Musical Manuscripts

The visual representation of contemporary music was the subject of a unique exhibition at The Drawing Center, 137 Greene Street, from November 8 through January 26, 1980. Musical Manuscripts featured a group of original scores selected from a collection compiled by John Cage to benefit the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts. These musical manuscripts were doubly remarkable in that they represented the aesthetic sensibilities of both a composer and visual artist. Included in the Center's exhibition were works by such diverse contemporary musicians as the Beatles, Leonard Bernstein, Igor Stravinsky, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Cage.

In order to trace more clearly the development of current forms of musical notation, the Center had augmented the exhibition with works by composers such as Mozart, Haydn, Brahms, Schoenberg, Satie, Ives, Rachmaninoff, and Bartók. Among the 20th-century manuscripts included were works by George Gershwin, Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, and "Jelly Roll" Morton. Some of the more well-known scores exhibited included a section of Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin, Always True to You from "Kiss Me Kate" by Cole Porter, Washington Post March by John Philip Sousa, I Could Write a Book from "Pal Joey" by Richard Rodgers, and Afro-American Symphony by William Grant Still.

The manuscripts in the exhibition were selected not only for their musical importance but also for their visual interest as works on paper. The score sheets presented not only a view of the working methods and modes of transcription of composers, but also traced the revolutions in notation from the classical five-line staff used since the early 13th century, through the recent evolution of individually devised formats which could be more freely interpreted by performers. Contemporary composers had adopted many of the traditional materials of drawing — collage, paint, pastels, and such unexpected materials as magazine photographs, computer printouts, and words — in the interpretation of their music.

This extraordinary group of works had been assembled from several sources including the Yale University Music Library, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the Northwestern University Music Library, selected by Head Music Librarian Don Roberts, and the Library of Congress.

In conjunction with the exhibition, The Drawing Center sponsored a performance series of works by contemporary composers. This included a special performance for children and students by Philip Glass on December 7, a performance by Henry Brant on January 20, and performances by Joel Thome, Bill Hellermann, and Lucia Lucia Dlugoszewski on January 23. A catalogue of the exhibition with an essay by Don Roberts, Head Music Librarian at Northwestern University, was published.