DVD Program Notes

Part One: Brett Terry, Curator

Curator's Note

To complement the articles presented in this special Computer Music Journal issue on Visual Music, the curated portion of this year's DVD features a selection of nine visual music works as well as a compendium of video and sound examples to accompany articles in Volume 29. The process this year utilized a call for works which attracted over 50 submissions. In selecting the nine works on the disc, I sought to create a complementary blend of works that would underscore the diversity of composers and visual artists working in this exciting medium.

One evaluative criterion I often apply to musical works is to ask whether every moment in the work feels truly necessary. When working with visual music—i.e., without explicit plot, dialog, or actors—it is truly a challenge to forge for each work a form and language for the music and visuals that allows their expressive content to meet this test and that strikes the right balance between them. I hope that the works presented here are unified by the deeper connections and underlying structures that successfully solve this challenge, and that these works are characterized both by compelling dramatic arcs that bind their moments together and diaphanous central ideas that engender contemplative insights on the part of the viewer/listener.

Reynold Weidenaar's Wavelines II is one of the classics of this visual music genre and fortunately he was able to oversee a new transfer of this piece to digital format for this DVD. Mr. Weidenaar was also able to revise his original program notes. In this compilation, his piece serves a bridge that connects computer-based visual music's origins—e.g., working with oscilloscopes and Lissajous figures—with the very contemporary works on the disc. There is, however, an almost timeless and classical quality to the work, despite the 16mm-to-digital transfer and the work's technical provenance. The highly kinetic energy of the figures and the color logic possess a vitality that is highly engaging.

Bill Alves's aleph is discussed in an article Mr. Alves wrote for this issue of the Journal, in which he elaborates upon some of the central themes in his works, particularly his development of the ideas of John Whitney. Rich with nuances of pattern, Just Intonation, and periodic structures, aleph illustrates well the composer's goal of developing a complementarity between music and visual expression. Mr. Alves's relationship to Gamelan music is also evident in both the music and the visual language.

Aerial, by the father and son team of James S. Hegarty and James H. Hegarty, is a hypnotic study in movement, shape, and texture. A singer's voice, only minimally processed, influences a solitary silky red cloth—buffeted by the wind and under the influence of virtual gravity, the over-all effect is striking in its simplicity and elegance. Dennis Miller's Cross Contours, by contrast, delights in its complexity: kaleidoscopic forms unfold, grow, emerge, and shatter in an evocative soundscape. A rich interplay connects the work's visual gestures with its grammars of color, light, and music.

Light Body Corpuscles, a work by Antonin De Bemels and Gordon Delap, begins as a slow emergence of recognizability, with restless kinetic particles gradually revealing their true nature. The arrival of a recognizable human form is, however, disturbed as the viewer encounters a stroboscopic alternation of human images, creating a virtual human form of indeterminate gender, characterized by its refusal to stay still. Another work of high velocity is Open Circuits, by Tim Howle and Nick Cope. From the outset, this piece takes the viewer on a dramatic ride full of contrasts and excitement, with rapid cuts of jagged blurry city lights and train travel. The music matches the cuts of the video and alternates between a frenetic connotation of high speed and a journey through a virtual hypnotic space.

Gesture Lesson, by the Regis Ferguson Collective (Michael Berkowski and Greg Scranton), features two on-screen figures interacting in an LED-like world. With each pass, the figures emerge and their interactions increase in complexity, often exhibiting balletic grace and creating an aura...