La Monte Young, Jackson Mac Law (eds.): An Anthology of Chance Operations (1963)

A source-book of early Fluxus classics. A collection of scores, poetry, dance constructions, and other avant-garde work. Includes Henry Flynt’s first essay on concept art.

When the poet Chester Anderson, publisher of Beatitude, exited New York for California in 1959, he asked La Monte Young to edit Beatitude East, composed from the performance scores Young had collected in Berkeley and New York. In this he was aided by Jackson Mac Low, who had attended Cage’s composition course at the New School for Social Research and worked at the Living Theater with Julian Beck and Judith Malina.

Mac Low and Young provided Maciunas with connections to “beat” ideology, encouraging him not only to present radical programming at AG Gallery, but to design An Anthology, and to organize the initial 1962 Fluxus Festival in Wiesbaden, Germany. All of this was contemporaneous.

Maciunas supplied the paper, design and some money for the publishing of An Anthology, according to Henry Flynt, and had it ready for printing by October 1961. It was finally published by Young and Mac Low in 1963 as:

AN ANTHOLOGY of chance operations concept art anti-art indeterminacy improvisation meaningless work natural disasters plans of action stories diagrams Music poetry essays dance constructions mathematics compositions, BY GEORGE BRECHT, CLAUS BREMER, EARLE BROWN, JOSEPH BYRD, JOHN CAGE, DAVID DEGENER, WALTER DE MARIA, HENRY FLYNT, YOKO ONO, DICK HIGGINS, TOSHI ICHIYANAGI, TERRY JENNINGS, DENNIS, DING DONG, RAY JOHNSON, JACKSON MAC LOW, RICHARD MAXFIELD, ROBERT MORRIS, SIMONE MORRIS, NAM JUNE PAIK, TERRY RILEY, DITER ROT, JAMES WARING, EMMETT WILLIAMS, CHRISTIAN WOLFF, LA MONTE YOUNG/LA MONTE YOUNG – EDITOR/GEORGE MACIUNAS – DESIGNER.

The first edition (it was reprinted in 1972 by Hundermark, Germany) contains 67 leaves and three inserts. It includes multicolored and onionskin paper, card stock and two envelopes. The text was printed in offset with a heavy paper cover, collated manually with a staple and perfect binding.

Self-published, New York, Spring 1963
Layout by George Maciunas
120 pages

Wikipedia

PDF (36 MB, updated on 2012-7-9)

Michal Murin (ed.): Avalanches 1990-95: Zborník spoločnosti pre nekonvenčnú hudbu (1995) [Slovak]

An anthology of the Society for Non-conventional Music (SNEH).

Translations: Eva Keprtová, Jozef Cseres, Peter Zagar, Miroslava Telúchová, Alexander Avenarius ml.
Publisher SNEH, Society for Non-Conventional Music, Bratislava
ISBN 8096720643
216 pages

PDF (no OCR, updated on 2012-8-3)

John Cage: Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961–) [EN, HU, CZ, RU, CN]

Silence is a collection of essays and lectures Cage wrote during the period from 1939 to 1961.

“In these lectures, scores, and writings, Cage tries, as he says, to find a way of writing that comes from ideas, is not about them, but that produces them. Often these writings include mesostics and essays created by subjecting the work of other writers to chance procedures using the I Ching.”

Publisher Wesleyan University Press, October 1961
ISBN 0819560286, 9780819560285
276 pages

Review: Virgil Thomson (New York Review of Books, 1970).

Publisher
Wikipedia

Silence: Lectures and Writings (English, 1961, updated on 2012-8-3)
Silence: Lectures and Writings (English, 1973, 43 MB, no OCR, added on 2018-11-4)
A csend: válogatott írások (Hungarian, partial, includes 7 essays, trans. Kata Weber, 1994, 28 MB, added on 2020-5-7)
Silence: přednášky a texty (Czech, trans. Jaroslav Šťastný, Radoslav Tejkal, and Matěj Kratochvíl, 2010, 6 MB, added on 2020-5-7)
Tishina: lektsii i stati (Russian, trans. Grigorij Durnovo, et al., 2012, 12 MB, added on 2020-5-7)
Chen mo: Wu shi zhou nian ji nian ban (Chinese, trans. Jingying Li, 2013, 65 MB, added on 2020-5-7)