I began to fuse drawing and music during a 1996 residency at Kebbel-Villa Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany. A year earlier I had included popular music in the soundtrack of Kaddish, a multimedia video installation documenting the childhood memories of Holocaust survivors commissioned by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. At Kebbel-Villa I was able to explore the relationship between music and memory further and consider the ways in which both music and drawings have been used to establish and convey collectively held ideas and beliefs. The imagery in the pieces repro-duced below was drawn from a wide range of sources that included dictionaries, children’s books, instruction manuals, field guides, propaganda tracts, cartoons, and fine art repro-ductions. Musical scores chosen for this series ranged from popular songs to works of classical music. It was my intention that whenever possible, the drawings would be inter-preted by musicians at some point during their public exhibition.
Conversation with fellow artist Louise Kames and artist and Kebbel-Villa director Heiner Riepl, Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, Schwandorf, Germany 1996. Photograph by Gerhard Götz.
Deep Memory. Above: 1996 version Below: current array
Der Giftpilz (The Poisonous Mushroom) 1996
Collection of the Friends of the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus e.V., Schwandorf, Germany
Music drawing series based on illustrations featured in Der Giftpilz, a propagandistic children’s book released in 1938 by the publisher of the antisemitic Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer. American neo-Nazi activist Gary Lauch produced English and Estonian language versions of this book in 2007.
Linger Awhile 1996
This set of music drawings is a meditation on the sentiments of people torn between the necessity to flee from political or religious persecution and their desire to stay in their homelands. The setting here is Europe during the 1930s and 40s, a time when people fled in automobiles and ocean liners, but the trauma of flight and exile is the same for those who flee on foot or in small fishing boats or inflatable rafts today. The smaller song sheet collaged onto the sheet music for Linger Awhile is a German WW II military song that begins:
Comrade, we march in the west,
United with the bomber squadrons.
And even if many of the best fall,
We will strike down the enemy!
Forward! Forward, forward!
Across the Meuse, across the Scheldt and the Rhine,
We march victoriously into France,
We march, we march
into France!
