Jorinde Voigt merges visual art and music in a new project and exhibition titled “Song of the Earth”. She has created a new series of drawings that will be read as scores and performed by musical ensembles. A musical score, with its system of bar lines, notes, and performance instructions, bears the direct marks of the composer, with the linear notation of tempo, time, dynamics and instrumentation translated into sound by the musician.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE “Song of the Earth”, Jorinde Voigt, through 25 March 2017, at David Nolan Gallery, New York davidnolangallery.com

Avant-garde composers such as John Cage, György Ligeti or Iannis Xenakis have been experimenting with traditional notation since the 1940s, opening up musical scores in the direction of expressive and free picture compositions.

In her show “Song of the Earth” at David Nolan Gallery New York, Voigt similarly enters into direct partnership with musicians – her artworks become a musical transcript for performers to freely interpret, opening the performance up to chance, improvisation and creative rhythmic structures, and breaking away from traditional harmony and complex musical structures.

Voigt, who is trained as a visual artist as well as a cellist, says: “Similarly, in principle to the notation of a composition in music, visual and acoustic elements are rhythmically arranged, in addition geographically located by way of marking down meridians and latitudes, and set in relation to duration and speed.” Her work addresses specific topics, whether Niklas Luhmann’s treatise “Liebe als Passion” (Love as Passion) or the 32 piano sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven, which she cuts up into a time and a geographical line and whose affective notations she meticulously records.

 

 

The drawings created for ‘Song of the Earth’, inspired by Gustav Mahler’s symphony of the same name, denote the earth’s rotational direction, number of rotations per day and orders time into the units ‘day before yesterday’, ‘yesterday’, ‘today’, ‘tomorrow’ and ‘day after tomorrow’. Additionally, each work notes direction and position relative to the centre of the earth and closes with a ‘now’ line, which once more concentrates the origination process in the manner of time and memory.

Art historian Fiona McGovern writes about Voigt’s new series: “What does it mean to be on earth? Jorinde Voigt’s new cycle of works Song of the Earth, in allusion to Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, devotes itself to this question in an all-encompassing way. [The works] represent an abstracted form of lived experience and theory and constitutes the basis for the ensuing musical interpretation. For Voigt, both drawings and musical transformation are systems of conceptualization that have major parallels due to their abstraction as well as their formal construction. Both may be comprehended as processes that translate reality.”

Images // WV 2016-165 Divine Territory, Edition 4 of 5, Jorinde Voigt, 2016, courtesy the artist // WV 2016-167 The Farewell, Edition 1 of 3, Jorinde Voigt, 2016, courtesy the artist.

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