{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-article-js","path":"/has-black-musical-culture-always-been-a-visual-culture-opinion-zoe-hopkins/","result":{"data":{"wordpressPost":{"id":127779,"slug":"has-black-musical-culture-always-been-a-visual-culture-opinion-zoe-hopkins","title":"Has Black Musical Culture Always Been a Visual Culture?","excerpt":"The rich history of black graphic scores represents a visual culture creating space for improvisation, imagination and unknowability in much the way black musical culture does","content":"\n

The rich history of black graphic scores, writes Zoë Hopkins, represents a visual culture creating space for improvisation, imagination and unknowability in much the way black musical culture does

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A cadre of recent and contemporary black thinkers – among them Amiri Baraka, Arthur Jafa and Fred Moten – have argued that black visual culture necessarily finds itself playing catchup to the aesthetic and social power of black musical culture. The latter, nearly metonymous with black culture itself, is not only more accessible in terms of its production and circulation but also understood as a more organic expression of the psychic and affective richness of black life, and of its origins: it is, indubitably, a rare and sacred metaphysical DNA-strand tethering us to that which survived and preceded the wreckage of the Middle Passage, as well as to the intransigence and insurgency required for such survival. But how might black visual and aural culture cocreate each other’s stakes and beauty? Where does black vision prelude and produce black sound? What if black musical culture has always also been a visual culture?

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Black graphic scores – from Julius Eastman’s to Renee Gladman’s – open the heart of these questions. A graphic score involves either braided musical notation and visual elements – such as abstract signs, figures, pulsations of chroma and hue – or the complete metamorphosis of musical notation into a schema of signs that are, in essence, visual rather than legible. Instead of notes, staffs and clefs, musical meaning dwells in and speaks through a pictorial voice. The resulting translation between score and sound is moved by the indeterminate wind of aleatoric and improvisational playing: interpreters enter into an open field of meaning where they have license to imagine and decide what a sight might sound like. Sight – aerated by improvisation – displaces script, leading sound towards what Moten himself might call ‘music against the law of reading’. So too is sight released from the sclerotic calculus of empiricism – which falsely renders seeing equivalent with knowing – entering with sound into an ambiguous liquidity of meaning and interpretation. Thus, the improvisatory poiesis that stirs the life of black music is enriched and redoubled by a visual spontaneity, notation that wanders beyond signification.

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The black avant-garde past and present is rich with composers and visual artists alike who have adopted the graphic score. Julius Eastman was among the first to experiment with the form. In the score for Buddha (1984), musical notation floats inside womblike layers of concentric circles evoking the shape of the Zen Buddhist ensō and the halo of ambient intensities that enshroud the song itself. In Thruway (1970) musical symbols are themselves transformed into abstract images: notes, rests and crescendos are enlarged and isolated, morphing into minimalist geometric abstractions.

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Anthony Braxton, born in 1945, five years after Eastman, works devotedly from the synaesthetic pressures and play between colour, sound and shape. His score for Composition 76 (1977) is annotated with colour arranged into geometric shapes, encoding an affective index wherein hue corresponds to the mood of the playing (green is ‘calm, restrained’, red is ‘explosive or intense’). The composition is what Braxton might call a ‘three-dimensional painting’ made of the embodied emotional resonance of a colour, and the relocation of this resonance from the body into the sound. Later works are entirely graphic in comportment: Composition 108B (1984) consists of oscillatory patterns resembling sound waves or the eidetic analogue of a glissando. Nothing in the score indicates what musicians should read in these shapes; they are given freedom to move in the blur between sound and form, to let their playing wander along the curve and flexion of the line.

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Renee Gladman, Slowly We Have the Feeling: Scores (details), 2019–22, pastel and pigment on paper (grid of nine), dimensions variable. Courtesy Artists Space, New York
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In Renee Gladman’s Slowly We Have the Feeling: Score (2019–22), fragments of musical notation nestle against mathematical notation and pastel abstractions. The putatively objective art of calculation is inflected with the questioning voice of improvisation, with the unsolvable variables of pitch, tempo and sonic feeling. Elongated and inverted musical staffs populate several works on paper by Jennie C. Jones: in Score for a Sustained Blackness (2014–16) she incorporates the elements of scoring into a minimalist grammar of form and line that ‘search[es] for the time signature of blackness’.

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In a modernity where vision has been wielded to surveil, subjugate and render blackness immanently knowable, graphic scores offer black visuality a chance at the mysticism of black sonic improvisation: they offer up sight as a device of occultation and encryption rather than of revelation and description. Sound and sight dance together towards those semiotic loopholes where blackness can improvise its infinite unknowabilities.

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From the September 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.

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