This unique work from 1984 belongs to a period when Warhol was explicitly revisiting American popular culture as a system of signs detached from their sonic content. Musical notation — the most abstract of representational systems, in that it notates time as space and sound as mark — becomes, in Warhol’s hands, pure graphic surface. The notes do not play any identifiable music and the staff lines carry no key signature or tempo indication. This semantic evacuation is characteristic of his method across all media. Synthetic polymer on paper, rather than on canvas, gives the work an intimacy and directness associated more with drawing than with painting. The choice of musical notation is not arbitrary: Warhol was deeply engaged with the New York music scene throughout his career, including the Velvet Underground’s residency at the Factory, but musical notes appear his work as early as his 1953 Musical Notes and Sprite Faces, and as late as his series of 4 Beethoven screenprint portraits in 1987, the year he died, the surface covered with notes in a fusion of art and music.
