Music Composed and Performed During Performance of Merce Cunningham and Dance Company 1973

John Cage made this musical score in 1973 for a performance with Merce Cunningham and his dance company. It looks like he used pen on lined paper, not unlike what I sketch on. You can see the hand in it, the process. The texture of the paper itself, those horizontal lines, become part of the composition, a foundation for Cage’s notations. The blue ink is thin, almost transparent. It’s not about hiding the process but laying it bare, making the artistic choices visible. There's something almost childlike about the script, recalling the kind of notation you might find in a science notebook, somewhere between precision and expressive freedom. Look at those groups of vertical marks in the lower part, under the words “key for identifying Hexagram.” They feel both precise and somehow arbitrary. Like the work of Sol LeWitt, this score reminds us that art is an ongoing dialogue, a set of instructions, open to interpretation and change.