Elaine has been writing about Stephen Malinowski’s animated scores for Beethoven and Haydn. I am following Elaine’s lead and posting this example because it makes me so happy. Enjoy. (How could anyone not?)
Stephen Malinowski’s animations
Haydn : Mozart : Beethoven
Friday, October 25, 2019
Haydn on the move
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comments: 6
Oooo, colors! Dancing colors! :)
I enjoy this tremendously! (Yes, present-tense because I'm listening and watching right now.)
I was at work when I first played the video so only took a few seconds to listen and watch. I've since played it several times since coming home. Happy-happy, joy-joy.
What pleases me most about this video is the slow realization I was watching sound! Not just hearing it, but watching the complexity of the music, all the layers dancing across the lines and spaces, each at its own speed and rhythm and...things I can't even put words to, but recognize it as a different kind of magic. Elaine, is this what you see when you play your instruments? The thrill must be unbelievable!
When I was a kid, I used to see color when I listened to music, just as I saw colors when I wrote numbers or did math. This video brought all that back, makes me feel the unbridled happiness, the silly giddiness of those times. (I remember asking my teacher if red and yellow equaled 7. She looked at me as if I had two noses or something equally odd. Yellow and blue are 9. Yellow must have had a value of 5.)
Whatever. Thanks for posting this, Michael. Made my day, it did.
Martha, you must be a synesthete. (Like Vladimir Nabokov, for example.)
Elaine is typing right now. :)
I don’t see colors when I play, but some people do. These are score animations, so they take the musical values on the staff (which is actually a kind of grid) and animate them with color. This helps people who have never learned to read a musical score, with all its clefs, to understand what is happening. As far as Haydn is concerned, he was such a tremendous genius that even when you know how the music “works” it is still creative beyond belief. I imagine you would like everything Haydn wrote, even without animations. When you see a string quartet in a concert, you can see the workings of music too, but the graphic animations bring the listener even closer to the experience of playing. They really take you inside the mind of the music and the composer. But you can now have an enhanced Haydn experience even without the animations now that you know a new “how” of listening.
In addition to Haydn and Beethoven, I've done some Mozart. Here are the links for all three composers:
Mozart https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtj_HurkS7ZyoXh-Rw8TXNUOAdi-fTkH9
Haydn https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtj_HurkS7ZyDSNY3AGMB1L_FLjKFDpXv
Beethoven http://www.musanim.com/BeethovenStringQuartets/
Thanks for the links, Stephen. I’ll add them all to the post. Your animations are a joy. (I’m Elaine’s husband, by the way.)
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