The Visualization of Music


'Wolfgang Winkler Wolfgang Winkler

Music is an art form that is very closely connected to visualization. This applies first and foremost to the score itself. This is the written expression of how the composer wanted the piece’s content to be played and is the basis of any subsequent interpretation or reading of it. On the other hand, there is the musician, the orchestra and its conductor. Whether the concertgoer is aware of this or not, the visual impression that a concert makes is of decisive importance to the process of partaking of it. A concert of complex music broadcast on the radio—that is, without a visual image—is heard in a very different way than the same music played in a concert hall. Visuals and music, one might say, condition each other. The Ars Electronica Center and the Brucknerhaus have made these considerations the basic concept of their joint undertaking: music and visualization. The visualization of the opera Das Rheingold that was presented two years ago in a joint production by the Brucknerhaus and the FutureLab is a model of the various possibilities of visually staging a work, which are for the most part determined by the technology available to the respective production. At that time, Johannes Deutsch was the artist who translated the content of Das Rheingold into his own visual language that was, in turn, configured in real time by the FutureLab’s technology as well as by musical parameters like tempo and volume.

The production of Igor Strawinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps opera this year carries on this concept. Basically, it presents a new dimension of the visualization of music. With this idea as its point of departure, it also constitutes a possibility of enhancing the stage setting of any theater by adding this dimension. As a new production element at the 2006 Bruckner Festival, the realization of three-dimensionality will also transcend the confines of the concert hall. Since this concert will simultaneously resound in the Donaupark in the context of the classic Linzer Klangwolke, concertgoers in attendance alfresco in the riverside park adjacent to the Brucknerhaus will also have the opportunity to partake of the visual effects produced within the concert hall.

Translated from German by Mel Greenwald