The Scores of Tree Care Hyde Park
Tree Care Hyde Park centers around a series of short poetic invitations in the form of instructions for communing with trees.
Scores are a contemporary art form that was pioneered in the 1950s by artists such as John Cage. Scores were a central strategy in the Fluxus movement of the 1960s. A particular inspiration is the work of composer and sound artist Pauline Oliveros. Her practice, which she called Deep Listening, used scores to create experiences that invite the performer to expand, alter, and deepen their senses, in particular listening.
Scores are a narrative experience expressed through a set of instructions, like a recipe or a musical score, often involving everyday actions, objects and ideas. The composer of the score, in an act of empathy, puts themselves in the shoes of another person, and offers a set of guidelines for engagement. The score is a text form that stands on its own. It can be experienced simply in the imagination of the reader, or scores can be performed by anyone. The performances of these scores are open to variation and interpretation by the performers, environment, time, and culture.
These scores are offered as gifts to anyone who wishes to experience them.
The scores for Tree Care Hyde Park have been written over the last few years as part of a larger project The Urban Tree Oracle. In that project, one aspect of each tree species’ role in our ecosystem is highlighted and translated to participants through the score, which is experienced in embodied sensory experimental practices.
The process of writing the score involves a sustained attention and relating to the tree species.
Often I will visit a single tree over four seasons: walking by them with my dog, sitting under them, researching about then, and writing to and drawing them. The process is experimental, intuitive, and winding. I am trying to find a way to be in relation with this being that we call a tree. I don’t know what that means and I want to find out through my senses, my embodied self, my intuition, and other experimental forms of communication, research, and engagement.
Collaborators
Many of the scores in this project were coauthored. I am grateful to the following individuals for their contributions and dreaming with me and the trees:
Vaughn Bell, Tree of Heaven
Christa Donner, Sumac
Sheila Gallagher, Birch
Sandrine Schaefer, Tree of Heaven
Andi Sutton, Hackberry
Deb Todd Wheeler, Elm
