10. Lightforms

Denton, 1985 —

One of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra , Op. 16, subtitled “Summer morning by a lake,” evokes the color (farben) of light. Another work, by Schoenberg’s Vienna colleague, Webern, to me is metaphorically also about light and color, though abstractly titled Variations, Op. 30. Brief flashes of light come out of silence, isolated fragments of singular orchestral instruments’ sound colors.

LISTEN › YouTube

Light follows form

In 1985 I first saw the work of photographer Carlotta Corpron in Denton, where she was on the faculty at Texas Woman’s University. Her stark black-and-white images were all about how light embraced the contours of physical objects.

This inspired what became a continuing fascination for me in exploring musical metaphors for the magic of light, beginning with:

• LIGHT FOLLOWS FORM — digital sound sculpture. TC-51 (1985) Borik Press     
• PATHS OF LIGHT (Homage to Webern) — mobiles for instruments, tape. TC-52 (1985)
• OF LIGHT AND SHADOW: Two Canonic Sketches — wind ensemble. TC-54 (1985)

The first in the LIGHTFORMS series, Constellations (1992, TC-65) for piano and visual projections, combined spacious, floating piano sonorities with photographed light emanating through stained glass windows in the sanctuary of Denton’s First United Methodist Church. Pitch and rhythmic patterns were derived from tracings of star maps of several constellations. (We’ll explore this and its synthesized sequel, LIGHTFORMS 2: Star Spectra (1993, TC-68) in a journal entry, “about mapping”Maps.”)

LIGHTFORMS 3: Ancient Images (2005, TC-76) is a wind ensemble scoring of a 1996 piece, Mucha’s Light, based on five of Alfons Mucha’s 20 epic paintings, Slovanská Epopej (“Slavic Epic”). We’ll explore this one in another journal post, “Sound painting.”

Spectrum

More recently, the LIGHTFORMS series continues, with three multimedia videos (viewable on YouTube) combining new computer music with my more experimental and sometimes abstract photo images.

Sonic exploration of cosmic harmony in a quiet, almost timeless star-gazing mood . . .

Timbres emerge, echo, and fade in a floating, slow-moving distant landscape of color . . .

Musical impressions of dusk, with a Haiku-like text quoting one mellifluous phrase from Robert Frost’s “Waiting Afield at Dusk” . . .

______________