MUSIC FROM ART
Music inspired by works of art.
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Visual artist, Vicki O'Donoghue, made this set of paintings, War Specific Viewpoints, as part of the Sonic Notation project. The challenge for this round of music/art interpretation was to "think about the role of repetition in our medium and use it to say something about the piece we're interpreting."
The idea of a portal seemed appropriate for 2020. Writing the music helped me resist clinging to the old normal or even rushing to rebuild a new. I want to stay floating in the portal to listen, to see what's what and what could be. In the second half of the music, I play the theme with one hand and surround it with clouds of "potential notes" with the other.
The idea of a portal seemed appropriate for 2020. Writing the music helped me resist clinging to the old normal or even rushing to rebuild a new. I want to stay floating in the portal to listen, to see what's what and what could be. In the second half of the music, I play the theme with one hand and surround it with clouds of "potential notes" with the other.
Jennie Grangel made this image as part of the Sonic Notation project. The challenge was to "Find one significant feature in the piece you've chosen to interpret and explore it. Limit yourself to 5 of something (words, colours, tones, notes, shapes, motifs, or whatever)." I limited myself to 5 notes.
Irish visual artist, Monica Dunne, made this painting as part of the Sonic Notation project. The challenge for this round of music/art interpretation was to "choose 3 elements of the art/music you've chosen to interpret and create 3 pieces, each of which combines 2 of the elements." I chose line, layer, and space.
Irish visual artist, Jennie Grangel, created this digital image as part of the Sonic Notation project. I felt a sense of physical space, as though I were looking down through the layers and wrote a section of music for each.
Irish painter, Vicki O'Donoghue, painted this image, Orchestral Manoeuvre in Pink, as part of our Sonic Notation project. I echoed her layers of colour with layers of flute and piano, and turned her visual motifs into sound motifs.
Visual artist, Aishath Huda, from Maldives, invited me to create music for her collage, Contained. To create the melody I drew crisscrossing lines on a musical staff to emulate the mesh on the canvas and placed notes where the mesh lines crossed the staff lines.
Canadian photographer, Karen Bhatt, took this photo while flying over the Rocky Mountains on her way to a new life. What's majestic about mountains, I mused, is their height and their dramatic birth. I took myself back to primordial Earth to sound-paint a moment in the formation of the Rockies.
Italian artist, Ivana Pinna, invited me to write a musical interpretation of her installation, Nagreta Noten, which went on to win 2nd place in the VERNICE ART PRIZE in March, 2018. I was going for the feeling of kicking leaves on a sunny autumn day, so I wrote it for oboe and cello.
Mario Rodriguez, based in Barcelona, invited me to write music for his light sculpture, A Path Through the Hills of Light. I wanted to capture the dreamy, ethereal sense of the sculpture, so I wrote it for flute, tubular bells and keyboard synthesizer. The melody was derived from the shape of Mario's design.