2007feb07
#1, visually emotional narrative
Alex,
You ask whether a visually emotional
narrative could emerge from musical structure alone, as it does aurally, but in
the next sentence you say that the purpose of your work is to develop a visual
experience that places the role of music at its center. Was the first
question rhetorical, or are you straddling the fence? Assuming it's not
...
I think the answer is yes, as long as you're willing to define
"musical structure" in a way that's abstract enough that it could be expressed
as adequately visually as it is aurally.
For example, the opening of
Beethoven's fifth symphony could be abstracted as "three short ones that are all
the same followed by one longer one that's different." That's pretty
small-scale, but it's structure. Is it emotional? I think so (to the
extent that music is emotional --- which is a separate question); it's only a
single atom or molecule of an emotional narrative, but it has an emotional tone,
one that is distinct from, say "one long one followed by three short ones" ---
more serious, for example. Of course, a tiny motive is a different thing
than a symphony. Could a visual narrative achieve as much as an aural
one? I think the answer is "yes, but."
A musical narrative doesn't
exist in a vacuum. To understand (and feel) a Beethoven symphony, you need
a certain degree of fluency in its idiom. There are neural mechanisms that
allow us to distinguish, without training, consonance from dissonance (in some
contexts), but Beethoven's use of consonance and dissonance depends much more on
learned meanings of pitch relations than on raw perceptions. If there were
to be, ex nihilo, a visual composition comparable in scope to a Beethoven
symphony (but as foreign to us as a Beethoven symphony would be to a person
who'd never heard music), we simply wouldn't have the familiarity with its
idioms to understand it. We might be amazed (and certainly awe is an
emotion), but that's a different thing than understanding the narrative intent
of the composer.
There's another possibility, though: using a visual
idiom that already exists. This is not a complete solution, because our
contemporary visual idiom is largely representational, and does not map
one-to-one to musical idiom, but it's a place to start. The visual
language needs to grow and evolve with the art that's communicated in that
language.
However, there's more to "musical structure" than just ...
structure. A piece of music is not just a set of mathematical
relations. It is also the effect those relations have on us when they're
embodied in musical sounds ... and sounds have affects. Just as the color
red can only be known by experiencing the color, musical sounds can only be
known and felt by hearing them (though, of course, in both cases, the memory of
the experience is also an experience). So, visual music will always be
distinct from aural music. Of course, the distinction could be blurred:
just as I can read a score an "hear" the music in my head, it should be possible
for a person to watch visual music and imagine sounds. But for these
sounds to be the ones intended by the composer, the listener would have to be
very fluent in the idiom. I don't think this is impossible; for
example, if you knew me personally, you could imagine my voice as you read these
words. But the average literate person's facility in verbal language is
well beyond the average person's facility in musical language (being able to
hear a score when reading it is the exception), and our visual language is only
now being born.
I don't mean to suggest that I want to develop a visual
language that exists apart from music; I don't. I'm too much a musician to
be passionate about a mute art. But even if I wasn't interested in music
as a permanent companion to abstract animation, I would still chose it for now,
because people's understanding and love of music provides leverage. Was it
Stravinsky who complained that when he attended concerts he didn't know what to
do with his eyes? In any case, our eyes are often free to do something
else when we're listening to music; opera and ballet take advantage of this, but
abstract animation has the potential for being more satisfying visually than
either (though the human form can be pretty compelling). And: music
provides a context, a frame of reference in which a visual language can be
taught. If a musical event has a certain meaning (within the idiom of a
certain composition) and we place a visual event in parallel with it, the
audience will associate the two, and begin to expect the visual event to
function the way the musical one does. If the visual event is
well-designed, this association will be satisfying, and thus more memorable than
if it were arbitrary. Using music as a platform, a springboard for
developing an abstract visual musical language is very practical, because people
already listen to music, and they like forming associations. It's a
natural.
S.