This is one of the Gregorian chants, titled In Solemnity of St. Stephen the Protomartyr, written in the medieval musical notation: square neumes on a staff with four lines. In this notation, a square symbol marks a note in a melody, and sometimes a group of squares are sung to a single syllable. This system of neumes only represents an overall movement of the melody, and does not designate a specific pitch in absolute terms, so it depends on a singer which note to begin with, and which tune to follow. In this respect, it seems that the shape and structure of the medieval musical score, implying the possibility of ‘random’ performance, may have struck Paik with regard to his idea of ‘random access music’ that he materialized in 1963. Among his Random Access series is the work in which fragments of unwound magnetic tapes were attached to the wall, and you could scrape the point you wanted to listen to, with a metal playback tape-head in your hand. Giving the title again to a 15th-century music manuscript in which he attached ten square pieces of magnetic tape over original notes in places, Paik showed his consistent interest in the notion, “Random Access.”
