Maura McDonnell.

The brochure also features an excellent essay by Maura McDonnell, a look at visual music from both the critical and historical viewpoints, an essay that tells us a lot about the origins of visual music, detailing how it actually reaches way way back in time (as in the "color organs"), while also presenting many aspects of the form(s) of visual music, multiple aspects/approaches well worth reflecting upon, pointing to the "cross-pollination" that occurs between various art forms and sciences in, through and as visual music.

McDonnell lives in Ireland (www.soundingvisual.com) and teaches at Trinity College (M.Phil, music and media technologies) in Dublin.

Once again, as with Miller and all the other people who will "speak" in this article, McDonnell also practices what she preaches: the Marathon featured one of her films (Towards One).

A glance at her essay (www.soundingvisual.com/visualmusic/VisualMusicEssay.pdf) simply listing the title of its various sections, will show how exceptional her contribution is:

The Marathon featured one of McDonnell's films Towards One. © Maura McDonnell.

The Visual Music Artist

Visual Music Composition:

• Visual Characteristics and Musical Characteristics.

• Painting According to a Language of Music

• Principles of Counterpoint -- Orchestration of Form

• Orchestration of Movement

• Orchestration of Time

• Expressive Moving Paintings and the Composed Score

• Color Sings -- Colored Rhythm

• Composing Motion -- Figures of Motion

• Music and Image Synchronization -- Acoustical Laws and Optical Expression

• Synthesis -- Simultaneous Composition of Sound and Image

  Visual Music Performance:

• Instruments and Systems to Perform Image Parameters

• "Instruments to Perform Color-Music"

• Color Music Scale -- A Harpsichord for the Eyes

• Painting Music -- Harmonious Color

• Mobile Color

• Lumia

• Color Projection Instruments

Stephanie Maxwell.

All that is followed by a summary in which she reviews much of the above, mentioning, "a developing grammar for working with the complementarity of music and image."

The Visual Music Marathon was a first, but was/is already -- and definitely -- a model for (one hopes) many more like it to come. It takes a concentration of works only achieved in such a marathon to demonstrate, beyond doubt, the depth and diversity of visual music, its amazing potential.

But, there is a belief "out there" that audiences can only put up with a few minutes of "non-narrative/abstract/experimental animation" (henceforth referred to as visual music). I even heard of a pseudo-scientific study that claimed that "6-1/2 minutes is all that the 'average' viewer can take before dozing off."

I dispute that, I have had too many experiences that proved otherwise. I therefore cannot let it go unchallenged. From my lecturing (as for example with my "Animating in a Different Key" lecture, which can last up to 2-1/2 hours and show in excess of 300 images and QuickTime movies), to my introducing the Stephanie Maxwell Retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa a few years ago, which lasted well over one hour (and did not lose a single member of its audience), shows me that, given the right audience (a key, of course), the more experimental animation/visual music the better.

"The right audience," indeed, a very important key, and did the Visual Music Marathon ever summon "the right audience!"