complex set of instructions for actions

with instruments that include Japanese gongs, prepared guitar, tom-toms and
gamelan. Here, Brecht notes that: ‘The sound becomes a projection of the
record of a state (like an abstract-expressionist painting). The cards represent
a record of a more or less momentary state’ (Vol. I: 20–1). Like many of the
notebook compositions, Checker-Music (July 1959) explores the relationship
between choice and chance methods; it instructs performers to produce sounds
according to the sequence of plays in a checkers game played by members of
the audience (Vol. III: 97).
Numerous scores tease out correspondences between sound and light, like
Three Colored Lights (July 1958), in which sound events are contingent upon a
dense matrix of visual cues (Vol. I: 29–34). Others exploit relationships between
time and space. Room Piece (for a garage) (August 1958) collects ‘receiving
elements’, ‘transmuting elements’ and ‘originating elements’ in a room where
words are hung. The notes refer to ‘light and sound elements [that originate
from] random point centers’ in the room, but the nature of these elements is not
at all specified (Vol. I: 60–1).
Brecht was familiar with Cage’s 1958 lecture ‘Composition as Process:
Indeterminacy’, which teased out the tensions between determinate and
indeterminate structures, methods and materials in music by Stockhausen,
Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, and others. Cage claimed of
Brown’s 4 Systems, for example, that ‘Structure ... is indeterminate. Form, the
morphology of the continuity, is also indeterminate. In given interpretations
... method is determinate and so too are the amplitude, timbre and frequency
characteristics of the material’ (p. 38). Brecht picks up on a number of threads
from this lecture in his notes, inflecting Cage’s discussion with scientific and
mathematical references. He analyses the same work by Brown in terms of
relativity and probability, for example, and proposes relationships with the
composition to analytic geometry:

… each score-fragment [in 4 Systems] is a ‘microstructure’ in

the ‘macrostructure’ of the piece (as an electron is a microstructure in
the macrostructure of the atom, and the atom is a microstructure in the
macrostructure of a table) ... The freedom of the performer to turn the
page side-to-side is analogous to the rotation of axes in analytic geometry,
where, for example, the same point P can be described as (x, y) in terms
of axes 0X and 0Y (or x’, y’) in terms of 0X’ and when the axis is rotated.
Then x’ and y’ can be expressed in terms of x and y (that is, are necessarily
related, according to the axioms of geometry) ... This, of course, is just
another way of expressing the correlation of structure between performers
(inversions, retrogressions, etc.). (Vol. I: 63–9)

Brecht’s conception of chance-based processes is specifically rooted in scientific

discourses (see Brecht, 2004[1966]). Where Cage highlights chance-based
processes that serve to undermine the composer’s ‘ego-sense of separation
from other beings and things’ (p. 39), Brecht is interested in the probabilistic
8 journal of visual culture  10(2)

dimension of ‘Observer–Observed’ relationships that draw attention to the

interconnectedness of seemingly distinct elements.
Cage and Brecht independently discovered the teachings of D.T. Suzuki
and conceptions of chance within Zen Buddhism, and both were drawn to
propositions of non-intentionality and indifference therein; however, where
Cage was more specifically interested in the implications of non-intentionality
in relation to European musical conventions, Brecht’s interest was located more
generally in terms of its contribution to a contemporary ‘world-view’.
Brecht’s compositions for the New School class both reflect and diverge
from Cagean models of musical indeterminacy. Some relay instructions for
indeterminate actions with objects/instruments that result in the production of
sounds (i.e. a chance-based music); others set into motion indeterminate systems
without necessarily specifying any temporal structures or frameworks, leaving the
performer or audience to determine structure through navigation and observation.
The role of the performer shifts considerably in this music: at times it is central
(i.e. a score transmits instructions for a soloist or a group of performers); at other
times the performer occupies a more distant place in relation to the score and the
concept of ‘performer’ shifts from that of ‘musician/actor’ to that of ‘observer’.
The most significant change is that the aural element begins to fade in these
compositions, which at various stages are concerned with articulating ‘musical’
sounds (sounds with specific characteristics made on specific instruments, etc.),
less specific sound ‘elements’ or ‘events’ and, finally, more generalized structures
in which sound is one element among many, with none ranking in any particular
order. These shifts underscore the more fundamental change underway in
Brecht’s thought, which was becoming less interested in organizing sounds, and
more overtly concerned with structuring experiences. Brecht’s proposition of a
new model, the Event, framed this paradigmatic shift; as Julia Robinson (2009:
86) suggests, it signaled ‘Brecht’s move away from Cage’ and, in a more general
sense, from music.5

Structures of Experience

My life is devoted to research into ‘the structure of experience’ (George

Brecht, Notebook entry, January 1959 [Brecht, 1991–2005, Vol. II: 107])

I conceive of the individual as part of an infinite space and time: in constant

interaction with that continuum (nature), and giving order (physically or
conceptually) to a part of the continuum with which he interacts. (George
Brecht, ‘Project in Multiple Dimensions’ [Kaprow et al., 1999[1957–8]: 159])

The term ‘event’ appears in Brecht’s research from its earliest stages. It is initially
linked to Cage’s proposition of music as ‘Events in sound-space’ (an idea that
Brecht quotes verbatim in his first notebook entry) (Brecht, 1991–2005, Vol. I:
4). This concept is reflected in Brecht’s early musical analyses, which count the
 Ouzounian  Structures of Experience: On George Brecht’s Event Scores 9

number of discrete ‘events’ that occur in a given composition. It is then expanded

to a more general one that might be described as ‘events in space–time’. Here,
‘event’ still retains the meaning of ‘occurrence’, although the occurrence is not
necessarily limited to sound.

Dieter Daniels: … the concept of ‘event’ takes a very interesting

development in [your notebooks]. It is mentioned the first
time in a quotation of John Cage ‘Events in sounds–space’
… and you use the word ‘event’ according to its sense in
the dictionary, and then slowly and almost unremarked the
word ‘event’ gets more and more specific – until it is finally
the word ‘Event’ with a big E.
George Brecht: Yes, like in Toward Events, the title for the show at the
Reuben Gallery. (Brecht, 1991–2005, Vol. I: unnumbered
endnotes)

Brecht’s first public exhibit of works, ‘Toward Events: An Arrangement’, was

held at the Reuben Gallery in New York City, from 16 October to 5 November
1959. On display in this exhibit were not events in the traditional sense, but
instead objects accompanied by the instruction ‘to be performed’. One Event,
The Case, featured a suitcase containing common objects like a spool of yarn,
a plate and stamps. Brecht’s instructions indicated that The Case should be
opened, its contents removed and ‘used in ways appropriate to their nature’;
he wrote that the Event ‘comprises all sensible occurrences between approach
and abandonment of the case’ (see Fischer, 2005: 42). ‘Sensible’ here refers to
anything that can be sensed, pointing to the ‘total, multi-sensorial perceptual
experience’ (Kotz, 2001: 83) that Brecht aimed to manifest in the Event.
Following this exhibit, Brecht composed his first Event score, Motor Vehicle
Sundown (Event) (Spring/Summer 1960), which he dedicated to Cage. In this
work, an unspecified number of performers are each given a set of cards that
contain instructions for actions with parked cars. The performers shuffle the cards,
randomizing the arrangement of the work, but are permitted to choose the duration
of their actions. This Event score is atypical in its complexity, and resembles earlier
musical compositions like Confetti Music. However, it hints at a conception of the
Event as something that emerges from observation and is rooted in experience.
Brecht describes his inspiration for Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event) as follows:

Standing in the woods of East Brunswick, New Jersey, where I lived at

the time, waiting for my wife to come from the house, standing behind
my English Ford station wagon, the motor running and the left-turn signal
blinking, it occurred to me that a truly ‘event’ piece could be drawn from
the situation. (Brecht, 1970)

In July 1960, Brecht began to describe a new model of Events as ‘psycho-physical

structures’, once again referencing topics that appeared in his earlier writings:
10 journal of visual culture  10(2)

uncertainty principle, relativity, open systems, psychology, etc. (Brecht, 1991–

2005, Vol. V: 165). By 1961, he was composing the famously succinct Event
scores that were arguably much closer to approaching the conceptual models
laid out in his earlier research.
In 1957, having only recently met Cage, Brecht wrote ‘Chance-Imagery’, an essay
in which he explored the concept of chance within art and science. Brecht’s
genealogy of chance-based art included the improvised paintings of Wassily
Kandinsky, the automatic art practices of the Dadaists and Surrealists, and the
mechanical chance processes employed by Marcel Duchamp. Brecht attributed
the presence of chance in art to an apparent lack of consciousness in design, and
suggested that automatic/unconscious actions were one way of achieving this
lack. In terms of contemporary art practices, Brecht felt that Pollock’s paintings
were the most important work being done in area of chance. Citing Pollock’s
interest in the unconscious, Brecht examined the technical features of Pollock’s
work through the lens of indeterminacy:

Aside from the lack of conscious control of paint application in [Pollock’s]

paintings, there are technical reasons for looking at this complex of
interdependent forms as predominantly chance events. For one thing,
the infinite number of variables involved in determining the flow of fluid
paint from a source not in contact with the canvas cannot possibly be
simultaneously taken into account with sufficient omniscience that the
exact configuration of the paint when it hits the canvas can be predicted.
Some of these variables, for example, are the paint viscosity, density, rate of
flow at any instant; and direction, speed and configuration of the applicator,
to say nothing of non-uniformity in the paint. (Brecht, 2004[1966]: 11)

Brecht goes on to suggest that chance methods afford not only technical or
aesthetic opportunities to the artist but metaphysical ones as well, by allowing
the artist to transcend personality, culture and, ultimately, self (p. 23). In
exploring the contours of this transcendence, Brecht refers to the writings of
D.T. Suzuki, who is commonly credited with having introduced Zen Buddhism
to Western audiences in the 1950s. He cites the following passage from Suzuki’s
‘Zen Buddhism’:

There is something divine in being spontaneous and not being hampered by

human conventionalities and their artificial hypocrisies. There is something
direct and fresh in this lack of restraint by anything human, which suggests
a divine freedom and creativity. Nature never deliberates; it acts directly
out of its own heart, whatever this may mean. In this respect Nature is
divine. Its ‘irrationality’ transcends human doubts or ambiguities, and in
our submitting to it, or rather accepting it, we transcend ourselves. (p. 12)

In Suzuki’s conception, nature is divine because it does not think but merely
acts; nature is therefore ‘free’. Similarly, within Zen Buddhist doctrines, a self
that achieves freedom from itself (which realizes the non-existence of self) is
 Ouzounian  Structures of Experience: On George Brecht’s Event Scores 11

enlightened. Brecht’s model of the Event was arguably an attempt to realize such
an enlightenment by pointing to the chanced form as an arbitrary subdivision of
the ‘unified whole’ of the universe. An arrangement of an object or objects is a
‘performance’ of this whole in that it frames moments or subdivisions within it,
i.e. ‘[gives] order (physically or conceptually) to a part of the continuum with
which [a person] interacts’.
Some Event scores illustrate this concept quite explicitly. Three Aqueous Events,
for example, lists three momentary states that an aqueous ‘object’ may occupy over
time: ice, water, steam.6 A realization of this score entails performing (arranging,
observing, ordering) these objects/states and, through this performance,
revealing their condition as arbitrary points within a continuous field, and indeed
their existence within a continuous state of flux between these points. In making
this observation, the performer ideally realizes, and more precisely experiences,
his or her own place within this continuum. Such an experience entails a
kind of transcendence in which any stable sense of self is at least momentarily
undermined through its connection to this larger system of flux.
In this way, an Event score not only structures occurrences, but also experiences
ones that are ultimately transformative in nature. The first words in Brecht’s
preliminary notes for an article, ‘Objects/Events/Situations’ (the original title to
the ‘Toward Events’ exhibit) are ‘Changing. Mutual transaction’ (Brecht, 1991–
2005, Vol. V: 239). The change that is figured in the Event is intended to take
place in both directions, i.e. not only is an object acted upon or observed, etc.,
but the observer/performer is also changed. This change is not one that can be
measured or determined; it belongs more fundamentally to metaphysical realms,
developing as what Brecht (1970) would designate ‘little enlightenments’.7

Wider and Wider Vistas

In a notebook entry from January 1959, Brecht likens his life’s work, what he called
his research into the structure of experience, to ‘climbing a series of progressively
higher plateaus, while at the same time one’s sight becomes proportionately
keener’ (Brecht, 1991–2005, Vol. II: 107). He writes, ‘As one climbs, one becomes
aware of the wider and wider vistas (relationships), while at the same time not
losing sight of details, or at least, not of the critical ones’ (p. 107).
In a remarkable way, Brecht’s artistic evolution during the 1958–1962 period
follows a parallel route. The Event score emerges, on one hand, from experiments
that draw connections between musical indeterminacy and indeterminacy within
other systems. Brecht’s early compositions aim to illustrate these connections
using scoring methods whose complexities, while fascinating, arguably limit
the performer or listener’s ability to perceive those wider relationships.8 His
conception and refinement of the minimal Event score, however, paradoxically
open the expression to a more general field of occurrences, while it simultaneously
becomes keener in content, and in focusing the critical aspect of experience
within a conception of indeterminacy.
12 journal of visual culture  10(2)

The Event is typically understood as a genre of performance or composition, but

it is perhaps more fundamentally a genre of experience, one that can negotiate
the personal, complex and mysterious by connecting the incidental occurrence
to the ‘unified whole’ of the universe. Brecht (2004[1966]) writes that:

Science tells us that the universe is what we conceive it to be, and chance
enables us to determine what we conceive it to be ... The receptacle of
forms available to the artist thus becomes open-ended, and eventually
embraces all of nature, for the recognition of significant form becomes
limited only by the observer’s self. (p. 4).

An experience of the Event connects the observer’s self to this open-ended

receptacle of forms and, as such, removes this limit from the equation, extending
the possibilities for connection and change into infinitely wider, more uncertain
realms.

Notes
1. ‘Project in Multiple Dimensions’ was a grant proposal put forward by Allan
Kaprow, Robert Watts and George Brecht. The proposal, which outlined an
ambitious project to establish a new institute for experimental art rooted in science
and other disciplines, was first published in full in Marter (1999).
2. Event scores were notably published in Young (1963) and the Water Yam edition
(Brecht, 1963), a box collection designed by George Maciunas that collected about
50 scores printed on small cards. Photographic reproductions of scores appear in
Martin (1978[1967]) and the exhibit catalogue edited by Fischer (2005); numerous
scores by Brecht and artists associated with Fluxus are reprinted in Friedman et al.
(2002).
3. From a conversation between George Brecht, Herman Braun, Dieter Daniels and
Kasper König in Cologne on 22 August 1991. This conversation is printed in the
unnumbered endnotes to the first volume of George Brecht’s notebooks, which
have been published in several facsimile editions, see Brecht (1991–2005): Vol. I
(June–September 1958), Vol. II (October 1958–April 1959), Vol. III (April 1959–
August 1959) were published in 1991; Vol. IV (September 1959–March 1960) and
Vol. V (March 1960–November 1960) in 1998; Vol. VI (March 1961–June 1961) and
Vol. VII (June 1961–September 1962) in 2005.
4. In ‘Project in Multiple Dimensions’, Brecht writes that his organizational methods
stem largely from other parts of my experience: randomness and chance from
statistics, multi-dimensionality from scientific method, continuity of nature from
oriental thought, etc. This might be emphasized: the basic structure of my art comes
primarily from aspects of experience unrelated to the history of art; only secondarily,
and through subsequent study, do I trace artistic precursors of some aspects of my
present approach. (Kaprow et al., 1999[1957–8]: 159)
5. In a 1973 interview with Irmeline Leeber (1978[1973]) for Art Vivant, Brecht says:
[Cage] was the great liberator for me. But at the same time, he remained a musician,
a composer … I tried to develop the ideas that I’d had during Cage’s course and
that’s where my ‘events’ come from. I wanted to make music that wouldn’t only be
for the ears. Music isn’t just what you hear or what you listen to, but everything that
happens … Events are an extension of music.
 Ouzounian  Structures of Experience: On George Brecht’s Event Scores 13

6. Brecht understands objects as time-based phenomena; he writes in a notebook

entry dating from September–October 1960 that ‘Objects are processes which
we choose to conceive of as having a zero (or near-zero) rate of change’ (Brecht,
1991–2005, Vol. V: 239).
7. In ‘Origin of Events’, Brecht (1970) describes his later Event scores as becoming
‘very private, like little enlightenments I wanted to communicate to my friends
who would know what to do with them’.
8. In an interview with Michael Nyman (1978[1976]), Brecht discusses performances
of his earlier, heavily notated compositions in Cage’s course at the New School;
he recalls that, ‘everybody was to give their thoughts about [the performance] and
Cage ... said “I never felt so controlled before” or “Nobody’s ever tried to control
me so much.” So I learned that lesson there, I realized that I was being dictatorial.’

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Gascia Ouzounian is Lecturer in the School of Music & Sonic Arts at Queen’s
University Belfast. Her writing has appeared in such journals as Journal of the
Society for American Music, Organised Sound, Computer Music Journal,
Contemporary Music Review and RADIO Journal, and the recently published
monograph Paul DeMarinis/Buried in Noise (Kehrer Verlag, 2010).

Address: School of Music & Sonic Arts, Music Building, Queen’s University
Belfast, Belfast, BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland. [email: g.ouzounian@qub.ac.uk]