Music Mosaic

"Blue in Green" by Miles Davis

 The piece of music that I chose for this assignment was Blue in Green by Miles Davis. I’ve always thought that this piece had a melancholy feel to it, so I decided to choose colors that would reflect that mood. I started off by making the pictures more black and white, with a lack of color. I feel as if this gives the images such as the street lamp and the contemplative face more somber. However, as the song progresses, the color becomes more saturated and the images become more blue. This adds a cautious but hopeful attitude. However, the images are still not completely in color, keeping a sense of ambiguity.

Another element that I used to continue to change the perspective from the melancholy to the hopeful was by using different levels of light in the pictures. I started out with pictures that were darker and showed small sources of light, such as the neon sign surrounded by darkness or the street lamp at night. Then as you go down the pictures, they become more flooded with light and sources of light such as the shiny and reflective saxophone and of course the sky lights which are the last two pictures.

I also used the subjects of the pictures themselves to emulate the experience of listening to the music. As a saxophone player, I tried to capture the texture of the instrument in the picture, showing the different keys and tubes that are part of the complex structure of the instrument. The complex lines and shapes on the instrument reflect the complexity of the improvisation on this song. As a saxophone player, the literal texture of the instrument is just as beautiful as the sound, and I wanted to capture that in the image. I also took a picture of a record and tried to show the textures there and also emulate the experience of listening to jazz in the image.

I also chose urban landscapes as subjects because of its cultural connectedness to jazz music. The occasional quick tempo of the solos in this song juxtaposed against the slow overall tempo of the song reflects the need to quickly go about our business in the city, while still feeling that our individual lives go on slowly or can pause for a moment. It is in these moments that we can find beauty in our surroundings. This is in contrast to the Dillard reading, in which she seemed to find more beauty in nature. I was interested to read about how she continued to speak of all the things that she just barely missed as she tried to observe them in nature. However, I was quite impressed at all she was able to see and I think that she has a much more trained eye than she seems to be giving herself credit for.

The reading reminded me of some lyrics from Stephen Sondheim’s musical, Into the Woods.

“Just a moment,
One peculiar passing moment...
Must it all be either less or more,
Either plain or grand?
Is it always "or"?
Is it never "and"?
That's what woods are for:
For those moments in the woods...

Oh. if life were made of moments,
Even now and then a bad one-!
But if life were only moments,
Then you'd never know you had one.”

(source: http://www.lyricsondemand.com/soundtracks/i/intothewoodslyrics/momentsinthewoodslyrics.html)