Notes on my painting for “Lights, Camera and a Call to Action” documentary film
I was commissioned to paint the music composed by Jason Cullimore to score the documentary “Lights, Camera and a Call to Action”. Of the three samples sent to me I chose to paint “Call to Action: Artist Studio”. The score is much more filmic than what I am used to, and I believe that digital soundscapes were incorporated into the composition.
I enjoyed working through this piece because it required a lot of thought. Normally when I do notations I feel as though I can manage all of the piece at once, by mapping out the correlation between sounds I hear in seconds and corresponding inches on paper. This time however, that did not work with the dimensionality and space that I heard in the piece.
This prompted a bit of a breakthrough. Instead of thinking of measuring points along a linear or perpendicular (space-time) axis, I realized that I need to follow the line of the principal Instrument and see where it takes me. The music is in itself the line of measurement and movement. It creates form that ripples through space-time, and changes space-time for the duration of the sound.
A curve, representing the directionality of how the music moves, may present as a fraction of a second if you try to measure and match duration of the sound that produces that curve onto a piece of graph paper. A fraction of a second is virtually impossible to measure, but if the curve is shown as the movement of the sound, ie the curve, it will take up quite a lot of space… much larger than that fraction of a second would suggest.
This is how music creates volume and dimension, changing the axis between space-time in the continuum of sound.This is not a one to one ratio but a multitude of alterations as the music progresses. Layer on simultaneous alterations in tempo, instrumentation, inflection pitch and timbre and you will get changes in the energetic frequencies in the matrix of space-time. What is latent may emerge and be expressed. Perhaps this is one reason why music and harmony have such healing and restorative powers.
The other breakthrough again had to do with the nature of the music I was given. The soundscape is very different from listening to traditional stringed or percussion instruments in a classical sense. In an 18th-century composition by Mozart you would never hear what looks like a burnished metal surface, but in the 21st-century we live in a different world. So I am very happy to say that I had to figure out anew how to produce some of the sound textures I saw in this music, with whatever I had at my disposal. It’s been a fun adventure!
Painting by Marina Pinto Miller, April 29, 2024, based on music of Jason Cullimore
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