Assignment - Music grid/space aural experience collage

Cuisinaire Rods; one 4/4 time signature measure's worth

White = 1/16 note

Red = 1/8 note

Light Green = dotted 1/8 note (1/8 + 1/16)

Pink/Purple = 1/4 note

Dark Green = dotted 1/4 note (1/4 + 1/8)

Brown = 1/2 note

Other time signatures will have a different measure length...

A partial attempt at two measures from "Paper Tiger" by Beck

(from the album Sea Change)

The song is in the dropbox, listen and look if you need. This is an incomplete exercise...

Top row is the hi-hat and snare; 1/16 notes.

The middle row is the bass.

The next row (of brown) is just to bracket the measure.

The bottom row is the kick drum. I think that drums could be signified using upturned rods (vertically oriented). It would provide some space in the measure.

However, if this exercise were completed, the rods would be pushed together; as close as possible.

The assignment:
On Wednesday, you will have a 16" wide x 24" tall collage. This will be made up of shots taken from your charcoal music diagrams layered with your cuisinaire rod diagrams. I imagine that the overlapping of these fragments will create whole new grids and spaces.
You are free to crop, scale, or otherwise transform (distort?) these fragments to make the new diagram. You may also tint the frags of your charcoal diagrams (pretend that you are dong a multi-tinted water color painting...in photoshop). You may tweak the color of your rod diagrams. The outcome will be even more like the space of your music than the process work. It will define the space of the aural experience and the structure of the music. Realize that through the use of color, you can create space and volume on a surface.

At the end of class today Steve Mahn asked me a question...something like this....why should we be literal at all about the music with the rods; couldn't we just diagram the music intuitively? I answered that the goal is to start out as literal as possible so that the difference between your products relies less on each students idiosyncratic compositional skills and more on the identity of the music. In other words, some kernel of the structure of your pieces will survive your compositional drives and define difference. Try it.

“So I came to making only lines, and brought the colour within the lines.” - Mondrian

You have probably realized that this project is about the space between the lines or, the space that transgresses the lines or, the space that grabs/groups/graduates the lines or, not about lines at all.