Abstraction No.1 for Violin and Piano

This short piece for violin and piano was written while I was living in Ithaca New York. The other pieces that I had written at this time have been lost but this one remains as the sole composition from that time in my life. It was also at this time that I was doing a great deal of painting and a lot of my musical pieces were composed with visual components. Unfortunately, those paintings have also been lost. My process to create this piece and the other pieces in the set is as follows. First I would cut out many pieces of cardboard, all approximately the size of an A5 piece of paper. Then I would choose a few colours of paint. From here I would paint a simple abstract image on one piece of cardboard, trying my best not to paint a distinct image or symbol or shape. After I finished painting this small piece I would leave it somewhere that I couldn’t see it, walk away, and do something else for a while. After about an hour or so I would come back to my pieces of cardboard and try to paint the same picture again from memory. I would repeat this process many times until I felt a substantial abstraction of my original image had taken place.  This process could take a few days to complete, but in the end I would have a series of paintings that shared some interesting characteristics but also had their own individual peculiarities. This form of experimentation took on many different variations. I experimented with different lengths of time between trying to repaint my image. I experimented with using many colours so as to make it more difficult to remember the order of their application on the cardboard. While I was doing this kind of creation in the visual realm I was also following a very similar procedure in the musical realm. It was through composing this way that I created Abstraction No. 1 for Violin and Piano. Originally, this was the first in a set of 5 pieces.

︎Abstraction1.pdf

Violin
Piano

4:40

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