"Word Pieces": the Score as Concept

The classical painting is a material object with a virtually infinite number of unspecified and unspecifiable properties which are nonetheless considered to be constitutive for the identity of the work, because they were supposedly witnessed (and thus endorsed) by the artist. That is why art galleries exhibit original paintings, rather than copies or descriptions. (Cf. Nelson Goodman on copies and fakes in Languages of Art.)

If and when art is created by realizing explicit, discursively articulated concepts, the possibility arises to skip the realization of the work, and to communicate the underlying concept directly to the "spectator". In classical music, this possibility has existed already for several centuries, because it is always based on the execution of scores which specify the intended properties of a piece in great detail. Some people do in fact read music, but playing and listening have always remained more popular.

The musical score was the historical origin of the "concept art" tradition in modern art. Around 1960, the Fluxus composers started to write verbally specified musical pieces which were inspired by John Cage's extension of music to theatre. These pieces were often fairly vague, or had nothing to do with sound, or were obviously nicer to read than to execute, or were impossible to perform in the first place. They were verbal artworks without being literature, using conventional, literal language to denote classes of things, events, or concepts.

The Fluxus composers (such as La Monte Young, George Brecht, Dick Higgins and Yoko Ono) presented their concepts as music pieces. The pieces by later conceptual artists such as Lawrence Weiner and Sol LeWitt presented were more visually oriented, and presented in a visual arts context.

Note that the verbal description of the concept is treated as an autonomous artwork, independent of its execution, displayed in books or magazines (as if it were a score or a poem) or on the walls of galleries and museums (as if it were a painting). As to the status of the descriptions, there are nonetheless important differences between different artists.

The word pieces by the Fluxus composers (if performable at all) were executed as "events" in the context of musical performances; some of them (e.g., many pieces by George Brecht) have also been realized as visual art works instead. (Cf. the exhibition Pop Art Redefined.) Sol LeWitt's pieces seem to be intended to be executed. Lawrence Weiner leaves this explicitly open.