on 7/3/02 5:15 PM, Bryan Finoki at finoki@lucasarts.com scrawled:
quoted 11 lines The question is as simple or as difficult as you want to make it?
> The question is as simple or as difficult as you want to make it?
>
> How do you relate Music and Architecture?
>
> This is an area of serious interest and I have been doing a lot of writing
> and now it is time to get you people's thoughts on this subject. I am
> purposefully leaving it very open for interpretation because I think these 2
> subjects can best be related interpretively for sake of ocnversation via
> internet, nor am I looking for anything specifically from you, but rather
> exploring the notion of people's first reactions to this relationship.
>
How do you relate theatre and film? or text and film? You're just as likely
to answer either of these questions as the one you posed. All the
disciplines inform each other and I think this particular relationship seems
to gets lots of attention since in their finer moments of both architecture
and music are quite glamorous.
Couple of thoughts..
-While both are immersive and experienced over time, I've never heard of
badly designed music collapsing mid performance and laying waste to it's
audience.. I suppose enough merzbow could inspire a mild psychosis though.
-Buildings and songs are both comprised of countless "unit structures"
(salutations to Cecil Taylor) - moments, accents, details.. all repeated and
articulated in a common language and hopefully all combing cohesively to
equal more than the sum of their parts. While every aspect and internal
system of any building or piece of music can be scrutinised and quantified
in 10,000 different ways, despite this you'll never be able to capture the
phenomenal experience of moving through a space, or the emotional reaction
of hearing a piece of music for the first time. It's like the difference
between the rhythm and in-tone-ation of a poet vs. the meaning of the words
they use.
-both are about animating systems and making them dance together. Rhythm +
Harmony + Melody is to music as Materials + Structure + Circulation +
Program is to architecture
Unless you have a serious knack for synaesthesia I don't think you're going
to find to many cross connections between any given building and any given
piece of music. If you want to do some further digging, take a peek at the
following...
While the fact that Daniel Libeskind wrote his notes for his entry to the
Jewish Museum competition on sheet music paper gets mentioned lots. Not so
often mentioned is the fact that he was an accordion virtuoso as a youth.
He's done a fair amount of writing on the linkages between the two
disciplines. Libeskind also inspired a generation of designers to explore
this intersection while he headed up Cranbrook's M. arch program a while
back. You may want to do some searching for Libeskinds "The Space of
Encounter" as there are some juicy passages in it. Anybody in Finland
should check out William Taylor's 'instrumental associations' project which,
I believe, is part of the permanent collection at their national
architecture archive. Stephen Holl has some built work that is derived from
musical form, I don't know the specifics though because this is second-hand
knowledge. There is also a decent edition of the princeton architectural
press's pamphlet architecture series floating around there entitled
"architecture as a translation of music" worth tracking down. While not
architectural, Pamela Lee's essay comparing the themes of repetition and
phasing in the music of Steve Reich and Sol Lewitt's Incomplete Open Cubes
project is some of the most interesting analysis of musical composition and
visual form I've read. Last but not least, when all else fails... read John
Cage's writing!
Also, take a look at
http://www.caipirinha.com/index1.html for the synopsis
of their architecura project which is to commission musical reactions to
specific works of architecture.
Oh yeah.. one more thing. When Warp had that 'questions for autechre' a
while back on their site I asked them "If confield was a building, what
building would it be?" The smartasses said it would be my house. :P
~g
--
Greg Smith
http://www.laiad.com
"There is no such thing as a perfectly accurate clock. The nearest you can
get is one that has stopped. Although you never know when, it is absolutely
accurate twice a day." - JG Ballard/Chronopolis
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