P L A N T A R C H Y 2 - Critical Documents

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notions of scoring, and all the elements of the piece become, to use a phrase
from Lyn Hejinian, “maximally excited” (The Rejection of Closure 43). Among
Basinski’s works to be displayed and discussed in this paper are two scores,
SPAR’S EUROPEAN SAUSAGE SHOP, and Madame Kitty Opera [displayed
at the end of this text]. 2 The difference between these two examples is
immediately clear, yet both utilize an openness for a similar purpose of striving
for inexhaustibility in interpretation. Openness in works of art, as I am using
it here, is a concept laid out in Umberto Eco’s Opera Aperta (The Open Work).
The notion was founded on an increasing democratization of art that Eco
found prevalent in the contemporary avant-garde. The open work explored a
“field of possibilities” and “encouraged acts of conscious freedom on the part
of the performer” (Eco 4) that can be seen as a reaction against the status quo
conservation of the classical mode of artistic interaction (traditionally works
of closed nature). In my use of the phrase “open score”, I allude to the ‘open
to interpretation’ element of Eco’s open work, but I suggest a more radical
intervention, more direct invitation, and a focus on the performer rather than
the reader.
Both scoring styles of Michael Basinski exercise a type of openness
that leaves space for interpretation as completion. In both styles, there is a
motivation towards a blank page: the short form pieces give as little as possible
to maintain freedom of interpretation around all undefined borders, while the
visual scores attempt to break down all predetermined conventions, aiming
for the unrestrictiveness of a blank space. Eco’s statement that “A work of art
can be open only insofar as it remains a work” (101), reflects that a blank page
cannot be anything but a blank page without appropriate contextualization.
Like Basinski’s scores, they must always be working toward a blank page, but
never a blank page. For all that exists on the page fully occupied by letters,
animals, invented symbols, and numbers, Basinski’s scores still rely on the
play between all that is there and that which is not. The performer-defined
map that Basinski offers to a performer points to a definition of open works
as purposely partial pieces — the incompleteness opening itself to alternative
readings, multiple performances. Yet if a piece is constructed with too
much openness, it becomes an overwhelming burden for a performer, a
seemingly unwelcoming invitation from the whimsical author, which shifts a
disproportionate creative responsibility onto the addressee. Within this game
of ‘giving just enough’ there is the craft of the open composition: balancing the
generative information within a structure that opens out instead of closing in,
creating a dynamic equation of structure, information and openness, wherein
a piece can either fall silent or become white noise.
Deprived of all indication, all direction, the listener’s ear is no longer