Kandinsky No.1

2008
Biennale Zagreb, Croatia

My interest in Kandinsky’s paintings extends back to early childhood when I can remember thumbing through a picture book where two kids have gone to an art museum. One of my favourite things to do is to go through the book Kandinsky: A Colourful Life, page by page and slowly make my way into abstraction with the artist.

For quite some time now I have been searching and experimenting with new formal structures, and one thing that I have always come back to is using a visual medium to organise and structure a piece. One such example is this work Kandinsky No. 1.  To write this piece I simply looked at the painting (Study No. 1 for a Panel for Edwin R. Campbell, 1914), and took notes on staff paper as to how I would represent certain elements in the music. I wrote almost exclusively words, and almost no musical notes during my first sketches.

The form of the piece comes not from anything pre-designed, or from any traditional structure that makes ‘musical sense.’ I simply let my eyes follow the natural direction of the painting and translated it into music. Some of the inspiration to work in this way comes from Kandinsky’s similar processes in painting.

︎KandinskyNo.1.pdf

Piano 
Violin
Cello

7:00

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