When my father died I found all his sheet music, going back to the 1920s when he was a pupil of Miss Lee in Scholes, nr Holmfirth, learning the pianoforte, spanning the years when he played the piano accordion as a young man (it was the guitar of the time), and right up until his death at 85 when he played the organ.
I don't play any keyboard, but desperately wanted to do something with the music so I saved it until such time as I found the right way to use it in my artwork.
Recently I have been making 2D relief pieces where I take each bar of music and score along the lines of the staves, then fold the bar into something ressembling a matchstick.
I think they're rather beautiful, and the bars of the different pieces of music are vastly varied - slow music with long notes has short bars, fast music with demi semi quavers (?) has long bars.
Once I have made the series of matchstick bars, then I turn them vertically and place them on prepared boards - either smooth gesso or worked graphite - they are reminiscent of organ pipes.
The resulting artwork maintains a link with the original music, both physically and conceptually, despite the form being subverted by presenting vertical bars of music.
Some of These Days
closeup
Schubert's Piano Concerto in Bflat - provisonal layout
St Louis Blues
