I have included four excerpts from performances with Transformative Reflections, which exemplify the hybrid art experience space explorations of Transformative Reflections, also described in P4 Reflections.
1. 2 excerpts from Red Studio Suite Live at SMK, Copenhagen, January 2023
2. Excerpt from Live at The Getty Museum LA Juni 2023
3. Excerpt from Impressions of LA Ring Studio Concert June 2020
P3 Music and media
This project has resulted in a series of musical works, performances, and processual sound sketches. These works and sketches have emerged during and as part of my creative process of developing a coherent art methodological approach to transformative reflections.
The album format consists of a journey through the Red Studio, with a suite of compositions containing conceptual, compositional, and free improvisations based on the TR method, and with post-production, choosing, editing, combining, and rerecording as a part of the composition and producing process.
I find this relatable to the concept of different types of works, impressions, improvisations, and compositions that painter Wassily Kandinsky describes in Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Kandinsky 1979). I see the final studio recordings in the album format as close to his description of compositions, with "a slowly formed work which comes to utterance after long maturing," where "reason, consciousness, purpose, play an overwhelming part." In contrast, both the sketches and, to some degree, the first live concerts have a higher degree of what would then be similar to Kandinsky's impressions and improvisations.
Although I present these works here in a concrete, fixed form, they are at the same time still in process and will continue to evolve into new transformative reflections each time I perform them. The works, performances, and sketches I present on this page can, therefore, while being experienced as a final composition, at the same time be seen as status reports rather than closed and completed works.
Listen to the sections 1-9 from
Transformative Reflections Red Studio Suite
with a detailed analysis of the method and composition processes of each section, hereafter called pieces. Click the pdf thumbnail below the music player to read in another browser window. Category 5 – Artwork dialogue flows through all the works in these final versions of the music, so I have only mentioned the distinctions between categories 1 to 4 in my analysis and description.
You also see the music files placed in the method category they are based on on the TR Map on this page.
Listen to the Double Piano part of the live concert
Transformative Reflections Red Studio Suite Solo & Duo Live
with analysis of the method and composition process of the two sections
Free Improvisation leading into RedS Revisited Double Piano Perspective
Additional descriptions and analysis through a few other paintings from my process
Here are a few other pieces I have worked on, accompanied by brief descriptions to supplement the explanation of my process. As in the previous examples from Red Studio Suite, category 5, – Artwork dialogue flows through all the works in the final versions of the music, but I have only mentioned the distinctions between categories 1 to 4 in my analysis and description:
Painted Papercuts 2 Tekinoktay and Painted Papercuts Tekinoktay
This mainly falls in category 4 – Idea analytical.
I transpose Tekinoktay's process of collages with cutouts of pre-painted paper to improvisations with pre-sampled favorite chord colors. In my interview with Tekinoktay (Tekinoktay 2022), she speaks about tradition, which I represent in the instrumentation in this experiment, and she also talks about being inspired by pop culture and magazines, which I in this experiment represent 1 to 1 with a conceptual vintage rhythm box beat in Painted Papercuts Tekinoktay 2. This is countered by the chords' abstract movements and the sampled canun's improvised melodic line.
This is an example of transferring ideas from the process and not necessarily a translation of the painting's narrative or content but an idea that creates something new in the musical domain.
About Mie Olise’s "Abandoned House 1 & 2”:
This mainly falls in categories 1 and 4 – Intuitive and Idea analytical.
Two free improvisations, an offshoot of my previous improvisations and compositional experiments on the two paintings by her. I kept improvising from a pool of ideas and stayed with the free improvising format for the recording for both these paintings. The pieces are based on iterative experiments with 5-7 concept ideas alternating with intuitive improvisation. With inspiration from Bill Evans’ liner notes from Miles Davis’ album Kind of Blue, which can be found in the context appendix, and from the story of a Japanese (and Chinese in another version) emperor asking an artist to make a drawing, where – in short – the artist then does months of process studies and versions/explorations of drawings before making the final drawing in one quick stroke. In one of the versions, the process studies are countless drawings of various motif parts.
About Vibeke Tøjner’s "Reve":
This mainly falls in category 2 – Element analytical.
My interview with Tøjner (Tøjner 2021) gave me extra insight into her inspiration and perspectives; how she thinks about topology and phenomenology in almost all her works. I would say that Tøjner's portraits of Camus, "Le visage de Camus," which has inspired my method, belongs in both the Concrete and very much in the Idea analytical category of my method, besides the Artwork dialogue. According to Tøjner, a significant number of her paintings are influenced by a childhood experience of seeing the landscape through a thicket of branches.
In "Reve," I perceive the white veil as a version of the thicket, and the background as a kind of unknown landscape, based on Tøjner's description of a recurring topographic theme in her works.
I chose two different low register triads, C-major and B-minor, along with a series of improvised melodic lines based on the overtone series of these triads, to represent the naturalistic yet abstract aspect I experience in the painting. In principle, Some of the overtone triad melodies have strong tensions in relation to the triads from an interval tension row point of view. However, I find the naturalness in the overtone series gives this relatively dissonant abstract melodic material a mild and natural feeling regarding tension, which matches my impression of the painting as dark and light at the same time. When recording Marilyn Mazur's percussion, we talked about her role as representing the white veil in the painting with light bells and sounds.
About Tal R’s "Månen spejler sig i Sortedam":
Sortedam Reflections Met video 17 min. and 11 seconds in
Sortedam Suite - here is the original explanation in the form of notes on the first version of this piece, divided into six parts. In this final version, I have added a vital artwork dialogue element consisting of improvising bass, drums, and percussion with preceding talk about improvisational concepts for the painting and my and the improvising musician's analysis, feeling, and interpretation of the painting and the music. Link to painting: www.talr.dk/works/sortedam
1) Starts at minute 0.00, using method category 2 – element analytical to a lesser degree category 3 – concrete systematic: Sortedam. Strings celeste and more acoustic piano. Start of experiment with assigning a musical element to different elements of the painting. The matte black and the square are represented by four octaves of reverberation of all notes on an acoustic piano pressed down. The dark figure in the water gets a three-part, more moving dark piano figure, where the attack of the notes is included.
2) Starts at minute 1.45, using method category 3 – Concrete systematic, points from my interview with Tal R (R 2018): Set to music, alternative use of an element behind the painting.
3) Starts at minute 2.22, using method category 3 – Concrete systematic, stringent pixel to midi translation of an inverted photo representation of the painting, with added free improvisation experiments with a subjective moon-ish sound representation in a sampled, slightly effect-manipulated celeste. I experiment with adding a free, intuitive element to the reflection/translation, which gives a different type of artistic freedom.
4) Starts at minute 4.11, using method categories 1 and 2 – Intuitive and Element analytical, intuitive improvisation based on free interpretation and observations of the painting, with constant visual attention to (digital representation of) the painting in the process. Focus on the soft poetic darkness in the painting. Transparent feeling, considering that black is not a color. Db major (with many black keys), and it is a distinctive sound, representing the dark, soft, and poetic. Water-like deep-sounding movements, flow, currents in the water, three-part (tripartite) motive movements, bright garland-like movements, and black moon. At some point, the city in the middle becomes (melodic) activities in the middle, partly mirrored, something frequency-wise lighter and darker above and below, as in the picture (and as in other Sortedam sketches). Finally, the reflection of the moon, which is the closest to reality, even though it is a reflection, represented by a transparent impressionist movement.
5) Starts at minute 8.56, using method categories 2, 3, and 4 – Element analytical, Concrete Systematic, and Idea analytical: "Tutti inversion." Several elements in the painting are assigned a musical element in a diatonic tonal/harmonic relatively soft universe. The image is read from left to right. The lines in the painting are imitated by sampled strings played through a frequency filter, light over the water, darker and with reverb and delay, representing the reflection in the water. The houses are represented, read as a kind of sheet music, by a melody on a sampled celeste (half-hidden in the sound) and with a diatonic mirroring of this melody in single-string D played on a deeper bell-sounding Fender Rhodes with reverb and delay representing the water reflection of the houses (also half-hidden in the sound). The negative-reflection-moon is represented by an ascending low acoustic piano figure in unison with sampled double bass, with an attack on the notes. In the middle, the piece modulates to a darker key (with more flat accidentals), representing the moonlight's (glossy black) reflection in the water. (I have also experimented with playing the audio files backwards in the second half as a mirror).
6) Starts at minute 10.36 using category 4 – Idea analytical except for improvisation/sketch: I mirror the existential negative-space that Tal R creates with his black-on-black painting of the moon that is reflected in Sortedam to a similar negative-space room with a classical black grand piano in a concert hall and a free improvisation, where the sound of the grand piano is mirrored through an analog electronically changing pulsating semi-compositional setup that provides both a tonal, varying, more and less random reflection and change of the musical input, and also a change of the sonic material that as a result sounds both like a grand piano in a way, but also not a grand piano, similar to the moon at the same time being and not being a moon.
About Marcel Duchamp’s "Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2"
This mainly falls in categories 2 and 4 – Element and Idea analytical.
This painting has fascinated me and has been a recurring pivotal point in my explorations and reflections. It inspired a "field composition" idea explained in the appendices, and I feel it still has unresolved potential for Transformative Reflections.
I worked with recording and sketch-recording various ideas; here are three of them briefly explained:
1. I created a chromatically descending five-note pattern representing the five echoes of the woman in the picture, and with regards to Ligeti's “L'escalier du Diable,” which could have been a transformative reflection of M.C. Escher’s lithograph print "Relativity" depicting never-ending staircases. I experimented with echoing effects, placing four echo versions of the full track, displaced with approximately 32nd of the note value. This to represent the four echoes in the painting.
2. I reworked Ornette Coleman’s jazz composition “Lonely Woman” with an echo effect.
3. I recorded myself walking down a staircase in Brooklyn and used that as an accompaniment to an improvised composition following the lines and inspiration in the painting.
About ”Anxiety of Influence Misprision Bloom”
This mainly falls in category 4 – Idea analytical.
This piece is part of my experiments with reading about art on top of music, in this case, not while playing. The words are passages from Anxiety of Influence (Bloom 1997), and the music piece is not necessarily a translation or reflection, it being mainly based on direct quotes, but I consider it a misprision of Bloom and belong to the Transformative Reflections.
In a conversation with literature and pop art scholar Alessa Dominguez, she stated that Bloom's perspective was too masculinist and old-fashioned but still interesting and somehow valid. She commented on this piece: "Are the voices climbing on top of each other at the end a commentary on the masculinist orgasmic structure of anxiety?" which is an exciting point of view, pointing to the ethical and societal considerations of this project described elsewhere.
About Købke Limewood Tree
This mainly falls in categories 2 and 4 – Element analytical and Idea analytical. This is an example of experiments starting with analysis, reflecting, and concepts as a fundament for composition and improvisation, here based in the Element-Analytical category.
The final concert version, which can be heard in the video clip from the concert Live at The Getty Museum for Limewood Tree, is the natural overtone row representing the tree and a mirroring of these notes as the roots. The second part of the music piece is based on the sense that the depicted tree seems to possess and express a personality and a mood, which the music interprets. This connects to my experience of all the artworks of various non-human objects in an exhibition I saw, turning into portraits or people and mirrors. This is described further in P4 Reflections.
Introduction - Method - Music and media - Reflections - Context - Events - Appendices - References
Please visit https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/51449
to see Nude Descending a Staircase no 2 by Marcel Duchamp
Nikolaj Hess Solo Piano and
Kris Davis Nikolaj Hess Piano Duo Concert
MoMA Matisse The Red Studio
Nikolaj Hess solo ➡️:
00.10 intro opening
00.57 intro
3.30 Colors Shapes Space Time
6.55 Clockwise Concrete
9.50 figure ground inversion - 10.30 transition to
11.00 Mortons Fields
13.16 Objects Sheet Music
14.35 RedS intro
15.33 RedS
16.58 intro Trees
17.44 Trees
20.10 Heard
⬅️ Double piano duo Nikolaj Hess & Kris Davis
00.00 Duo free improvisation Turning Point
04.15 RedS Duo
Music and video on this page:
Based on Matisse's The Red Studio:
Transformative Reflections Red Studio Suite audio
Alternative perspective revisits audio
Solo and double piano concert at MoMA video
Solo piano concert The Getty excerpt video
Solo piano concert The Met excerpt video
Solo piano and trio SMK excerpts video
Selected pieces from music based on other paintings, from the album Transformative Reflections The Others audio and video
Here is the option of listening to the solo piano concert version of
Transformative Reflections Red Studio Suite
Translated from picture:
Nature seen through veil
Pianissimo
Nature overtone rows in right hand from left hands triads
Tøjners expression "whiteness" - the veil, light sounds and lines in the overtone rows. Belongs and at the same time have an undefinable quality.
Phenemenological
Topological
Cartographic
Nature Portrait
TR Map 2023 with the 9 sections/pieces from Red Studio Suite placed in the categories they are based on (identical to the one on P1 "introduction")
Based on category 2 - element analytical and category 4 - idea analytical. The quarternote based bassline represents the reflection of the moon in the painting that looks a bit like an instrument, for example a bass. The three curves becomes 3 x 3 beats and a 9/4 meter and the shape of the line semi-follows the lines of the moon reflection.
Deep sounds and the black keys on the piano represent the black in black in the painting, and the contextualisation to 18. century Danish painting is weaved into the improvisation and surrounding pieces in the concert.
In my process, I have made alternative perspective revisits of selected sections of the work.
You can listen to alternative perspective Revisits of:
Clockwise Concrete (slow) - Impro - RedS - Heard here and also find them placed in the method map on this page