Of feet and knees and melodies

The saga continues with the foot. Now, I’m more concerned about rehab of the knee. I’m learning far more about anatomy and how the human body is supposed to work and how my body has been accustomed to working than I ever wanted to know. I’d prefer to just get from point A to point B without thinking about it all. Sigh. The good news is, I’m making progress at the 3 steps forward, 1 step back rate.

Before I share pictures of the second round of my interpretation of the Saint Saens movement, I wanted to share a bit of how I have been thinking through my design.

There are elements of design that all artists deal with. Sometimes it drives the whole project, other times, things just fall into place. Changing facets of each element change the art. That’s all I’m qualified to say on that. I’ve only scratched the surface learning about all that. I don’t feel it’s necessary to spend a whole lot of time on deciding how I’m going to tat, but I am basing my art on the thought that it is important to spend time looking carefully at the music and assigning visual cues to what we hear.

If that’s clear as mud, don’t feel bad. I’m still striving for a way to express my process.

For this composition, I’ve decided to correlate the color of the beads to what section of the orchestra has the “melody” or whatever we recognize as a theme. Each element of tatting (ring, chain, etc) roughly correlates to phrases or sections. Finally, I’ve decided to use only 1 color thread. And I’ve decided a circular “doily” overall structure suits the composition.

If you glance up at yesterday picture, you see some green thread. That’s a metallic sewing thread added using the “daisy picot” technique to represent the piano part. There are 4 phrases to the melody lifted out for the movie. The strings and pianos play it first, then the organ and brass. I ignored the brass frequently in this version. I felt guilty until I really looked at how he composed the 2^nd movement and then made that call for this movement. When I create something representing the 2^nd movement, I’ll revisit that decision.

Tomorrow I’ll explain what I saw in the fugue subject.