Charlotte Hug
Son-Icons, visual music |
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1. Touching music I draw my inner visualisations of the sounds using both hands. Through the visual-corporeal track of the drawing process I touch the music. I often use several graphite pencils simultaneously, following the primal musical impulse – the musical gesture – and transcribe this through drawing. What emerge are polyphonic or sometimes even orchestral drawn structures. The Son-Icons serve again as visual stimuli for improvisations and compositions. |
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| The Son-Icons, drawn on semi-transparent paper, can be read rotated, mirrored, forwards or backwards, or even in retrograde and retrograde inversion. This is a clear historical reference to J. S. Bach. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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2. Playing with musical-visual ideas The musical result will, however, always be sustained and imbued by the inner rigour or the sensuous pull of the formal language of the Son-Icons. |
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3. Combined and Self-Contained The Son-Icons exist in and of themselves – a harmonious whole. Nevertheless, they cannot come into existence in this form without their interaction with music. The same goes for the music. The aim is not an unconditional joining of drawing and music, but the recognition of visual and acoustic ways of thinking and qualities, which accordingly generate other ideas and other worlds. Nevertheless, at certain moments they both enter into an intense symbiosis. |
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4. The open air settings or distinctive locations imbue the genesis of the music and the Son-Icons. Both are strongly influenced by their respective places of origin. Qualities such as those found underground, in wind regimes, rain, flooding, ice etc, influence the music as well as the Son-Icons. Visual traces of the places are also apparent in the drawings (for example signs of abrasion, water etc). These structures in turn shape the music. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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5. The intervals between each medium offer new spaces for thought and creativity - and hence great potential for renewal. The eye often perceives differently to the ear. Where the eye and the ear incline to different results and questions, then the switching of media is an especially strong catalyst for ideas. Equally, any slight incongruence in the two media may continue in unpredictable and often surprising and harmonious ways. The reciprocal process of composition, improvisation and Son-Icons is not linear but branching or fragmented. |
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 Son-Icons (pdf) |
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