The Art of Sketching: Eric Whitacre's Equus
Eric Whitacre is a contemporary choral and orchestral composer who likes to "sketch" his ideas before committing them to staff paper. Attached is one of these sketches for a band piece called "Equus."
My favorite part of this sketch is that I don't understand any of it. I don't know enough music theory to understand what Whitacre is writing in the bottom left. I am not sure what the disc is. I don't know what the lines coming out of the disc mean.
But what I do recognize is the list of descriptive words he uses. (Recall that we had to do the same for Project 1.1). I think it is interesting that such an accomplished musician does the same exercise we did when coming up with ideas - just goes to show how valuable sketching can be.
My next post will likely be about Whitacre again - it will be focused on one of his poem-based compositions. Just as we had to base our art off of sound, Whitacre had to base his sound off of words. I'd like to explore this analogy so you can expect a blog post about that soon.
My favorite part of this sketch is that I don't understand any of it. I don't know enough music theory to understand what Whitacre is writing in the bottom left. I am not sure what the disc is. I don't know what the lines coming out of the disc mean.
But what I do recognize is the list of descriptive words he uses. (Recall that we had to do the same for Project 1.1). I think it is interesting that such an accomplished musician does the same exercise we did when coming up with ideas - just goes to show how valuable sketching can be.
My next post will likely be about Whitacre again - it will be focused on one of his poem-based compositions. Just as we had to base our art off of sound, Whitacre had to base his sound off of words. I'd like to explore this analogy so you can expect a blog post about that soon.
This is really great - thanks for sharing! ...and in Project 2 we will be using text / poetry to inform design decisions for an animation.
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