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Artist Statement -- A Response to Spring's 'Contemplation'
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Composer Glenn Spring and visual artist Anne Bullock have been intrigued with the similarities of composing processes
for music and visual art and have talked for years about collaborating "compositionally." Oksana Ezhokina, pianist, and Jennifer Caine, violinist, performed Spring's piece, Contemplation, during a March of Peace concert in Walla Walla.
Visual artists have long used music as a way to structure and express their work. Kandinsky and Mondrian, for example, worked with this relationship between the visual arts and music. Marcel Worms, a Dutch jazz pianist, commissioned Theo Lovendie, a Dutch composer, to create a work, Red, Yellow and Blue. In this piece Lovendie expressed his perspective on the abstracts of Mondrian using minimalism--just like Mondrian did in his paintings.
Spring's kind sharing of Contemplation for Icicle Creek: Cascades of Peace performed in March 2008, gave Bullock opportunity to respond visually.
Likewise, Spring was recently commissioned to create a piece to honor Georgia O'Keeffe and her work. As he prepared to respond musically to her visual pieces, he discovered this quote in a program note from the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, of which O'Keeffe was a supporter and attendee: "As a young art student, O'Keeffe recalled one of her teachers, Alon Bement, playing recordings and asking his class to draw what they heard. She wrote, later, how this gave her 'the idea that music could be translated into something for the eye.'" Spring's harpsichord work, Memoriam Georgia O'Keeffe: prelude, toccata & fugue-fantasia will be debuted by L. Palmer at the premiere in Santa Fe on July 28, 2008. It is featured on a just-released Soundboard CD, "Hommages" (which includes other harpsichord compositions by Spring).
As for Bullock's visual response to Spring's musical score, Contemplation, she said, "My process is relatively pragmatic from the outset as I set up to work on an art piece--planning, setting out materials, sketching, experimenting with just the right color palette, laying in a underpainting. The satisfaction, though, comes from the actual creating and spontaneity of working with materials. When I am in the 'flow' of the moment and detached from the world is when I do my best work, music helps me reach that place. I think many visual artists experience this. For me creating is a spiritual act; it is at these moments when I experience a keen sense of inner peace."
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