Visual Music Essay - 2007 - Maura McDonnell

I am hoping to better gather together essays and articles on visual music and visual music relevant topics in this blog.  I have only recently realised that blogger provides a tag facility, and so posts can be accessed via the tags.  A few such tags I wish to try to provide more posts for is the tags: essay, article, research, writing.  I have come across a lot of good writing - online or otherwise, so I am probably really doing this for myself, so I can quickly get access to them again.  CVM and iotaCenter based in Los Angeles, US provide really good resources and links to excellent resources.  Check them out for more up to date and extensive links.

If you have a link to an excellent essay, piece of writing or resource, I would love to put it in this blog, if you could email me at mmcd@soundingvisual.com, I would be delighted to hear from you and to share the resource on this blog.

Dennis H. Miller based in Northeastern University, Boston invited me to write an essay on Visual Music for the program catalog for the Visual Music Marathon held in Boston, US in April in 2007 and then presented fully again in New York, US in April 2009.  The essay was published in both catalogs.  The essay was based on visual music lecture notes I had prepared for a specific set of classes I taught on Visual Music to students attending the Music and Media Technology M.Phil. course at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland (I still present the visual music classes on that course).  At the time, the intention of the lecture notes was to introduce students to visual music and to show them that there was plenty of historical precedents for pursuing a very close relationship between music and image. As the  course has a very strong practical element to it, students have to create their own work.  So the point of the lecture was to provide a context from which they could possibly place their own music and image assignments and if they choose to also pursue this in their final thesis project.  The lecture I gave on visual music did have a very practical focus to it.  I shared these notes with Dennis H. Miller ( and he shared excellent teaching material with me).   Dennis invitation to me was to write up the lecture notes in an essay form.  It was not an easy task (much much easier to jot down notes and talk - as in a teaching situation)!

The essay is an introduction to visual music.   It is definitely not definitive, but it is a start for me to articulate beyond notes.  The essay has many credits from the experts who checked it over for me and to whom I am very grateful.

DOWNLOAD: The visual music essay (without images - text only) can be downloaded here.

The New York Visual Music Marathon - 2009 program booklet can be downloaded from the Northeastern University website, the Visual Music Program Catalog - 2009  includes the visual music essay (not with all images from the print version, but with some) I wrote, but also includes the program note for the 60 or so contemporary works shown at the visual music marathon. 

[Maura McDonnell - author]

Visual Music Marathon - New York - Review

The MFA Computer Art Department at School of Visual Arts, the New York Digital Salon and the Department of Music and Multimedia Studies at Northeastern University presented the New York premiere of the Visual Music Marathon. The screenings of the 120 visual music works took place in the new Chelsea Visual Arts Theatre, recently acquired by the School of Visual Arts, New York. The theatre was an excellent venue for the screening of the works.   The schedule for the event and the program catalog can be downloaded from:

http://www.2009vmm.neu.edu/schedule.html

I was fortunate to have also attended the Boston premiere of the Visual Music Marathon held
in 2007, hence many of the wonderful works on show I had seen before and had become familiar with since.  After the first presentation of the event, I had some clear favourites, and these were still the case - such as Jean Detheux's wonderful works - Rupture, Liaisons, Daydream Mechanics V Sketch 3, Semiconductor's 200 Nanowebbers, Fran Hartnett's Navigating the Pearl System, Gordon Monro's Dissonant Particles, Larry Cuba's Calculated Movements, Dennis H. Miller's White Noise , Scott Drave's 165 Star Oasis.  After the viewing in New york other works came to my attention, the incredible lucsious works of Stephanie Maxwell - Time Streams and All that Remains and Bonnie Mitchel's 2BTextures. The skilfull composition of Barbara Neubauer's Passage, the rhythmic constructions of Brian Evans's Pipilo, the drama of Jeffers Egan's Bati Dominance.

To be fair, all the works were incredible in this marathon.  This is also a credit to the artistic director Dennis H. Miller, who curated the works that were shown.  The Visual Music Marathon program catalog is really worth exploring, if you wish to further investigate any of the artists whose works were shown at the event.  Download the program from the Visual Music Marathon North Eastern University homepage. Quick link here.

George Stadnik presented a really exciting installation of his lumia compositions on 3D tv and demonstrated an exciting presentation of the possibilities of lumia compositions in installation settings.  There were two live acts who presented their live audio-video performances in the Visual Arts Theatre - the incredibly tight minamilist work of Chiaki Watanabe with David Galbraith music.  The incredibly colourful work of S2; SIMSTIM SQUARED with Marjan Moghaddam on images and Adam Caine on music.  Interestingly, the live acts drew a packed audiences into the theatre who many left before the incredible film of Jean Detheux.  What a pity.  Still, nice to see some young people there, taking an interest in Visual Music.