2/18 Moonlight Milk Sonata / Toy Piano / 100 Days Revisited

Artist Sara Naim did a fascinating experiment with photographing milk at high speed while playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata through the milk - resulting in these vibratory snapshots.  Some really cool pictures and a very unique way of visually representing the abstract narrative of a piano sonata. 
From Sara Naim's website:

Beethoven - Moonlight Sonata: "This body of work looks at translating sound into a photographic image. Ludwig Van Beethoven’s sonata vibrates through milk. He composed this piece in the early 1800’s for his blind pupil and lover, Giuletta Gucciardi. Gucciardi said to Beethoven that she wished she could see the moonlight. Beethoven then composed a piece about the moonlight’s reflection off Austria’s Lake Lucerne, called Moonlight Sonata."

The stuff about Lake Lucerne and Giuletta Gucciardi is not exactly corroborated by recorded facts, but it's a nice thought I guess...anyways the images are the thing.

Another unique take on the Moonlight Sonata is this performance adapted for "Toy Piano" by specialist Margaret Leng Tan. I'm actually more familiar with Ms Tan's work as a performer of John Cage's works, so this is quite surprising and a little odd. What's even odder is that Cage hated Beethoven - one assumes John Cage is rolling in his grave ;)


There are boatloads of videos of the Moonlight played on acoustic and electric guitar and most of them are well...frankly, not particularly interesting, but this one by Michael Lucarelli stands out as a fine transcription in its own right (and a fine video production as well):



If you're interested in hearing what the Moonlight Sonata sounds like on electric guitar after it's been sped up to 1500 bpm (from its original tempo of 40 bpm)...click below...

Beethoven - Moonlight Sonata at 1500 BPM on Guitar

It's pretty out there ;)

Finally, to round out a light Friday post, here's an update to an older post where I mentioned Jessica Svendsen's 100 Days Project - she's DONE! 
From Ms. Svendsen's website: "Every day for 100 days, I created a variation on a Josef Müller-Brockmann poster for a Beethoven concert in Zürich in 1955. This project was part of the Michael Bierut 100 Days Workshop at the Yale School of Art."

I really liked her designs, so much so that I threw them into my video editing software and generated a quick video using the Coriolan Overture (conducted by Dmitri Mitropoulos).  The poster itself is for a Coriolan Overture performance by Carl Schuricht, but I don't have that particular one handy, oh well....

100 Days Website