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

the reading of writerly texts as “ourselves writing” (5) and of Eco’s statement that
the performer of an open work of art “…reinvents it in psychological collaboration
with the author himself” (Eco 4).
In the interpretation of any one of Basinski’s scores, especially during an
improvised interpretation in which his scores are most frequently used, there is
an impulse to engage the location of the imagination at the immediate personal
moment. Although the content of the score is not random material and does have
meaning (if only intuitively) for Basinski, the point of performing them is not to
arrive at the same intention as the author. A swerve of interpretation, or to some
extent ‘misinterpretation’, is a prerequisite in performing his scores. Often this
swerve travels inward, evoking from the performer an interpretation that includes
recent thoughts, current proclivities, or even recently read texts or watched
movies, making the reading timely no matter when the actual score or poem was
created.
The extension of the score into temporal and internal realms proliferates
openness by introducing the entirely unscripted as valid interpretational material,
suggesting that an open score can extract and display meaning from a performer/
interpreter just as much, or more so, than he or she can from the score. The
temporality that arises as a result of the performance of a score provides open
planes on which a performer may choose to engage with material from the score
or invent it anew, creating a text approaching performance inexhaustibility.
“This… necessitates the moment, we read this now, and when we read
it again circumstances have changed and so too has the narrative. Mike has a
wonderful penchant for writing texts which are certainly about something, but
what that something is changes each time the text is approached” (Howe 4). The
interpretation may move into and off of the score, which does not restrict itself to
the meaning of the text that is present, or legible, but to the reading of subtext it
provokes or the illegible semantic indicators.
The disruption of meaning which occurs in an open work, with or without
intent, can be compared to the disruption of signal in information theory. Eco
touches on this connection in his essay “Openness, Information, Communication”
(44). David Robey’s introduction to the 1985 translation of The Open Work explains
that Eco’s interest in information theory “is the principle that the information (as
opposed to ‘meaning’) of a message is in inverse proportion to its probability or
predictability…Thus, Eco argues, art in general may be seen as conveying a much
higher degree of information, though not necessarily a higher degree of meaning...
and the modern open work may be seen as conveying an exceptionally high degree
of information, because of the radical contraventions of established conventions
that characterize it” (xi).
In a study of graphic scores in music, R. Murray Schafer states that “A
score which contained all the information with regard to its execution would be
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