I’ve been watching the wind playing in the lush summertime leaves and grasses and rippling the surface of the river. Visible music. How to capture the transient and the visible manifestation of the invisible in my artwork?

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summer meadow

river ripples

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Here is my latest experiment with video and music. In Invisible Wind I have extracted and spliced video recordings of the wind on the river surface and in the treetops and meadow into a short film. I had the music of Steve Reich in mind when I recorded these images and used a recording of Vermont Counterpoint for the soundtrack. This piece is composed for alto flute, flute and piccolo – all ‘wind’ instruments.

At first I was going to compose it from big blocks of video, but the more deeply I listened to the music, the more I heard individual melodic figures, harmonies and rhythms emerging from the layers of music. So I picked out and repeated visual patterns from the moving images. I really enjoyed making this piece and synergized parts of my brain that have probably never gotten together before.

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Steve Reich is an Amercan composer and pioneer of minimalism. Reich is known for composing works that focus on the same melodic phrase and repeating it over and over with varying dynamics and superficial melodic activity. Reich’s objective is to force listeners to appreciate the process of change rather than the actuality of it.

“Phasing” is one of Reich’s most used and most well known techniques. In this process, two or more audiotape loops are set into motion at two slightly different speeds, so that the tapes begin in unison and slowly shift “out of phase,” creating a new set of harmonies and rhythms. In addition to the initial process of phasing, Reich also introduces the notion of “found” or “resulting” patterns (new melodic figures created from the overlapping voices of the original “theme”).

“Vermont Counterpoint,” for flute, “New York Counterpoint,” for clarinet, and “Electric Counterpoint” for electric guitar, build upon the original processes of the early phasing music. The complexity, however, is far deeper than the early phasing pieces: In Vermont Counterpoint, for example, a total of 10 layers are prerecorded, with the final 11th flute layer played live.

Composer’s Notes: Vermont Counterpoint (1982) was commissioned by flutist Ransom Wilson and is dedicated to Betty Freeman, the American philanthopist. It is scored for three alto flutes, three flutes, three piccolos and one solo part all pre-recorded on tape, plus a live solo part. The live soloist plays alto flute, flute and piccolo and participates in the ongoing counterpoint as well as more extended melodies. The piece could be performed by eleven flutists but is intend primarily as a solo with tape. The duration is approximately eight minutes. In that comparatively short time four sections in four different keys, with the third in a slower tempo, are presented. The compositional techniques used are primarily building up canons between short repeating melodic patterns by substituting notes for rests and then playing melodies that result from their combination. These resulting melodies or melodic patterns then become the basis for the following section as the other surrounding parts in the contrapuntal web fade out. Though the techniques used include several that I discovered as early as 1967 the relatively fast rate of change (there are rarely more than three repeats of any bar), metric modulation into and out of a slower tempo, and relatively rapid changes of key may well create a more concentrated and concise impression.