Robert Rooney – Graphic Scores [LP]

"In 1965, Melbourne artist Robert Rooney produced his first graphic score, 'Synops', for his contemporary music trio with Barry McKimm and Syd Clayton. Over the next few years, Rooney continued this visual approach to musical indeterminacy with graphic scores allowing for new levels of experimentation.

Rooney’s graphic score for 'Duo 1, 2 and 3' (1965) is a visual system of exits and entries for performers, divided into three sections. Two players read from the score while a third improvises in response to their performance.

'Second Landscape for Instruments (Slippery Seal)' (1968) utilises the seal shape, taken from a Kellogg’s cereal packet, from Rooney’s 'Slippery Seal' series of paintings made in the same year. Musicians must find a way of performing the visual objects they encounter.

Like his paintings from the same period, with their emphasis on abstraction, pop motifs and the impersonal, Rooney’s graphic scores demonstrate the artist’s interest in open-endedness and chance within the structure of a predetermined system.

Published together here for the first time, the only extant recordings of these avant-garde scores – performed by Rooney (piano), McKimm (trumpet) and Clayton (double bass) – document one of the earliest occasions in Australian history when experimentation in visual art and music were combined.

This limited-edition LP is accompanied by new writing by Maggie Finch, Curator of Photography, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, on Rooney's little-known sound practice."

Audio Art Australia, 2025