What Does Fluxus Sound Like?
Listen to this playlist of vintage and reinterpreted songs
Valentine's Day card sent to Jean Brown, ca. 1975, Charlotte Moorman. Pen and ink on wrapping paper. Getty Research Institute, 890164 ; Box 34, folder 27. Courtesy D. Hoyt Moorman Estate / Pileggi Estate
Body Content
No question about it, Fluxus was about sound: music, noise, words, and sometimes, silence. Many of the artists associated with Fluxus were also composers or musicians, or they collaborated on events that brought the arts together.
Benjamin Patterson, John Cage, Yoko Ono, Charlotte Moorman, and Dick Higgins all played with sound and music with a notable lack of preciousness or concern for authority.
Fluxus leader George Maciunas had called for dramatic changes and a drastic purge of artistic traditions in his 1963 Manifesto flyer. On the title pages of An Anthology (1962), a compilation of musical and instruction scores, Maciunas’s list of sample genres includes Music, Dance, Composition, and Improvisation, along with Meaningless Work, Natural disasters, and Indeterminacy. Echoing Dada graphics, it’s a tumbling crowd of barely legible words, a graphic mashup of genres.
In this playlist, vintage performances mix with reinterpretations of scores by contemporary artists. Like the earlier Dada movement, Fluxus commented on politics in poetry, music, and dance performed in social settings. Countering traditions of musical practice, these artists proposed that readings of scores could be experimental and experiential, adapted according to the instrument, the number of players, performance spaces, and timings.
Making this list, it was impossible not to include songs by Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band along with John Lennon’s visionary “Imagine,” now a contemporary anthem. Terry Riley’s sound and performances were informed by his longtime studies of Indian music, streaming waves, and cycles of sound. This, in sharp contrast to Dick Higgins’s piece featuring the sound of warped words; or the concentration required to listen to John Cage’s 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence.
These selections demonstrate how musicians and composers challenged conventions and traditions of music in the same way that Fluxus artists sought to re-imagine categories for creation in the visual arts.
