Posts Tagged ‘John Cage’
“Animation is not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn”*…
From Open Culture, an appreciation of an animator who, though never a commercial success in his own time, became an inspriation…
At a time when much of animation was consumed with little anthropomorphized animals sporting white gloves, Oskar Fischinger went in a completely different direction. His work is all about dancing geometric shapes and abstract forms spinning around a flat featureless background. Think of a Mondrian or Malevich painting that moves, often in time to the music. Fischinger’s movies have a mesmerizing elegance to them. Check out his 1938 short An Optical Poem above. Circles pop, sway and dart across the screen, all in time to Franz Liszt’s 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody.
This is, of course, well before the days of digital. While it might be relatively simple to manipulate a shape in a computer, Fischinger’s technique was decidedly more low tech. Using bits of paper and fishing line, he individually photographed each frame, somehow doing it all in sync with Liszt’s composition. Think of the hours of mind-numbing work that must have entailed.
Born in 1900 near Frankfurt, Fischinger trained as a musician and an architect before discovering film. In the 1930s, he moved to Berlin and started producing more and more abstract animations that ran before feature films. They proved to be popular too, at least until the National Socialists came to power. The Nazis were some of the most fanatical art critics of the 20th Century, and they hated anything non-representational. The likes of Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka and Wassily Kandinsky among others were written off as “degenerate.” (By stark contrast, the CIA reportedly loved Abstract Expressionism, but that’s a different story.) Fischinger fled Germany in 1936 for the sun and glamour of Hollywood.
The problem was that Hollywood was really not ready for Fischinger. Producers saw the obvious talent in his work, and they feared that it was too ahead of its time for broad audiences. “[Fischinger] was going in a completely different direction than any other animator at the time,” said famed graphic designer Chip Kidd in an interview with NPR. “He was really exploring abstract patterns, but with a purpose to them — pioneering what technically is the music video.”
Fischinger’s most widely seen American work was the section in Walt Disney’s Fantasia set to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor [see it here]. Disney turned his geometric forms into mountain peaks and violin bows. Fischinger was apoplectic. “The film is not really my work,” Fischinger later reflected. “Rather, it is the most inartistic product of a factory. …One thing I definitely found out: that no true work of art can be made with that procedure used in the Disney studio.” Fischinger didn’t work with Disney again and instead retreated into the art world.
There he found admirers who were receptive to his vision. John Cage, for one, considered the German animator’s experiments to be a major influence on his own work. Cage recalled his first meeting with Fischinger in an interview with Daniel Charles in 1968.
One day I was introduced to Oscar Fischinger who made abstract films quite precisely articulated on pieces of traditional music. When I was introduced to him, he began to talk with me about the spirit, which is inside each of the objects of this world. So, he told me, all we need to do to liberate that spirit is to brush past the object, and to draw forth its sound. That’s the idea which led me to percussion…
Bonus: an excerpt from Fischinger’s cigarette ad from 1934:
An animator ahead of his time: “Optical Poems by Oskar Fischinger: Discover the Avant-Garde Animator Despised by Hitler & Dissed by Disney,” from @openculture.bsky.social.
You can find excerpts of other Fischinger films on Vimeo.
###
As we appreciate art, we might recall that it was on this date in 1940 (16 days after its single-theater premiere) that Walt Disney’s Pinocchio was released. Although it received critical acclaim and became the first animated feature to win a competitive Academy Award– winning two (for Best Music, Original Score and for Best Music, Original Song for “When You Wish Upon a Star”)– it was initially a commercial failure (mainly due to World War II closing off the European and Asian markets). It eventually made a profit after its 1945 rerelease, and is now considered one of the greatest animated films ever made.
Pinocchio was also a major step forward in animation technique, especially in effects animation, an effort led by Joshua Meador.. (In contrast to the character animators who concentrate on the acting of the characters, effects animators create everything that moves other than the characters—vehicles, machinery, and natural effects such as rain, lightning, snow, smoke, shadows and water.)
… the water effects are the true standout in Pinocchio, representing an artistic achievement that would still be difficult to replicate today. To a certain extent, it was nothing more complicated than good old fashioned hard work: Effects animator Sandy Strother [see here] worked on nothing but water effects for a full year. But in addition to working hard, the animators were working smart: In the open-water scenes, for example, the water toward the back of the frame is less detailed and more impressionistic, allowing the artists to focus on making the foreground as rich in detail as possible.
But as detailed as that water is, it isn’t attempting photorealism; as with the character design, the focus is on how the water should function within the story and the emotional response it should provoke, not replicating the real world exactly. Compare the down-to-the-droplet detail of Pinocchio’s open-water scenes to those of Fleischer Studios’ first entry in the feature-animation game, Gulliver’s Travels. Released only a few months before Pinocchio, Gulliver’s Travels used rotoscoping, which had been developed at Fleischer. While the film’s water looks realistic and imposing, it has a flat, almost geometric look that undermines its visual punch. Whereas the way the water works as Monstro chases Geppetto and Pinocchio’s raft is terrifying and overwhelming, and not especially realistic. This is the power of animation, to mold and morph reality to function as something familiar, yet fantastical…
– source
Fischinger, who was primarily engaged down the hall on his ill-fated contribution to Fantasia (released late that same year), contributed to the effects animation of the Blue Fairy’s wand.
“Never miss a good chance to shut up”*…
Death metal band Dead Territory performing 4’33”, a 1952 composition by John Cage.
Written for any instrument or combination of instruments, the score instructs the performer(s) not to play their instrument(s) during the entire duration of the piece throughout the three movements. Though often referred to as as “four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence,” the purpose of the piece is to focus the audience’s ears on the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed.
[TotH to The Whippet]
Black Sabbath, arguably the first heavy metal band, is turning 50 this year…
Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi credits a welding accident with the creation of the band’s signature sound. A machine at the factory where he worked as a teenager chopped off the tops of two of his fingers, which could have ended his guitar-playing days. But he fashioned thimbles with plastic and leather and put lighter-gauge strings on his guitar, down-tuned so they were looser and easier to play. The low, sludgy riffs he went on to write set the tone for metal music to this day…
The history of headbanging: “Heavy Metal.”
* Will Rogers
###
As we savor the sounds of silence, we might recall that it was on this date in 1967, in Portland, that The Who began their first U.S. tour… as the opening act for Herman’s Hermits. The Who played “Pictures of Lily” (a power-pop tune about masturbation) and their guitar-smashing finale, “My Generation” to warm the crowd for Peter Noone and his crew singing “There’s a Kind of Hush (All Over the World)” and “I’m Henry VIII, I Am.”
“For fast acting relief, try slowing down”*…
Jem Finer’s initial calculations for his Longplayer project
From the newsletter of the Long Now Foundation…
Time is evoked in music in countless ways. In the first article in this series, we explored some of the long-term themes in Brian Eno’s work and traced that influence to his involvement with the 10,000-Year Clock. Through generative music — a compositional technique that uses a small set of rules to generate many unique outcomes — Eno created expansive compositions theoretically capable of lasting over extremely long periods of time. This is precisely the logic behind the 10,000-Year Clock’s Chime Generator.
Questions arise, however, when the extreme potential duration of combinatorially-generated music is taken as a challenge. How does one actually perform a piece that is 1,000 years long? Let’s explore two attempts to answer this question…
John Cage, Jem Finer, and playing music as slowly and for as long as possible: “This is How You Perform a Piece of Music 1,000 Years Long.”
* Lily Tomlin
###
As we take the long view, we might recall that it was on this date in 1941, at Decca Studios, that Charlie Parker made his first commercial recording. A member of the Jay McShann Group, he played on “Hootie Blues” and “Swingmatism.” He went on, of course, to become known for his virtuosity on the sax and for his gift as a composer; he earned the nickname “Bird” as he became a father of bebop.
“Ah this indeed is music–this suits me”*…
When Bebe and Louis Barron got married in 1947 they received a wedding gift from the future. Louis’s cousin was an executive at 3M and his present was one of the first tape recorders in the United States, plus a steady supply of reels of newly created magnetic tape. Bohemians, musicians, and tinkerers, the Barrons took their gear with them to Manhattan, where they set up a legendary electronic studio for the avant-garde at 9 West 8th Street…
Pressing [Anaïs] Nin readings to red vinyl and collecting “small sounds” for John Cage didn’t really pay the bills, so they jumped at the chance to make sounds for Hollywood… Rather than compose, though, they built…
Norbert Wiener was fixated on the possibility that delegation of weapons control to machines running game theory models would likewise wipe out the human race. But in their studio, Bebe and Louis were inventing a different and more interesting kind of future, a greenhouse of messy, perverse electronics that coexist with us, a population of cybernetic familiars and kinds of minds all singing together…
From the always-fascinating newsletter Passing Current, “The Overload.”
* Walt Whitman
###
As we tweak the gain, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972 that the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed by the Senate and then sent to the states for ratification. The ERA, as it became known, prohibited discrimination on the basis of gender, stating, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” and that “the Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” Although 22 of the required 38 states quickly ratified the Amendment, opposition arose, ostensibly over concerns that women would be subject to the draft and combat duty, along with other legal concerns. Despite an extension of the deadline to June 1982, the ERA eventually failed (by 3 states) to achieve ratification.
“In eternity there is no time, only an instant long enough for a joke”*…
Finnish artists Juha van Ingen and Janne Särkelä have developed a monumental GIF called AS Long As Possible, which loops once every 1,000 years. The 12 gigabyte animated image is made of 48,140,288 numbered frames, that change about every 10 minutes [the first and last frames are above]. van Ingen and Särkelä explain:
In the early days of World Wide Web GIF was the most popular tool for artists working on on-line projects. But in mid 90’s the technically more versatile Flash took over as the number one creative tool for presenting art works on-line. Recently with the huge success of photo-sharing services such as Instagram, Flickr and Tumblr GIF has had its second coming and has regained its popularity also as an artistic medium.
The name of ASLAP is homage to John Cage composition “ORGAN2/ASLSP” (1987) which is played with Halberstad organs for the next 625 years. The abbreviation of Cages composition included and instruction to the performer of the piece: As SLow aS Possible. However, if the piece was to be played as slow as possible the first note should be played for ever.
As humans capability to comprehend eternity is limited, it is easier understand the dimensions of a composition lasting hundreds of years than something playing for ever…
They plan to start the loop in 2017, when GIF turns 30 years old (and Finland celebrates its Centennial of independence). “If nurturing a GIF loop even for 100 — let alone 3,000 years — seems an unbelievable task, how much remains of our present digital culture after that time?”, van Ingen said. The artists plan to store a mother file somewhere and create many iterations of the loop in various locations — and if one fails, it may be easily synchronized with, and replaced by, another.
[Via]
* Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
###
As we take it slowly, we might send itty-bitty birthday greetings to Niels Henrik David Bohr; he was born on this date in 1885. A Danish physicist and philosopher, Bohr was the first to apply quantum theory,to the problem of atomic and molecular structure, creating the Bohr model of the atom, in which he proposed that energy levels of electrons are discrete, and that the electrons revolve in stable orbits around the atomic nucleus but can jump from one energy level (or orbit) to another– a model the underlying principles of which remain valid. And he developed the principle of complementarity: that items could be separately analyzed in terms of contradictory properties, e.g., particles behaving as a wave or a stream. His foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory,won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922.
You must be logged in to post a comment.