Milky Way / Nervous System
This is the final CD of a series of four collaborations that we began ten years ago. We established our first two projects on the interrelation and deep connection between music and the visual arts. By transforming a visual composition into a musical one, we experimented with how a visual art work translates into the language of music. (Bruegel Variations, 2008 N.U.D. Records, Mondrian Variations, 2012 Ektro Records)

We employed visual art techniques from both the Renaissance and 20th century modernism to define our two methods of creating musical structure. We observed the artistry of painters Pieter Bruegel (the elder) and Piet Mondrian. While the Renaissance dealt with compositional questions about perspective and the golden ratio, modernism centered around the abstraction of structure, colour and rhythm.

In Bruegel’s case we turned the human figures’ position into noteheads. After applying the noteheads on the music staff, we were able to determine the pitches and rhythm of the music.

Although we applied the Bruegelian notation technique to Mondrian’s paintings, we had to find a new method of identifying each colour with a pitch. Our solution was to pair the circle of colours with the circle of fifths, which are perfect structures in themselves, through which Mondrian’s paintings came alive in music.

Observing our themes’ evolution in our series, it is noticeable how and when interest turned from visual artists attempting to include music in their paintings, to composers creating music that also stand as visual works. Out of the leading figures of the 20-21st century, Béla Bartók and George Crumb were the two composers who inspired us in our last two projects through their musical structural aesthetics. The title of Bartók’s piano series, Mikrokozmosz [Microcosm], reveals in its title that, like the human nervous system, the pieces are made of music micro-organisms. Crumb’s Makrokosmos [Macrocosm] also encompasses the universe in its title and subtitle, Twelve Fantasy-Pieces after the Zodiac. Expanding the creative world of the above-mentioned composers, the closing parts of our four-piece series represent the micro- and macrocosm. Our music explores the duality of chaos and symmetry and unfolds the structure of the human nervous system and the Milky Way.

Milky Way

The idea that has led us to record Milky Way evolved from a purely elemental and emotional experience. The spectacular Milky Way links nations, history, cultures, families, friends, and lovers together. It connects humanity through past, presence, and future. We look at the same sky as our ancestors did and, in the future, so will our grandchildren. The Milky Way is the collective anthology of humanity. We wanted to hear how this anthology sounds.

This impression concluded in a thorough research of the topic. We studied structures, relations, space and time.

We committed to an impossible project. We attempted to capture a system in music that is constantly in motion. Besides, our planet gave us the option to look at the stars from only one angle, as did the satellites that take pictures of the deepness of the universe. Every new viewpoint shifted our perception of the ‘system’ and resulted in unlimited possibilities of translating the Milky Way into music. Our goal seemed impossible. For this reason, we narrowed our focus to work with the placement, distance, and rhythm of the stars that fell under the ray of a single line drawn with a pencil across the image of the Milky Way. The vast number of stars in this segment was enough to show how the entire universe might sound.

Out of the eight parts into which we split the Milky Way, the first part consisted of the pencil line and the stars that we used for notation. We followed our technique that we utilized in Bruegel Variations to determine the notes on the music sheet. The playtime of the resulting score is one hour. As the first part alone includes 180 lines, their total playtime would last seven and a half days. Thus, to play the music of all eight parts of the Milky Way would take 56 day without stopping. The sample that the listener hears on this CD is the first half of 1 out of 1350 lines.

As we associate the Milky Way with eternity, we selected to perform the score on the organ, which is able to emulate infinity in its nature.

Nervous System

The human nervous system evoked roots, paths, and relations in us, thus we chose to work with it based on an associative and visual experience. Unlike the Milky Way, this is a symmetrical system, and we were intrigued by how it would manifest in music. At the same time, we faced difficulties by turning the clearly symmetrical shape of the nervous system sidewise. In the new horizontal layout we lost the transparent quality of the subject, which makes it impossible to process the music holistically.

Even though the symmetry transformed into ‘chaos’, the notes still related to one another in a symmetrical fashion embedded in an all-inclusive disorder.

While we remained faithful to the notation technique used in Bruegel Variations, Nervous System shows similar features to Mondrian Variations in its sound aesthetic. Whereas we aimed to preserve the original tone of the acoustic instruments in the first and third parts of our music series, we achieved a more experimental sonority in the second and fourth parts through the preparation of the piano and the application of various sound filters.

We wrote the score of Nervous System for prepared piano and two hands. On the recording we kept the right hand’s line untouched. To imitate percussive instruments, we subjected the left hand’s line to distortion and transposition. The elements that hold the piano and percussive parts together are distortion, extension, fade-out, and interruption. These means create yet another layer of sonic effect in which notes and motives react to each other in alignment, anticipation, or decay.

In conclusion, Mondrian Variation and Nervous System carry in themselves the noise and pulse of society, built environment, industrialization, and machine work; the Bruegel Variations and Milky Way represent a purer and ethereal world.