AMEN: OSKAR FISCHINGER (VISUAL INTERPRETATIONS OF MUSIC)

I wanted to consider ways in which music has been interpreted visually to deepen my contextual and creative understanding of what was possible and to try and expand my horizons and inspirations as i moved forward with my Amen Brother piece. This led to research into different ways to do this and I remembered the work of the animator Oskar Fischinger that I had enjoyed. Oskar Wilhelm Fischinger (1900–1967) was a German-American abstract animator, filmmaker, and painter, notable for creating abstract musical animation many decades before the appearance of computer graphics and music videos. One of his constant themes was animating to music and trying to create a visual interpretation of it just as I am trying to do with the Amen drum Break.

The short film below An Optical Poem, 1938 is an excellent example of his work. The animation is composed to Franz Liszt's "2nd Hungarian Rhapsody." It is made entirely with paper in stop motion fashion often hanging from invisible wire to create the persoective. The piece below is thought to be the only one to be commissioned and released by an American film studio.





The use of shape, colour and size of the objects works really well and does create a strong visual interpretation of the music especially for the era and the techniques available to be used. The effect is stunning and constantly interesting and the images work well to combine the visuals and the music. An issue working with visuals to music is that all too often they do not integrate well enough and work parallel to each other not in combining in unison. Fischingers work does not do this and effectively combines the two.



Taking forward some of Fischingers ideas, whilst I am not prepared to spend weeks animating tiny pieces of cut out coloured paper the use of shape and colour is a very interesting one. This I feel is something I could exploit in my own visual interpretation of music for my piece. However my reservations are that although visually it is very strong it may not have the clarity of message linking all of the types of music in my piece together. His work is a forefather and therefore slightly reminiscent of some of the visuals at raves and gigs I attended in my misspent youth and these will be another interesting avenue to explore.