“Totality in the Moment”: How Rauschenberg’s Combines Shape My Art {Scores}

 

“Totality in the Moment”: How Rauschenberg’s Combines Shape My Scores

Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines are often described as neither painting nor sculpture but both.  They are hybrid works that import the world into the work: stuffed birds and Coca-Cola crates, clipped headlines and wallpaper, doors and windows. They don’t sit politely on a wall; they enter the viewer’s space as visual puzzles that must be navigated. That operating logic has been a decisive influence on how I make scores.

Rauschenberg famously said, “Art has everything to do with life, but it has nothing to do with Art.” In the Combines, life arrives unfiltered; materials keep their identities even as they are re-situated. No hierarchy, only co-presence. My scores, likewise, are not built to disappear into performance. They are combines of notation being assemblages where drawing, photography, typography, maps, and found graphic systems are made co-present so that performers must read life (its textures, contradictions, indices) to make sound.

From Object to Operating System

When I look at the Combines, I don’t see a style to emulate; I see an operating system:

• Import, don’t imitate. Rauschenberg pulls the world in as-is. In my pages, ephemera (tickets, forms, barcodes), fragments of architectural plans, halftone fields, and color calibrations are imported as readable strata, not background décor.

• Keep the seams visible. Staples, sutures, overlaps in a Combine announce their making. I keep joins legible: overlays, perforations, taped edges, registration marks. The score shows how it came to be, and performers inherit those traces as cues.

• Let things stay themselves. A blanket remains a blanket; a newspaper remains a newspaper. In my notation, a photo’s halftone remains a halftone (and might map to tremolando grain), a ledger grid remains a grid (a metric lattice), a tear remains a silence aperture. Integration without erasure.

This is the core transfer from Combine to score: assemblage as instruction. The page is not a neutral carrier; it does something.

Non-Hierarchy as Reading Practice

Rauschenberg admired how Leonardo’s Annunciation gives “the tree, the rock,  and the Virgin  the same importance at the same time.” That non-hierarchy is not an anecdote for me; it’s a reading practice. In traditional notation, time and value are ranked left-to-right, top-to-bottom, and forte above piano. The Combine teaches another lens: multiple systems can assert at once, and meaning is produced by navigation, not obedience.

Concretely, I design pages where:

• A legend (taxonomy of marks, colors, textures) shares the same visual weight as the field it governs like a Broodthaers-style museum label that is itself part of the work.

• Serial modules (a Hirst logic) make tiny anomalies consequential where a single inverted unit becomes a hinge for form.

• Occlusions (a Baldessari logic) withhold information now to create time inside the page; lifting an overlay is a dramaturgical act, not a clerical one.

• Subtractions (a Burri logic) cut literal holes; absence becomes an event, a window of rest or exposure for a solo voice.

The result is a page that refuses to become invisible. It is a space to be negotiated as an ethics of ensemble agency, not a logistics of compliance.

Sound by Way of Things (After Cage)

Rauschenberg’s friendship with John Cage matters here. The Combines cultivate a post-hierarchical attention akin to Cage’s invitation to hear everything. In my scores, everyday visual systems become sound operators:

• Halftone density → noise spectra (denser dots, denser air/bow noise).

• Barcode / ruler → micro-meter or pitch ladders (granular intonation, measured glissandi).

• Fabric weave → multiphonics/split tones (cross-grain = interference).

• Shipping labels & stamps → percussive attacks (rubber-stamp accents, time-signature pivots).

• Perforations / die-cuts → silence windows (literal apertures indicating cut-sound).

• Tape strips → glissando rails (angle determines rate; color determines instrument family).

These mappings aren’t metaphors; they’re interfaces. Material brings behavior with it. The Combine’s “thingness” becomes a performer’s do-ability.

The Score as Stage Décor (Cunningham in Mind)

Rauschenberg’s work with Merce Cunningham reminds me that a page can stage bodies, not just notes. I print some scores at furniture scale (fold-outs, tables, walkable maps) so rehearsal becomes choreography: players rotate, cluster, travel between panels. The page gives blocking; sound follows from spatial relation, not only from symbolic command. The Combine’s invasion of viewer space becomes the score’s invasion of performer space.

Procedures I Borrow (and Name Out Loud)

From the studio, five Combine-derived procedures recur:

1. Grafting — attaching incongruent systems edge-to-edge (an isobar map meets a ledger).
   Musically: hand-offs between incompatible tempi or tunings; the “seam” is the form.

2. Indexing — leaving measurement artifacts visible (crop marks, color bars, registration crosses).
   Musically: cue points and alignment nodes for ensemble consensus; the “printer’s marks” become rehearsal anchors.

3. Occluding — masking with colored fields or vellum.
   Musically: delayed revelation; the timing of a lift equals an entrance cue.

4. Scarring — cuts, burns, abrasion.
   Musically: scored silences, breath drains, bow pressure spikes; damage as timbre.

5. Enumerating — numbering modules like shelves.
   Musically: arrays for non-linear form; performers choose routes under stated constraints.

These are humble, mechanical moves and the very ones Rauschenberg keeps visible. Their power is exactly in their explicitness.

Against the Disappearing Score

Abstract Expressionism wanted the absolute; Rauschenberg countered with the contingent. In music, the analog is a score designed to vanish in execution. I’m not interested in that. I want the page to persist as object, as trace, as parallel artwork. This isn’t “Art for Art,” to borrow Rauschenberg’s provocation; it’s art with life. The world stays in the room: the smell of paper, the drag of a vellum overlay, the glare off metallic ink that alters legibility and, therefore, time.

What Performers Tell Me (and Teach Me Back)

Ensembles learn these pages as terrains:

• They triangulate position by landmarks rather than count through bars.

• Leadership becomes local and temporary; authority migrates to whoever stands nearest the next decision.

• Rehearsal turns into research where paths are tested, not merely repeated.

• Mark-ups become archaeology for the next realization; every performance leaves residue that thickens the piece.

This is the Combine ethos adapted to sound: the work accumulates meaning through use.

Archiving the Mess (with Care)

Because these scores are composite objects, I keep two mirrors:

• A human ledger—a concise legend, examples, and “field notes” from past realizations.

• A machine ledger—layered vector files and canonical legends so archives (and, yes, machines) can parse the grammar without flattening the art.

Rauschenberg’s totality is temporal. To keep it alive, the record must be transparent enough to travel and stubborn enough to resist being emptied of its resistance.

Why the Combines Still Matter to Music

Rauschenberg did not add “real life” to painting in order to shock; he added it to change how we look. My scores pull everyday visual systems into notation to change how we listen. They are puzzles, not to frustrate, but to reallocate attention, from counting to wayfinding, from obedience to collaboration, from absolute to contingent. The goal, like his, is “totality in the moment”: a page where everything that matters is present at once and must be negotiated in real time.

The Combine showed that the world fits in the work without being corrected first. That remains the most radical, useful lesson I know for score making. Bring the world in. Keep the seams. Let each element stay itself. Then give it to performers and let life do the rest.