Estudio Siete (1995)
To celebrate 100 years of film, the sound track of this film (“Study No.7” in Spanish) was commissioned in 1995 by the Bundeskunsthalle (the state-run Art Hall) in Bonn to accompany Oskar Fischinger’s 1930 film Study No.6. One layer of the music paraphrases Study No.6 by Conlon Nancarrow, whose aesthetically unproblematic technical brilliance resembles that of Fischinger. The other layer is a metamorphosis of Fischinger’s dancing objects, effecting a “physiophonetic” correspondence between the objects’ shapes and the resulting tone-cloud’s sound color. In 2015, rights-related friction with people in the Fischinger Foundation led me to completely replace the video track with one of my own making, while still referring to Fischinger’s objects.

It is best heard film-synchronised on a player piano, though it can also be performed live as an absolute piece of music.