With my visual score I wanted to use colours and their intersections as a way to demonstrate how the sounds might engage with each other in the piece, in my eyes each colour was a different sound or player, and each sound should be informed by their relation with the other.
I had always seen this as one solid drone or field recording being the orange, and the spaces between the points the other colours meet the orange being an indicator of how frequently other more delicate sounds should interject throughout the piece. The larger the body the deeper the tone, the more uniform the body the plainer the tone. I think strangely this score is fairly relatable to what I ended up going for in the final piece.
Paul Klee (1879-1940) was a painter & a colour theorist who also taught Music. He was fascinated with capturing the colour of music, he was friends with Kandinsky although never formerly writing visual scores, here are some examples of his paintings inspired by music.
Wasily Kandinsky’s “Succession” though never explicitly used as a visual score, is often interpreted that way by it’s viewers.
Visual Scores, and scores in general have potentially had a shift in their design since the discovery of recorded music, as their need has changed. With the arrival of modern and more abstract forms of art too there has been a shift in philosophy slowly bleeding into music & sound. When scores were once the only way to preserve music for future generations they are now an artifact of arguably less clarity. What can they mean when their place as gatekeepers of history has been taken from them by recordings? I think visual scores speak to a more liberating force within the art world, I see them as invitations to play placing the tools in the hand of the performer and I see it as trusting a performer and allowing them more influence on the final piece. It brings a chaos element to work, it accepts a level of separation that makes it feel like it’s a less egocentric type of composition and more collaborative. I believe the development of recorded music must have informed this movement, as it feels like a direct response to the finality of a composed and recorded piece – redefining the purpose to a performance of a piece of music as something that can/is allowed to change.