The score to Jim Nollman‘s “Cigarette Piece” is a classic example of instruction-music, a work in which the score is a set of rules, not of musical notes on ruled paper. The piece was performed live on KPFA radio in 1973, and a recording of that show was uploaded to the Other Minds catalog at archive.org earlier this month. The instructions are as follows:
The piece is scored for ten cigarette smokers and each night’s performance lasted as long as it takes each of them to finish one cigarette. In this performance one smoker whirls a noisemaker for the duration that smoke is in his lungs. In addition three other smokers each ring a bell for the length of time each one inhales smoke. Three others performers exhale against suspended wind chimes, while the final three sound a gong at each time they flick an ash.The sound of breathing, of smoking, might be somewhere in the deep background, but the music as heard in the recording is all dispersed bells, chimes, and an enveloping gong against the semi-mechanical rotations of the noisemaker (MP3). The result could easily be taken for a meditative ritual — which, in some respects, is what smoking is in the first place.