VII Con moto giusto

I constantly collect music with/for/to which I would love to work ("listening with my eyes"), and amongst those many pieces, two have often risen to the top of the list: György Ligeti's "Musica ricercata" ("VII - Con moto giusto") and Sergei Prokofiev's piano sonata nº 7 (its third movement, "Precipitato").

I wasn't sure which one to start with, but a few weeks ago, as I was listening to one of my favourite radio programmes, a music comparative listening show ("Table d'écoute" on Musiq3 http://www.rtbf.be/musiq3/emissions_table-d-ecoute?emissionId=2943&date=2013-02-03), one of the guests "used" the Prokofiev to explain aspects of the Ligeti!

That immediately prompted my starting with the Prokofiev (available here: http://vimeo.com/59657826) and then proceed with the Ligeti.

In both cases, I did not want to make it a "plumbing exercise" (way too many of those these days) but instead, to continue my exploration and discovery of "inherent animation," by way of "accidents," throwing sequences and gestures at the screen in ways somewhat related to Pollock's approach to painting (for the record, for years, I taught at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture http://www.nyss.org, my connection with "Abstract Expressionism" runs more than skin-deep).

Obviously, these sketches (which is what most of my pieces on Vimeo are) could be taken further, but given their nature ("sketches"), they have enabled me to discover (some of) what was available through their becoming visible, making the "next step" possible, necessary.

Too often, there's a very pernicious agenda in animation (and Visual Music), the implied obligation to turn out a finished and polished product, an agenda which to me belongs much more to the world of craft and merchandising than to that of fine art (an agenda that posits the finished product as an absolute obligation, while to me the process/journey is what matters most).

This remarkable interpretation of György Ligeti's music is by Herbert Schuch, recorded in concert at the Essen Philarmonie on December 12, 2011.