19.7 x 29.3cm, 30 pages, Full colour printed, Wire-o bound, Foil stamped covers, 2019

This is “Marina Rosenfeld’s first book publication, documenting her performance of the same name, and includes gate-fold renderings of the score pages, a “User’s Manual” by the artist, photos from the several performances of the work, and a foreword by musicologist Benjamin Piekut. The performance was Rosenfeld’s contribution to the exhibition Instructions Lab at the Museum of Modern Art (NY) in 2011.

A punning riff on spectral composition, the score from the work hinges on the misapprehension of the letters “r-o-y-g-b-” as song lyrics ( “are you that somebody…” “oh, oh, oh…” “why should my heart…” “just be…”). A choir is instructed to recall and re-perform in dense clusters of call-and-response, song fragments prompted by the familiar letters of the spectrum, which in the work’s premiere, were collected and projected vertically into the architectural volume of MoMA’s atrium in the implied form of a rainbow. “The drawings reproduced in this publication distill the playful translation of data across optical, auditory, and linguistic registers. As notations, they transcribe the MoMA performance, but they also enact a more general demonstration of human experience as transcription: light to color, letter, sound, word, lyric, and eventually music.”

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