The more I rely on computers to mix and master my music, the more I’m drawn back to pens, pencils, thick bonded paper, Moleskine notebooks, graphite pencils and watercolour blocks. As Marilyn Monroe said; ‘To think in ink..’.
There’s nothing like taking a line for a walk and feeling the resistance of the paper and the give of the pen to swerve you off into a more interesting place than you would have gone in the world of Qwerty.
I was cleaning my desk and I pulled out a copy of a piece I’d transcribed for a friend’s 40th. He’s a Geordie, so it’s an arrangement of ‘Oh Come ye from Newcastle’. He always wears strong glasses and a a cap, and as I was writing, my pen started to veer off into a picture of him..
From there it was a slippery slope to writing in terrible puns in the directions, Da Capo for the return to the baseball cap, the tricky bit along the chin is marked rather hairy, the chords on the mouth are marked as a drone…
I think the medieval calligraphers would have made a better fist of this, but it made him laugh…
[Let me know of any other picture scores in the comments & I can add them in]
© Philip Sheppard 2013
George Crumb at his best!
This is elegant…
Thanks to Elspeth Hanson for sending this!
Eisenstein nails it with this storyboard – music by Prokofiev!
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