Music for Art Exhibit: Memoir of the (20th) Century

[B Gray]

The music I just uploaded was written in 1980 for a large art exhibition in London titled Memoir of the Century -- by visual artist Felix Topolski http://www.topolskicentury.org.uk/  We worked together from 1978-1980 to envision a "sound-scape" for his Memoir.

I developed this music to match the architectural aspects of the murals as spatial/architectural music -- similar to the concept Giovanni Gabrieli used when he wrote for multiple, spatially separated groups stationed in different choir lofts in St Marks Basilica in Venice.  The murals themselves, 20-foot canvases, are arranged as a maze so the viewer must literally walk through the artists rendering of the 20th century as he recorded it.

Some parts of the Memoir are very dark indeed. Feliks Topolski was an artist and journalist who traveled, sketched and then published the "Topolski Chronicle" covering many of the major events of the 20th century.  In one section the viewer must walk over an open grave trench painted from the canvas onto the floor depicting the Nazi concentration camps (which the artist witnessed when they were liberated).
 
The tracks were recorded and designed to play simultaneously and in random sequence with the listener "arranging" the sound by the way they walked through the space.  The exhibit is at the London arts complex under the Hungerford Arch railway bridges and covers a space roughly the size of two American football fields.  The sounds in the live venue are punctuated by trains rumbling overhead at random intervals.  

Some of the tracks are sound collages, appropriate to the content of the specific area.  Others are strictly composed, notated and recorded with acoustic instruments.  The Violin & Synth duet was a very early acoustic/digital duet (recorded in 1979/80).   The first track labeled "mix" was a studio mix recreating the general sound sequence someone might hear walking through the Memoir.   The various tracks merge and counterpoint each other in a random relationship according to where the viewer is in the mural.