Album Page

A leading member among Fluxus artists and the founder of Something Else Press, which offered many artists a forum for publications, objects, and theoretical texts, Dick Higgins was greatly influenced by John Cage’s views on experimental music and composition, and the visualisation of both remained recurring elements in his work.

One of the pieces of Higgins’ musical graphics, "Album Page (Albumblatt)" presents compositions produced by the artist using graphically notated scores. A major Fluxus challenge, which Higgins set himself in this work, is to notate performance and music without resorting to conventional means. With relevance to both music and the visual arts, musical graphics are like a “sound image”, composed with red arrows on a single, otherwise blank page of sheet music. Higgins created similar pieces on existing musical scores, like Louis Gobbaerts’ Tramway Galop, or on old maps used as a visual template. Most of these scores are also compiled as musical artist’s books, together with instructions on how to perform/play them.