Dick Higgins 'Danger Music'

Dick Higgins ‘Danger Music’

The following is an extract from my BA dissertation ‘The Active Listener; Fluxus Experience in Contemporary Sonic Practice’:

A dramatic instance of aleatoric composition is in the performance of Dick Higgins’ Event score Danger Music No. 12, which reads 'Write a thousand symphonies’. In 1968, Higgins and his partner, Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, set out to South Brunswick Police Riffle Range with a thousand pieces of manuscript paper for standard orchestra ensemble and, whilst Knowles filmed to document the Event, Higgins proceeded to shoot at the music paper with a machine gun. Higgins then wrote out a list of instructions for a conductor, to aid the orchestra who were to attempt to interpret and perform the punctured and partially destroyed pieces of score paper. An example of the nature of these instructions is 'the straighter the rip, the simpler the timbre’. The Fluxus artist Philip Corner (bravely) prepared an orchestra to perform the resulting composition later that year in the Hickman Auditorium at Rutgers University. The triumphant execution of an Event score so unfeasible illustrates the determined spirit of Fluxus.

Critical Mass - Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia and Rutgers University 1958-1972, Geoffrey Hendricks, (Rutgers University Press, 2003) page 101.

dick higgins danger music fluxus articles Alison Knowles Philip Corner Rutgers University Event score artists