Michael Karr Audiovisual Composition

Breaking the hard language barrier between the visual and musical art forms is the central focus in my work. New and unfamiliar senses are becoming ever more important in my work, specifically how they relate to each...

Breaking the hard language barrier between the visual and musical art forms is the central focus in my work. New and unfamiliar senses are becoming ever more important in my work, specifically how they relate to each other with regard to the initial idea. A US-born A/V composer, I relocated to The Netherlands when I was 16 to learn Dutch and study visual art. I began composing music after graduating as a painter in 2007; my paintings were often described as 'musical' and I needed to discover just what kind of music this was. To do this, I taught myself to read music and compose. In my compositions I use image to guide the musicians toward the music and vice versa. It is important that the image be understood by musicians and that it functions properly as a score with respect to the music. I am fascinated by systematic approaches to creative problem-solving and set out to apply my systems to the painted medium and then to cross over to the musical medium. This as a demonstration to skeptics that, fundamentally, visual and musical composition are related such that you do not need two different degrees to practice both. I received a generous grant from the Netherlands Fund for Visual Art, Design and Architecture in 2009 to realize this cross over. I subsequently wrote and successfully performed two full-scale audiovisual works between February 2009 and May 2010. In 2011 a shorter piece of mine, Four Faces, was performed at Orgelpark Amsterdam as part of the Notations Festival. I am currently working on a marathon-length film on International English Slang, a transition from chemical manipulations of the periodic table to musical manipulations of very elementary musical themes and a 16-hour symphonic timeline scoping the development of all music from 1800 BC up to the current day. e-mail: info@michaelkarr.nl