Mapping Exercises
Those of you who listened to my Monet composition will have recognised the ambient style I chose for the painting; I wanted to capture the ‘feeling’ of the painting and, although my ‘feelings’ are subective, I think the music I composed is quite generic in the fact that anyone who listens can see and hear the connection between the painting and the music.
If a Looney Tunes cartoon is on TV, the music is always the same type. Each character has a musical motif/theme/identity, so therefore we don’t think about it, we just watch/listen.
I think that explains it…
Anyway, I got the composition completely wrong! I was supposed to clearly map parts of an image and compose parts to sections; I “painted my feelings”, as my lecturer put it.
So for this exercise, Monet was completely the wrong choice! This is a mapping exercise and therefore I am going to choose a more appropriate painting. I think I am going to compose to a Kandinsky. I will post the image.
The exercise is a lot more difficult than I thought, because on the one hand the composition must reflect each part of the painting so it can be followed, almost like a score, actually. There is a fine line between being too literal and too emotional. I will quote my lecturer’s blog post.
“Thanks to Simon for flagging the fact that this may not be clear. The task that deals with music for painting is basically a ‘mapping task’ where you assign shapes or colours to musical ‘objects’ and you consistently reflect in the music, in some way, what you ‘read’ in the painting. Be too literal and it will be boring, be too emotional and you won’t be able to demonstrate in any concrete way how the sounds correspond to the elements in the painting. So like most artforms this one requires a delicate balance between good taste, common sense and clear thinking. The criteria are the ones for artifact creation and the brief should be clear by now. I am looking for simple but interesting and appealing correspondances between sound and visual (check out your Baudelaire !!) “
I am posting this for my benefit, as well as sharing with anyone else who is interested!
SB
