Dick Higgins
A Something Else Reader (Book)
368 pages. A Something Else Reader is a previously-unpublished anthology edited by Dick Higgins in 1972 to celebrate Something Else Press, the publishing house he founded in 1963 to showcase Fluxus and other experimental artistic and literary forms. The publication features selections from Claes Oldenburg’s Store Days, John Cage’s Notations, An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, Breakthrough Fictioneers, Jackson Mac Low’s Stanzas for Iris Lezak, Gertrude Stein’s Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein, B…
Song for Any Voice(s) and Instrument(s) (Book)
* Rare original artist' book - Music scores and instructions for performance * This score by Dick Higgins consists of letters and arrows arrayed across one sheet of musical notation paper. A cover sheet provides the instructions for the four-minute, fifty-two second performance, stating that any number of people may interpret the score simultaneously if they do so independently of one another. Guidelines for interpretation are fairly specific, but the piece is different every time it is perform…
Variations on a Natural Theme for Orchestra (Book)
* Rare original artist' book - Music scores and instructions for performance * Variations on a Natural Theme (1982), as in Dick Higgins words, is a large orchestral work, in some ways a companion to the Ten Ways, since this time it uses gamuts (in this case selected by the individual musicians) and photo derivations made from a female model; she was insistent that she not be recognizable, since she was a teacher and was afraid that it would be damaging to her professionally if it were known that…
Sonata for Prepared Piano (Book)
*Rare original arist' book - Music scores and instruction for performance* Sonata for Prepared Piano (1982) is a short work which, again, uses photoderivations as parts of the notation—this time nature with incomplete figure photographs, mostly obscured by the natural objects around them. (Dick Higgins, "The Strategy of Each of My Books" from Horizons, 1984)
"Four movements make up this thirteen minute work. Each uses a very different method of interpreting its materials, a set of four phot…
Twenty-Six Mountains for viewing the Sunset from (Book)
Rare original artist' book - Music scores and instructions for performance ** Twenty-Six Mountains for Viewing the Sunset From (1981) is for a small ensemble, including three dancers. It is a different kind of notation, not using photographs but using an indication of what kinds of tex- tures and patterns are desired. The title comes from a trip I took late one night with a teenager from Vermont, who brought me to some of his favorite places to view the sunset from; it was magical evening…
Ten Ways of Looking at a Bird for Violin and Harpsichord (Book)
Rare original artist' book - Music scores and instructions for performance Ten Ways of Looking at a Bird (1981)...is a playful variation on the name of a poem by Wallace Stevens whose work I have always admired, though, goodness knows, there is no modern poet more different from myself. This is a piece for violin and harpsichord; the harpsichord part is developed in “live time” (that is, during the performance) from what the violinist is doing, according to a set of rules. The violinist uses mu…
A Book About Love & War & Death: Canto One (Book)
** 2021 Stock ** This first section of Higgins’ major work, A Book About Love & War & Death, a sprawling prose poem meant to be read aloud. The text evolves modally, cycling through language games and experiments, oblique autobiography, and vocabulary drawn from an Indonesian dictionary, with a use of a chance method that is both elaborate and informal. The guiding principle of the work is, above all, what Higgins saw as a density of conceptual imagery—a density to be unraveled somewhat in what …
Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press
"There are few art-world figures as influential—and as little known—as Dick Higgins (1938-1998), co-founder of Fluxus, “polyartist,” poet, scholar, theorist, composer, performer and, not least, the publisher of the Something Else Press. In 1965 he restored the term “intermedia” to the English language, giving it new dimension to recognize the dissolution of boundaries, the expansion of liminal spaces between traditional modes of art making, and the open field for new forms that cannot be compart…
The Thousand Symphonies
2010 release. Alga Marghen presents the first edition ever issued of Dick Higgins' music. Fluxus founding member, in 1958 Dick Higgins studied Composition and Experimental Music with John Cage in his class at the New School for Social Research in New York together with, among others, La Monte Young, Richard Maxfield, Toshi Ichiyanagi, George Brecht, Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, and Jackson Mac Low. In the Spring of 1968, Geoffrey Hendricks and Robert Watts told Dick Higgins of a project that was afo…