A traditional score tells a musician what to play with remarkable precision. Pitch, rhythm, tempo and dynamics are fixed on five lines, and the performer's job is to bring them to life.
A graphic score asks something different. It hands the player lines, shapes, colours or images and invites them to decide what those marks sound like.
For artists who work across sound and image, this is one of the most open doors in twentieth-century music. This guide explains what graphic scores are, where they came from, which works are worth knowing, and how to make and perform one yourself.
What a graphic score is
A graphic score is any piece of music written mainly with visual symbols instead of conventional staff notation. The marks might be geometric blocks, curving lines, dots, drawings, collage or even colour fields.
Graphic notation in music rarely tries to pin down every detail. Most graphic scores leave decisions about pitch, duration, instrument or order to the performer. Two performances of the same score can sound almost nothing alike, and that is usually the point.
It helps to separate graphic scores from two close relatives. Text scores use written instructions instead of pictures. Listening scores are drawn after the fact to help an audience follow a piece that already exists. Both overlap with graphic work, but they do a different job.
Why composers started drawing music
Staff notation is very good at describing the music it grew up with: melody, harmony and metre for familiar instruments. By the middle of the twentieth century, many composers wanted sounds and structures that five lines could not hold comfortably.
Electronic studios produced sounds with no fixed pitch. Chance procedures and improvisation made exact notation pointless. Painters such as Jackson Pollock and sculptors such as Alexander Calder were showing how a work could be open, mobile and shaped by process.
Composers in New York around John Cage were especially alert to these ideas. Between 1950 and 1952, several of them produced scores that still read as founding documents of the form.
Early landmarks: Feldman and Brown
Morton Feldman's Projection 1 for solo cello, dated 1950, is usually cited as his first graph score. Boxes on a grid show when a sound starts and how long it lasts. Their height in the box says only whether the note is high, middle or low, and the cellist chooses the exact pitch.
Feldman later compared his graph paper to Pollock's canvas on the studio floor. Each sheet framed a stretch of time, and he could place events anywhere on it rather than writing strictly from left to right.
Earle Brown went further with December 1952. The score is a single page of 31 black rectangles, some horizontal, some vertical, scattered across white space. There is no key. The page can be read in any orientation, and the performer decides how thickness, length and position translate into sound.
Brown had been thinking about Calder's mobiles. He even imagined a three-dimensional version in which the shapes would move in front of the pianist. The printed page is a frozen moment of that idea.
John Cage and graphic notation
Any account of graphic scores runs through John Cage, though his relationship with drawing was more varied than people often assume.
His Concert for Piano and Orchestra of 1957 to 1958 is a catalogue of invented notations. The piano part alone uses dozens of different systems, from scattered notes to dense diagrams, and the pianist may play any part of it in any order.
Fontana Mix, made in 1958, is another key John Cage graphic score. It consists of sheets with curved lines and dots and transparent overlays with a grid and a straight line. Performers lay the sheets on top of each other and take measurements from the points where lines cross, then turn those readings into sound.
The striking thing about Cage's graphic notation is that it is rarely an invitation to free improvisation. The drawings are tools for making decisions by chance, and he expected the resulting instructions to be followed with discipline.
Cage also helped the form reach a wider public. In 1969 he and the artist Alison Knowles published Notations, an anthology of manuscript pages gathered from a huge range of composers, many of them graphic.
Cardew's Treatise and the British scene
If one graphic score has a reputation as the summit of the genre, it is Cornelius Cardew's Treatise. Written between 1963 and 1967, it runs to 193 pages of lines, circles, numbers, grids and occasional fragments of musical symbols.
Cardew gave no instructions. A thick horizontal line runs through much of the score, and many players use it as a reference point, but how to read the pages is left entirely to them.
Cardew worked as a graphic designer during these years, and the score shows it. It was often performed in art colleges, and he believed that people with a visual education and little classical training could bring the most to it.
Graphic score music examples worth knowing
Beyond these landmark works, a handful of pieces show just how wide the field became. They are good starting points if you want to see and hear the variety.
Karlheinz Stockhausen's Studie II of 1954 was one of the first published scores of electronic music. Overlapping grey shapes describe the frequency, duration and loudness of sine-tone mixtures built on tape at the studio in Cologne.
Cathy Berberian's Stripsody of 1966 turns the sound words of comic strips into a vocal piece. The performer reads drawings and onomatopoeia and voices them, often with great comic timing.
Rainer Wehinger's 1970 listening score for György Ligeti's tape piece Artikulation uses coloured shapes to map the electronic sounds across time. It cannot be performed, but it is one of the most beautiful ways to learn how to listen to electronic music.
Reading and performing a graphic score
The first rule for performers is to take the score seriously. A graphic score is not a licence to play whatever you like. It is a different kind of text, and it rewards close reading.
Many musicians start by agreeing a set of conventions. The horizontal axis might be time and the vertical axis pitch. Thick marks might mean loud, thin ones quiet. Colour might stand for instrument or timbre. Once the rules are set, they stick to them.
Others prefer to respond more intuitively, letting the energy of a line suggest a gesture. Both approaches are valid. What matters is consistency and attention, so that the score shapes the sound rather than decorating it.
Rehearsal still matters. Groups that play graphic scores well usually talk a great deal before they play, and they listen closely to each other during the performance. In that sense the practice sits close to deep listening, as described in our guide to Pauline Oliveros and the practice of paying attention to sound.
Making your own graphic score
You do not need to be a trained composer to make a graphic score. Many artists come to it from drawing, printmaking or installation, and that background is an advantage.
Start by deciding what you want the score to control and what you want to leave open. A simple graphic score might fix only the order of events and the overall density, leaving every other choice to the player.
Then choose your marks. Dots, lines and blocks are easy to read. Texture, colour and collage are richer but harder to interpret. Test the score with a musician or two, watch where they hesitate, and revise.
If you already work with visual responses to sound, there is a natural overlap with sound drawings, where artists draw what they hear. A graphic score simply reverses the direction, so the drawing comes first and the sound follows.
Graphic scores as artistic research
Graphic scores are also useful far outside the concert hall. For artists in academic settings, a score can be a way of recording a process, testing an idea with collaborators, or documenting a site as a set of sonic instructions.
Because the score is both an image and a set of actions, it fits well with research that values making as a way of knowing. It can be exhibited, performed, revised and discussed, and each step leaves a trace.
That links the form to a wider tradition of using drawing as a method of paying attention. A score drawn on site, then performed by others, shows how differently people can hear the same place.
Where to start
If you want to explore further, look up the scores themselves before reading about them. Feldman's Projection 1, Brown's December 1952 and a few pages of Treatise are all widely reproduced and repay slow looking.
Then try playing one, alone or with friends, using whatever instruments or objects you have. A graphic score only fully makes sense once you have stood in front of it and had to decide what a line sounds like.
About Dr. Mira Solheim
Dr. Mira Solheim is an art historian and writer focused on artistic research, Nordic visual culture and the intersection of art with technology and film. She writes for Artistic-Research.no on methodology, institutions and practice.