GG: Mapping the heart of a fugue...

["Joseph Podlesnik" <veronese@jerseycape.com>]

It's tempting to try to draw parallels between the character of a visual
artist's work with that of a musician's. Ultimately, the practice can only
be futile -- like trying to systematically correlate specific colors with
certain musical notes. But one might argue that GG's work is strikingly
similar in a largely conceptual way to the work of the French avant guarde
artist Marcel Duchamp. (Duchamp once described his work as being
"diagrammatic". In a similar way, GG himself described his approach as
having an analytic, clinical, X-ray-like view of the music.)

I'm curious, can anyone else think of other visual artists whose work bears
similarities to GG's musical work?   (Who is this "visual artist", anyway?
He's
on the wrong mailing list. Get him off!)

Anyhow, I've seen the Norman McLaren animation used to supplement
(illustrate?) one of GG's recordings of a Bach WTC fugue (No. 14 F-sharp
Minor?). While I watched, I remember being intrigued, but at the same time
I was chuckling to myself, thinking how I really didn't see the music this
way. In addition, I saw some paintings on the web which, as the artist
claimed, were inspired by GG's music. (Has anyone else seen these? I can't
remember now for the life of me where I saw them.) But, again, I remember
thinking how *unlike* the paintings were to what I feel to be the character
of GG's work.     Graphic representations of music -- an intriguing idea!

--Joseph