V080: A Personal Search: For the Complementarity of Music and Visual Art

Pyramid Film and Video, VHS (NTSC), color (1992), 27:15.

Directed by produced by: Mark Whitney, James Schiller

Time Description
0:00 Credits
0:45 Music and color graphics
1:30 John Whitney describes his lifelong fascination with the correspondences between (computer-generated) music and visual arts
4:00 Photos of Paris (1937), where Whitney lived for a time with a practicing pianist. Here his ideas about the complementarity of the two art forms began.
5:15 Whitney began making films with his brother in 1944. He experimented with music generated by sine waves.
7:35 Whitney describes the influence of Arnold Schoenberg's 12-tone compositions on his own ideas about music (Pierrot lunaire plays in background).
8:20 Whitney continues his experiments at computers in his California studio.
12:50 Whitney improvises a visual accompaniment to Antonin Dvorák's cello concerto. He demonstrates the composing program he uses.
18:20 Footage of Willem de Kooning painting in his studio.
18:40 Whitney quotes Pierre Boulez on the future of electronic music.
19:45 Whitney provides an introduction and voice-overs to selections from his composition, Black Elk Requiem.
24:20    
Whitney makes concluding comments.
25:00 Credits
27:15 End