Variations on the idea of translation between forms, all but a few involving music (I think all of the exceptions instead involved dance). There were a few actual scores as 'punctuation' throughout the exhibition, including some beautiful illustrated Catholic sheets from the 13th, 14th, 15th century and a bunch of 'graphic notation' scores in which composers - including Ligeti - attempted to push beyong traditional notation to represent music in new and different ways.
I suppose it's in the nature of the exhibition's theme that a lot of the pieces were highly conceptual, in their various translations between music and language, colour etc, some of which struck me as interesting in concept but not deep in effect or execution. Exceptions included Danae Valenza's "Phonologies" ("a generic love-letter template ... has been translated and recorded in seven different languages ... These recordings were exposed to spectral analysis and processed as data through a computer program to create musical scores ... The seven tracks that result from this multi staged process of translation are played through a speaker stack that functions like a musical Tower of Babel, the original meaning lost, but in its place a whole host of new refrains") and John Nixon's "Colour-Music Music Composition" (paintings that can be played like a musical score, each element functioning as a cue for musical action - for example, a square is a violin and a triangle is a wine glass).
I also especially liked Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack's mid 20th century wooden 'colour chord stringed sound boxes', relating colour, music and movement - the Bauhaus school, which he attended and where he studied under Kandinsky and Klee, is a definite influence.
(I ran out of time and didn't get to see the top floor properly on this visit.)
I suppose it's in the nature of the exhibition's theme that a lot of the pieces were highly conceptual, in their various translations between music and language, colour etc, some of which struck me as interesting in concept but not deep in effect or execution. Exceptions included Danae Valenza's "Phonologies" ("a generic love-letter template ... has been translated and recorded in seven different languages ... These recordings were exposed to spectral analysis and processed as data through a computer program to create musical scores ... The seven tracks that result from this multi staged process of translation are played through a speaker stack that functions like a musical Tower of Babel, the original meaning lost, but in its place a whole host of new refrains") and John Nixon's "Colour-Music Music Composition" (paintings that can be played like a musical score, each element functioning as a cue for musical action - for example, a square is a violin and a triangle is a wine glass).
I also especially liked Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack's mid 20th century wooden 'colour chord stringed sound boxes', relating colour, music and movement - the Bauhaus school, which he attended and where he studied under Kandinsky and Klee, is a definite influence.
(I ran out of time and didn't get to see the top floor properly on this visit.)
