More about this video ...
Reflets dans l'eau ("reflections in the water") by Claude Debussy, performed by pianist James Boyk in 1984 at the Dabney Lounge at the California Institute of Technology, where he was Pianist in Residence. In the program notes for that concert, Boyk wrote
"... The Schoenberg set is technically radical in being atonal, but the esthetically radical work is the Debussy, for it has no protagonist. It is not about a person's hopes, struggles or triumphs, nor about a relation with God. It is a picture, simply, of Nature. No human is present except as observer.
"Nor is any human time sense present. Perhaps this is why playing the Debussy takes me out of myself and seems to quiet and refresh the audience. It is a wonderful base from which to move on to the objective time of the Stravinsky; the internal, asymmetrical heartbeat of the Schoenberg pieces---with time extinguished in the last of them, an elegy; and finally the sociable ebb and flow of the Ravel."
James Boyk can be contacted by email at
[email protected]and you can learn more about him and his work at his web site
http://performancerecordings.com/
The colors in the video correspond to pitch, with the "tonic" ("home") pitch being blue. The system of coloring is described in detail here:
http://www.musanim.com/mam/pfifth.htm
The shapes in the video correspond (roughly) to different ways the notes move and are grouped together: parallel chords, sustained notes and chords, fast-moving, slow-moving in regular rhythms, slow-moving in irregular rhythms.