Music for Everyman

A Score for Dead and Living, Human, Animal and Inanimate Composers is the title George Maciunas gave to one of his early works for the generation of a score, in which he set out from John Cage’s ideas on new forms of musical notation. The composing process calls for filling out a grid by selecting items from a list containing a wide range of sounds, from opening a corked bottle to nose blowing. Very much in the spirit of Fluxus, Music for Everyman is based on a democratic concept: it is an invitation to everyone to become active as composer and musician and thus blur the border between performers and audience. This work clearly shows Maciunas’s interest in La Monte Young’s ideas on aleatory and improvisatory music: rough guidelines on a structure’s composition provide a certain framework for an incipient anarchy of sounds.



 

Workdetails
  • original Title: Music for Everyman
  • Date: 1961
  • Genre: Musical score

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