Gayle Young Plays Yoko Ono's Secret Piece

Yoko Ono created Secret Piece partly in response to the challenge of transcribing the sounds of bird calls into music notation. A photo of the score appears in Midori Yashimoto's book Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York (Rutgers University Press, 2005). The score shows treble and bass clefs, the notation of F below middle C as tied half notes, plus a hand-written text, with the accompaniment of the birds singing at dawn. The date 1953, Summer is handwritten at the bottom of the page. The following guidelines are typed at the top of the page: Decide on one note that you want to play. Play it with the following accompaniment: The woods from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. in summer. Secret Piece was the first composition in which Yoko Ono moved beyond the limitations of conventional music notation to include language, and is now recognized as one of the earliest examples of conceptual art. Ono calls this type of work an instruction, intended for realization by viewers either as a performance or an exercise for the imagination..