After World War II, a diverse group of composers, poets, dancers, and visual artists reconceptualized the score as a flexible, open-ended medium that transcended traditional boundaries between disciplines, transforming it from a tool of musical notation into a site of experimentation in performance art, conceptualism, and intermedia; inspired by the innovations of John Cage, Earle Brown, and Morton Feldman, and catalyzed by the unique interpretive role of pianist David Tudor, artists began to craft scores using textual instructions, abstract graphics, and symbolic diagrams, displacing conventional notation in favor of systems that encouraged indeterminacy, iteration, and collaboration, thereby prioritizing process over product and experience over mastery, a shift nurtured in pedagogical settings like Black Mountain College and Cage’s New School course, and institutionalized by international movements such as Fluxus, whose affiliates—including George Brecht, Alison Knowles, and Mieko Shiomi—created scores that often blurred the line between art and life through mundane actions, participation, and parody of bureaucratic language; these practices not only subverted the norms of classical composition but also challenged modernist ideologies of authorship, medium specificity, and aesthetic autonomy, especially as artists from marginalized backgrounds—such as Benjamin Patterson and later Wadada Leo Smith—inserted racial critique and vernacular knowledge into this evolving matrix, revealing the score as a transdisciplinary, radically democratic form that continues to reshape how we conceive of notation, authorship, and collective creation in contemporary art and performance.
