Pigg 1 David Pigg Ms.

Caruso ENGL 1101 31 October 2011 Genre Recreation Defense on Abblasen Abblasen is a composition written in the eighteenth century by Gottfried Reich. This composition features a single trumpet in a quick fanfare. A fanfare is a short turn usually played on brass instruments. The quick rhythms and bright sound in the short piece makes it hard to catch every detail that Reich put into it. Since classical music is sometimes hard to understand, then a picture of this piece would allow a person to understand it better. A pictorial representation of a piece of music uses symbols and colors to describe the mood of the text. Instead of a person trying to capture each moment of a composition in one memory, a person can look at a picture and take as much time as they need to look over it. A picture is more easily identified for this reason. Yet a song could also give you a better understanding of itself since it is the original text. The ways that a person uses to identify and learn about an object are different from person to person. There are many people who could listen to a song and completely understand the meaning of it. Yet there are also people who need to be able to see a visual text in order to understand it better. This means that if everyone listened to a song then only half would fully understand it, so if the confused half could see a pictorial representation of the song then that half would also be able to understand it. One way a person could use the picture to help them understand it is to look at the colors. Colors are able to represent different emotions depending on the different aspects of the color. Relating a color to another object with that color is one of the easiest ways to describe the

Pigg 2 emotion of it. As an example, when you think of a lighter shade of blue most of the time you could relate this with water or the sky. Sine water and the sky are usually calm objects then a lighter shade of blue is also seen as calm. The picture I drew has many aspects that contain colors so the viewer can feel what the song sounds like. Near the top of the picture the title Abblasen is written. The larger boxed letters are drawn angled down and become larger near the end of the word to create an effect as if they are coming towards you. By having the title in the picture the audience would be able to find a recording of the song so they could have both the composition and picture to understand it. The letters in the picture are also colored in red. Red has always been an exciting color and was picked to emphasize the initial excited feeling of the composition. The words are also positioned in the sky, and are also drawn as if they are coming out of the sky. This was done to emphasize the songs ability to blend the excitement into the other aspects of the piece. With the other colors in the picture, the excitement is not an overpowering aspect of the picture or of the song since excitement is not the only emotion in it. The most obvious aspect of the piece is the only one that can easily be put to picture. The trumpet is playing throughout the entire fanfare. The bright and joyous sound that a trumpet creates is the easiest part to hear. A yellow or gold color can be very bright or joyous, so it is the best color to color the trumpet with. The biggest part of the piece of music and the picture is the trumpet. The trumpet is positioned right under the title and is twice the size even though both stretch across most of the page. The 3-D effect that the trumpet has gives the picture more life which is similar the changing pitches of the trumpet in Abblasen. The music notes coming out of the trumpet is also a vital part of the composition and of the picture. Notes and tunes are the most recognizable part of a song so they were drawn as an

Pigg 3 important image in the picture. These notes are also colored purple to simulate royalty. The trumpet and the notes it creates has always had a royal feeling. Trumpets were used to introduce kings and queens during many centuries of history. The notes in this piece have a royal introductory sound and therefore were colored purple. Also the notes drawn were relativity fast notes, but the styles of the notes were simple. A simple style of notes describes notes that are just half or double the length of other simple notes, and the notes also do not have any other markings for what style to play them in. This describes the sound to the audience to be quick, but with a simple rhythm. This is another huge part of the piece of music. The bright parts of Abblasen were centered near the middle of the picture and contained bright colors to describe the more obvious emotions that this fanfare gives its audience. They are all very easy to picture or hear in the song. Yet there are many parts of Abblasen that are more hidden to the ear. Similar to hidden messages in a book, the hidden emotions in a song only show themselves at the end of the song. Near the bottom of the picture there are scattered clouds fading back to the horizon. They only go up half of the page to let the audience feel like they are floating on clouds. The composition is able to give a person the feeling of floating on clouds near the end due to the resolving and relaxing ending. Since most of this piece can also be looked at as relaxing, the clouds have also been colored green. This is not an overpowering green since it is only one of the hidden emotions in the song. Even through this emotion can last throughout the entire piece, it is more apparent at the end. In the picture it is also not the first object that the eye catches on to. After looking at all of the objects, you will notice that the sky is a light shade of purple. Again, purple is a very royal color, but the sky has only been colored a light purple. This was used to tell that there is also a sense of royalty during the entire piece. It is also a way to say that

Pigg 4 the after thought of the piece is a feeling of royalty. It also makes the feeling more confusing since the normal sky color of blue would inflect a calm feeling across the audience. Since this piece is not calm, a royal color was used instead. The use of color is the best way to let a person feel what the song actually feels like. The first colors give the audience an initial feeling of excitement and joy, which is the same as the initial feeling of the composition. The secondary colors give the audience a final feeling of relaxation and royalty, which is the same as the final feelings for the composition. Yet even though the exciting colors are more obvious, the other colors take up more of the page. This tells that these emotions have more meaning in the song even though they are harder to see. The concept of art and music has always been enjoyed be its audience. Artists and composers need to spend long periods of time in order to finish their work. Many of the good artist and composers are able to quickly move through the development of the idea but still spend a long amount of time to actually develop their idea. Other armature artist or musicians take a long time in both steps of the process. Even though so much time is spent during the process of art, a very small outcome is received. To spend days on a painting to cover a sheet of paper, or to spend days on a piece of music that last about a minute is a difficult task. Yet both turn out to be very beautiful. This is one reason that both are very easily admired. The picture that I made did not take days, but it took long enough to represent the time it took to make the piece Abblasen. The picture that represents the composition is easy to compare to the actual piece. They both give you a bright feeling but are also able to relax in the end. Also both the piece and the picture have a royal appeal. The emotions that colors give the audience are an amazing tool that is easily used in pictures to explain the mood that the sound of the music gives them. Since pictures and compositions are difficult to make, they are a great way to represent one with the

Pigg 5 other. This recreation was able to successful give the audience the same emotions that were in the composition Abblasen.

Work Cited

Pigg 6 Reiche, Gottfried. Abblasen. Perf. Jeffrey A. Shaffer. Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCZcv17LMiE.