Transpositions Overview

Being a piano major in my early college years had a pervasive influence in how I viewed communication in many of the arts.  In a literature class, I discussed my theories in a term paper entitled, “Sounding Out Meaning in T. S. Eliot.”  My instructor didn’t quite get it, but T.S. Eliot and I were on the same wavelength.  I occasionally set poems to music, something that is common practice when composing music for singers.

Ten years later when I was taking a music theory class taught by a composer, my interest in methods of composition were reawakened.  One of my assignments was to visually plot the structure of music.  Another assignment was to use the method of Schoenberg to create atonal music.  I was thrilled because I was able to create atonal music that was melodious.  Using a poem by Robinson Jeffers, I incorporated my own technique of translating poetry which I believe allowed me to come up with something that truly expressed the feeling of the poem.

It was only a small jump, another ten years later, for me to later set up my own method to create stripe compositions, and a tiny step to have one line of compressed stripes set on top of another to create a canon (as in “Row, row your boat”) in visual patterns. In the Camarillo project, I used a poem by William Blake and had lines of patterns in dyed wood veneer in cabinetry reappearing like motifs in music.

In The Third Translation, my own poem was set to music and then finally translated to a stripe patterns executed in ribbons; and in the proposal for The Table with the Steel Skirt, I envisioned using a different poem of mine to create patterns in wood inlays around the waist of a skirt reminiscent of Marilyn’s as I wanted to entice the viewer to a pleasure that was not sensual, but rather intellectual.

                                                    The Table with the Steel Skirt

                                                     We’re so free now –
                                                     It’s the 20th century
                                                     Almost the 21st century.
                                                     Violence and change stalk the land
                                                     We take our pleasure where we can
                                                     And beauty is as real as our minds.
 

And as the rhythms of Paul Simon’s “Graceland ” were too tempting to ignore, I did a trial to see what sort of sculpture they might make.

Finally, in the Ojai project, ordinary speech patterns were composed in granite.