MUSIC ON CANVAS

With the Album "Portraits" I initiated a research about the links between Visual Arts and Music through Bass Trombone improvisation and sound design.

The perspective of finding an idiomatic link between both appeared while starting composing "Portraits" and I found an endless source of musical inspiration through the spectrum of visual artists and Contemporary Art.

It appeared to me very interesting to try to create a musical imaginative painting representing the work of a visual artist or the visual artist itself.

During Live performances, the audience experiments a deep immersive sound and have the possibility to hear about each artist's work as in a History of Art course as I introduce each piece before performing you can have a look here for my last performance in Italy at Museo San Rocco in Trapani, Sicily.

Therefore, the connection between Visual Art and Music is total for an unique fusion of styles and genres imagined by my own vision of these Arts.

Here are some examples of this work:

Portrait of painter Andy Warhol

It is my very last composition for this series of Portraits of great Visual artists. For those of you who remember "See you, See You" you will hear a connection between those two compositions as I used the same interview of Andy Warhol...I actually started this sound portrait when the interview stopped in "See you, See you".

I worked on the figure of repetition and slight changes on each of those to apply the modus operandi Warhol used during his career and used a sequence 4 chords in a very "Pop" aesthetic to make it very accessible to the listener. 3 layers of piano (whole takes and no edits) are the frame for the improvisation on the theme of 11 notes that I keep repeating and playing small variations of it.

While playing the bass trombone I try to mix a certain feeling of fragility, resilience, melancholy and force to embody the vision I have of Andy and his work.

As a matter of fact Andy Warhol used to live almost ten blocks away from where this performance was held and this song was the last song of my set, so it has definitely something special emanating from it !

Recorded Live on May 28th 2024 at Church of the Advent Hope.

Part of @carnegiehillconcerts

Live Recording by @mixedxjoaquin

Live Video Edit by @rodrigoaranjuelo Mix by Alix Tucou (Headphones on!) . . .

Portrait of painter Jannis Kounellis

In this composition portraiting Jannis Kounellis I used the concepts dear to the Art movement called "Arte Povera". Arte povera means literally 'poor art' but the word poor here refers to the movement's signature exploration of a wide range of materials beyond the traditional ones of oil paint on canvas, bronze, or carved marble.

While using a soundscape made of sound samples inspired by his work (horse sounds, stone, wood, flame) and using instruments like celesta, piano, and guitar, I chose to use only a simple C minor pentatonic scale as a tool to improvise, as if this scale could (sometimes) be considered as a "poor" scale in Western classical Music. With altering from a sequence of four notes (F Bb C Eb) and increasing tension cadenzas sequences I intended to embody the power of Arte Povera, the more you look at it the more you perceive its simple yet powerful message residing in the rawness of the material.

Recorded Live on May 28th 2024 at Church of the Advent Hope.

Part of @carnegiehillconcerts

Live Recording by @mixedxjoaquin

Live Video Edit by @rodrigoaranjuelo Mix by Alix Tucou (Headphones on!) . . .

Portrait of painter Hilma Af Klint

Hilma af Klint was a Swedish painter who was fascinated by spiritism....she used to hold spiritism sessions as it was en vogue at the end of the nineteenth century and used those sessions as a moment of "automatic painting"....she painted what she "saw" and what is considered now as the first work of Abstract painting....decades before the first works of Abstract painting, she had been a true precursor and went forgotten from Art history books, strangely...

At the time she decided to hide her work from the public and her paintings were re-discovered at the end of the 1960's (!!). With the music, I tried to translate the frontier between reality and spiritism with a deep natural, and telluric force represented by a Moog bass drone.

The trombone notes navigate between sounds of the baltic sea, winds, and sperm whale clicks and I play with the half valve of the trombone as an extended technique with a C note and mode of the song that is used to embody force in the Greek philosophy.

Recorded Live on May 28th 2024 at Church of the Advent Hope.

Part of @carnegiehillconcerts

Live Recording by @mixedxjoaquin

Live Video Edit by @rodrigoaranjuelo Mix by Alix Tucou (Headphones on!) . . .

Portrait of painter Cy Twombly

Whith studying his life for composing his portrait I discovered that Cy Twombly did his military service as a cryptologist and this experience had a huge impact on his visual research and I found it fascinating. The concept of finding a meaning behind some seemingly nonsensical signs inspired me to approach the musical elements this way. Twombly has been often criticized for the extremely simple graphics and some of the critics heard were that "a child could do it". I decided then to approach my playing of the music instruments as a child without any training as if I was following intuitively each line and mark of one of his paintings while "trying" to forget my 38 years of playing music (!!!)...that was not an easy task but extremely fun...

I channeled my memory of the first sound I produced when I tried the trombone for the first time when I was 8 years old. Then in the second part of the song, I decided to translate this "driven chaos" characteristic of his work with the use of an Arpeggiator of a real Moog Synthesizer that I manipulated in real-time in an old analog fashion way and with another layer of Moog bass to give again a telluric force to the composition. I always have been fascinated by his work and by the balance of chaos (and sometimes Violence) and pure poetry to my eyes. I chose then to play and record for the first time in 20 years a tenor trombone added to another voice of bass trombone, (all those in the high register) and a falsetto singing voice to oppose the telluric and electronic forces of the Moogs to emphasize the balance between chaos and poetry...in an aesthetic between Islandic Post Rock band Sigur Rós and Tunisian Musician Dhafer Youssef.

Recorded Live on May 28th 2024 at Church of the Advent Hope.

Part of @carnegiehillconcerts

Live Recording by @mixedxjoaquin

Live Video Edit by @rodrigoaranjuelo Mix by Alix Tucou (Headphones on!) . . .

Portrait of painter Paul Cézanne

Sound samples of Provence near the mountain Ste Victoire and lavender fields have been chosen as our frame...

The French Master spent most of his life near Aix en Provence practicing and perfecting his craft. For those of you familiar with this region in summer, you may know that thunderstorms come and go and you will hear this in the composition, I decided to craft a soundscape of a typical summer day in Provence and tried to translate its light into sound(!!!).

The little melody you will hear at the start and the end that I play with and practice during the piece is a Folkloric melody of the end of the 19th century originally from Provence called "Magali" that Cézanne may have known for sure and I found it very interesting to use it as a time traveler. The more I studied Cézanne the more it appeared to me that he had an intuition of how painting would finally evolve into cubism and contemporary Art. He expressed classicism while looking in the direction of the future...

Between the weight of his brush strokes (embodied by the chords of the Rhodes electric piano) and the bass trombone phrases alternating between lightness and weight (referencing J.S. Bach as an old master), I tried to embody his simplicity of subjects and the deep meaning of his work.

Recorded Live on May 28th 2024 at Church of the Advent Hope.

Part of @carnegiehillconcerts

Live Recording by @mixedxjoaquin

Live Video Edit by @rodrigoaranjuelo Mix by Alix Tucou (Headphones on!) . . .

Portrait of Marina Abramović

In this composition I crafted the music around the performance art training exercise of Marina Abramović called "Counting the Rice".

In this exercise one has to separate the rice from the lentils from a mix of those two. It seems extremely simplist but if you try to do it at home (which I did ...) it will put your nerves and patience on the edge. It is a mental exercise to train to resilience and focus. I sampled myself doing this exercise (sounds of rice and lentils grain on a table) and you can hear myself repeating "Don't give up" as a Mantra.

As a soundscape I used also a binaural recording of the MoMA of NY where Abramović performed numerous times.

Finally I decide to use very cold sounding synthetizer and electronic textures to embody the coldness of Abramovic work and with the bass trombone I used as main theme two notes C and B, as major seventh interval to embody a grain of rice and lentil and dissonance of the music in parallel of the difficulty of the exercise.

Recorded Live on May 28th 2024 at Church of the Advent Hope.

Part of @carnegiehillconcerts

Live Recording by @mixedxjoaquin

Live Video Edit by @rodrigoaranjuelo Mix by Alix Tucou (Headphones on!) . . .

Portrait of René Magritte

Surreal Music could summarize my research here. My main inspiration for this piece is his painting "The Empire of Light"....

You can see it below you may be amazed by the in between dusk and dawn light that emanates from the painting. The night frogs singing at the start and the broken chords of Rhodes descending in stereo panoramic hypnotize us as a daydreaming walk through a sleepy state of consciousness.

The middle part is a reference to Dadaism as a child of surrealism with a speech of Allen Ginsberg and I decided to embody Dadaism with a vibe of the end of the 60's British progressive Rock hommage to Gentle Giant.

Every bass trombone phrase is systemically broken down in dissonant intervals with a soulful weight for each note in order to translate the strangeness and expressivity of Magritte.

Recorded Live on May 28th 2024 at Church of the Advent Hope.

Part of @carnegiehillconcerts

Live Recording by @mixedxjoaquin

Live Video Edit by @rodrigoaranjuelo Mix by Alix Tucou (Headphones on!) . . .

Portrait of Niki de Saint Phalle

In this composition, I worked on the healing journey of de Saint Phalle throughout her career. The epic and almost space opera introduction embodies the illusion of fame of the Fashion world, and the trauma of sexual harassment and sexism that De Saint Phalle had to bear with during her career.

Sound samples of gunshots, paint splashed on walls and live drums with heavy-hitting fills embody the violence of her inner world.

Musically if you hear references to Stravinsky's Firebird it is not a hallucination...I did it on purpose to use the myth of the phoenix dear to de St Phalle, while the bass trombone plays nervously in the low register as a being locked deep down underground in a maze of trauma and pain, searching to express itself.

The symbol of going from Darkness to Light and overcoming trauma, (in a way rebirth) is emphasized at the end of the song with a surprisingly calm sequence with long and pianissimo bass trombone notes as a calming lullaby with sounds of outdoor garden, birds, wind, fountains that refer to the Tarot Garden which was maybe the most important piece of De Saint Phalle achieved in 1998. In her own words:

" The garden was made with difficulties, wild enthusiasm, obsession, and most of all faith. Nothing could have stopped me."

Recorded Live on May 28th 2024 at Church of the Advent Hope.

Part of @carnegiehillconcerts

Live Recording by @mixedxjoaquin

Live Video Edit by @rodrigoaranjuelo Mix by Alix Tucou (Headphones on!) . . .

Portrait of Yves Klein

What you will hear at the start of the track is a rendition of "Monotone Silence Symphony" written by Yves Klein. Originally it consisted in a 20 mn D major chord play by a small orchestra followed by a 20mn silence that was aimed to appreciate the resonance of the chord. Klein was fascinated all his short life and career by the study of the infinity of the cosmos and the notion of the Void.

In the first part of my shorter version, I decided to reduce and re-imagine the piece with a D chord made of a dozen layers of Trombones, Moog Synthesizers and Mellotrons with an enormous reverb effect to give a sense of gigantism.

After the chord stops abruptly we can hear the resonance of the chord and a soundscapes made of paint brushes. Added to those concrete sounds I decided to use only 1 note (D) as a MonoChrome (MonoTone in that context) and played with range, dynamics, and natural harmonics of the bass trombone but also saturated electric guitars and as a telluric element of the piece I used a sub-bass that goes up and down as a breath of the universe. As the lacquer of the piece, I crafted a Shepard Tone that is played during most of the piece. That creates the auditory illusion of a tone that seems to continually ascend or descend in pitch, yet ultimately gets no higher or lower to underline the notion of Infinity. Finally, the binaural soundscape of Nice (where the artist was from) finishes the song as a sweet awakening and makes us come back to our present time after a journey through infinity.

Recorded Live on May 28th 2024 at Church of the Advent Hope.

Part of @carnegiehillconcerts

Live Recording by @mixedxjoaquin

Live Video Edit by @rodrigoaranjuelo Mix by Alix Tucou (Headphones on!) . . .