Beethoven Machinery, 3:41, digital animation with music, 16mm color film, 1989.

About Beethoven Machinery

With this film I first put an idea to the test: could I visualize the unfolding structure of a musical composition? –– in this case the second movement from Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 16, in F major, op. 135, his final work. Beethoven Machinery is squarely in the tradition of visual music, experimental animation in which structural relationships between sound and image are explored with precise timing. Something like this idea was implanted in me as a child, probably from seeing Disney’s Fantasia projected in the Oz-like Radio City Music Hall at age 5, specifically the film’s opening episode, animated to a thundering toccata and fugue by J.S. Bach, whose music (transcribed for orchestra) I might have been hearing for the first time. 

As an undergraduate at Harvard I had the chance to pursue this idea, taking 16-mm film courses with experimental animators Kathy Rose and George Griffin. (The latter’s collage film Koko, to the music of Charlie Parker, is an exemplar of note-for-note visual music). As a graduate student at Cal Arts from 1986-89, where Beethoven Machinery was my master’s thesis, I worked with Jules Engel and William Moritz,  both of whom were connected directly to visual music pioneer Oskar Fischinger. Fischinger, it happens, worked briefly and unhappily on the Fantasia Bach sequence— long enough for the studio to adapt and bowdlerize his purely geometric ideas. Still, certain dramatic effects n the Disney version remain largely abstract and these were imprinted on my mind. 

The hybrid technology of Beethoven Machinery is a product of its time. I used an IBM desktop computer and an early flying logo program to realize the sequences. One now takes for granted being able to manipulate virtual objects in space interactively. In those days, however, it might take hours to render enough frames for a few seconds of screen time despite my simple wireframe imagery (often stolen hours, as the computers were in heavy demand.) Nor could the frames be seen at speed until they had been filmed one at a time off a CRT monitor by a 16-mm camera. To speed the feedback cycle, I learned to develop the film myself in negative. I could then cut and paste the tests in synch with a 16-mm magnetic transfer of the music on a flatbed editing machine. Changes and adjustments would be programmed back into the animation in the form of shifting sets of numerical coordinates, according to the limited interface of the time. 

I used the music as a script, timing out individual notes and larger phrases, trying to map Beethoven’s impishly syncopated country dance, whose insistent symmetries at last escape into lyrical flight; but which then falls into a diabolical whirlpool with no possible escape, a devil’s dance; but then does escape, back to the innocent (or perhaps not so innocent) dance of the beginning. The film, of course, depicts nothing like the true four-part intricacy of this abstract drama. But the short, deceptively simple Vivace (the entire quartet is a return to plainspokenness for Beethoven) struck me as a landscape that I could at least enter into.

Visual music derives in part from European Modernism –– early VM filmmakers such as Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling, for example, were connected with the avant-garde Blue Reiter and Dada movements, while Fischinger, before emigrating to Los Angeles, was associated with the Bauhaus in Berlin –– but popular cartoon animation could also be keenly synesthetic: e.g., the animal orchestra of Disney’s Steamboat Willie, the very first sound cartoon. Thus a double lineage is joined in Fantasia. Visual music, actually, is an idea that can be applied to a very wide range of films, from Busby Berkeley dance sequences to the silent experiments of Stan Brakhage. Beethoven Machinery, however, is strictly in the somewhat occult filmmaking tradition of pure abstraction in the service of a synesthetic dream captured by Goethe’s famous insight that architecture is “frozen music.” With the invention of film and, almost a century later, 3-D computer animation, this musical architecture became, potentially, unfrozen.

Beethoven Machinery has been included in numerous programs, exhibitions, and screenings, including at the Museum of Modern Art in a program of Cal Arts experimental animation curated by Josh Seigel and subsequently shown at the Centre Pompidou; at the Reina Sofia museum, in a program curated by computer animation pioneer Larry Cuba ; and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, in a an event curated by Sharon Louden and Margaret Parsons.

To learn more about the Visual Music world, please visit the Iota Center, The Center for Visual Musichttps://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/ and Stephen Malinowski’s fascinating Music Animation Machine.