kind of work. You may find when you listen to it that the text is more
interesting than it seemed when you were actually inventing it!
PERFORMANCE SCORES
Performance can radically reconfigure the role of the author by shifting
some of the responsibility for creation of the work onto the performers.
For example, a writer may produce a score which has written instructions
or prompts for the performers. This score is not a complete script, but acts
as a trigger and constraint. In such a piece the responsibility partly falls on
the performers who become co-authors. At the same time, the author is
setting up strict and stimulating parameters within which the piece can be
created. No performance of the work will be exactly the same, though dif-
ferent performances are likely to have some features in common.
In poet/composer Jackson Mac Low’s scores there is a very subtle
balance between control of the compositional concept and creative oppor-
tunity for the performers. Sometimes performers are given particular
words, letters and notes which they must implement, but with consider-
able freedoms about how to combine and transmute them (Mac Low
1986). For an example of a Mac Low score, which balances authorial
control with performer improvisation, see Example 10.1 (p. 228). Notice
also the emphasis on performer interaction:
Each performer must listen intently to all sounds audible, including those
produced by other performers (if any), by the audience, or by elements in
the environment. Performers must relate with these sounds in producing
their own, exercising sensitivity, tact, & courtesy, so that every performance
detail contributes to a total sound sequence they would choose to hear.
(Mac Low 1977–78)Some of the scripts by American poet and playwright Kenneth Koch are
more theatrical in intent, but unlike a conventional drama consist only of
instructions, at times of a somewhat surrealist kind. His ‘Mexico City’, for
example, is a set of instructions in which ‘An elderly American homosex-
ual tries to describe Mexico City to an illiterate and extremely ugly Finnish
farm girl who has never been in any city whatsoever.’ The performer must
be ‘as complete in his description as possible’ and the Finnish girl has to
repeat his description as precisely as possible. The elderly man then has
to tell her how well he feels she ‘has truly captured the spirit and mood of
the city’ (Koch 1980b, p. 215). In ‘Coil Supreme’ the actors must speak for
30 minutes, but every sentence they speak has to contain the words ‘coil
Tongues, talk and technologies 227