synaesthesia

pictures often sound for me. i hear the tone and contrast, the shape. sometimes i perform the score while teaching, playing pictures with gusto, with bravado. sometimes i don't.

last sunday the BPL Chamber Players wowed us at the Brooklyn Central Library - part of their terrific series of afternoon music sessions: wonderfully soothing, invigorating. along with selections from Rossini and Dvorak, they gave us a composition from Corigliano, a contemporary, titled Snapshot Circa 1909, in which he interprets a photograph of his father at eight years old.

in the snapshot there's a young boy standing in bright sun, a violin tucked into his chin. He's wearing a white shirt, black trousers narrowed at the ankles, his hair parted in the center, and next to him is a man, seated, in a black jacket and narrow necktie, with a large guitar in his lap.

Corigliano writes that he mused about the thoughts and expectations of his young father as he prepared to play with his uncle on that sunny day, and that he fantasized about the journey his father would take forward from that moment and through his robust musical career, and about how that career dovetailed into his own career and music. The picture (as reproduced on the BPL program brochure) is grainy and disintegrated, weak shades of gray; but the music (as played that afternoon) was brightly stippled and shot through with clarity and color, patterns, shape and texture climbing, seeking forward, reminiscent.

which led me to speculate on Coriglino's process, his fantasy, and about how he had been guided by those long dissipated streaks of sunlight and faded shadows, and by echos of invented hopes and expectations embodied by the boy with the violin, his father, in the picture.

which in turn led me to think about roland barthes' famous essay and the photograph of his mother, whom we read about but never see.

which then led me to think of my own mother, and her death in 1994, six months after the birth of my first son.

and as i reminisced on that time of loss and shallow breath, a further memory surfaced, something i'd forgotten until that moment: playing pictures as a musical instrument.

in 1994 i became immersed in a musical commission. Quintessence Chamber Ensemble, a quintet of wind players in Phoenix, had asked me to collaborate in the fall concert series; i would be a sixth performer, a pictorial accompanist. my contribution was to be a visual response to a John Steinmetz composition, which i would perform as a large-scale projection in sync with the music. during that late summer and through the fall of my mother's deterioration, i gathered and created more than 500 individual images, and then arranged their appearance and disappearance with a rudimentary switching computer that allowed me to fade and dissolve them on the fly.

my timing was atrocious. i could not feel myself within the stream of the music and the images fell discordantly out of sync with the sound. distracted by doctors, chemotherapy sessions, and feeding cycles, not to mention the regular demands of teaching, editorial deadlines, and my son's daycare, the new requirement of rehearsals proved too much for me. despite my wife's assurance that we could manage, somehow, i nearly gave up, overwhelmed, exhausted.

Peter Swan, accomplished jazz percussionist, band leader, teacher, great friend and long collaborator, himself overwhelmed with varied and scattered commitments, stepped in to assist me. with an impeccable sense of the aural center he found the visual thread that knit the piece together and then conducted my performance of the switching machine. backstage behind the wide projection screen, amidst the clicks and whirs of slides dropping and carousels advancing, beneath lights flashing on and off, slowly fading, then snapping on again, we dreamed a bright quilt of patterned tones in sync with the five players at the front of the stage.

last sunday with my son beside me, my wife and i dreamed through a man's memory of his father, inspired by a faded photograph, and i recalled an unquiet time of making photographs in response to music, and remembered my mother.

note: this photograph is by Robert Frank and is part of his book, The Americans, first published in the 1950s and recently reissued, magnificently, on its 50th anniversary, by Steidl and the National Gallery of Art. Encountering Frank's work as a boy was one of the key moments that moved me to become a photographer, and I know I'm not alone in that sentiment.

to learn more about synaesthesia, check out this post: Neurophilosophy: Can you Hear this Painting?