Artist's Statement: Music Mosaic

Artist’s Statement: Music Mosaic

The piece I chose for this assignment is Chorus of Shadows by Harry Partch. Partch was an experimental composer who invented his own musical scale using tones found in between the notes in the standard 12 tone scale used by most western composers. He also invented an array of musical instruments designed to play the music he composed using his own personal musical scale. As a result of Partch’s experimental approach to composition, his music has a haunting, dissonant, and utterly unique sound. The song Chorus of Shadows, like many pieces of music composed by Partch, has a primal minimalistic feel, with syncopated percussion overlaid with droning instruments and voices.

I believe the imagery I created while listening to this piece was partially influenced by the visual style employed by another experimental music/performance art group known as The Residents, whose music is also dark and surreal like the work of Harry Partch.

Listening to this piece, I was impressed by the way Partch managed to wring a beautiful, though slightly unnerving melody, out of the dissonance of the droning instruments. The deep male voices, mixed with the higher tones of Partch’s own instruments create a strange texture that gives the piece a surreal and nightmarish quality. As I listened, I began to visualize the shapes of the mouths of the singers as they performed this unique piece of music. I wanted to create images of mouths that would capture the mood and texture of the song. Some of the mouths I drew may appear to be singing, or they could be viewed as grimacing or screaming. Some appear to belong to expressions of pleasure, and others to expressions of pain. To me Chorus of Shadows is excellently bittersweet, and I wanted to create images that reflected both ends of the spectrum. Some appear more masculine in representation of the deeper tonal drones in the song, and others more feminine to represent the higher tones.

I drew the hands in representation of the percussive and rhythmic aspects of the piece, which I felt gave the song it’s primal feeling. I am attracted to music that to me feels like a pure expression of emotion, a clear reflection of the creator’s soul. Thanks to Partch’s conceptual style of composition, he is free to make music without precedent, and his music feels at times like it could have been the first ever made. I wanted to create images that could represent the strong percussive elements of the song in a way that also feels raw, human, and primal. I felt I could accomplish this by showing human hands in emphatic, staccato positions. The positions I chose are simply the positions that came into my mind as I listened to the song and visualized hands.

I chose to use only black and white in strong contrast because I felt like it fit with the minimalistic and expressionistic style of the music and the imagery I was creating.