Back on the Grind

Winter vacation is over, and the spring semester has begun. To get back into the swing of things at Pratt, we are doing a short 3-week project in Studio: designing a waiting area and conference room for a record company. We were each assigned a piece of music which will serve to inspire our designs, and I got "Pierrot Lunaire" by Schoenburg (hear it)

The piece is a haunting, dream-like melody which for me evokes the ideas of Freud and Jung. To capture this jarring, atonal atmosphere I used mirrors, plexi, and strips of red paper.


The piece can be divided into three components, a wind/string section, a piano, and a woman singing/reading 21 poems by Albert Giraud. Each of the materials represented one of the three: the mirrors stood for the winds and strings section, the shards of plexi represented the staccato inserts of the piano, and the undulating strips of red paper represented the woman's voice.


Schoenburg was obsessed with numerology, so much so that the entire title of the piece points out that it is "3 times 7 poems", and I have carried over this interest by utilizing each of the 3 materials 7 times.


The piece is celebrated today as Schoenburg's "atonal masterpiece" and the last great work of his expressionist period. I think that what I responded to most was the tenets of expressionism which emphasize emotionality over realism of form. I endeavored to capture the jarring, anxiety producing emotion of "Pierrot Lunaire".