Jack Ox talks about the Bruckner mappings: I worked on the project of mapping all of the themes from Anthon Bruckner's Eighth Symphony over a period of ten years. The complete series of twelve paintings were shown together in the Neue Galerie der Stadt Linz in 1996. There is a catalog. Axa Nordstern, the art insurance company, sponsored the exhibition. This painting is the last one available to be sold.

Below, you can see the drawings and the painted images that are collaged together in the final product. There are two image sources. The first is St. Florian's, a Baroque monastery very near to where Bruckner was born. He went to school there and became the organist for some years. Today, you can still visit him under the organ. Because Bruckner was such an excellent organist, there is an emphasis on counter-point in his otherwise Romantic symphony. Counter-point corresponds with the architecture of St. Florian's. The second image source is from dramatic Alpine images. These mountain views capture the feeling of Romantic/chromatic harmonic structures. Therefore, both in style and place, these image sources were well known to Bruckner. The two image sources are themselves in a counter-point relationship.

The two circles below are color wheels: the first is the color/harmony wheel on the setting for Bruckner's Eighth Symphony, where the key of c minor is the yellow on the inner wheel towards the bottom. This wheel can be recalibrated for different pieces of harmonically based music. As Bruckner modulates around the circle-of-fifths, the painting has a transparent glaze that uses the colors mapped to each of the key modulations. The next wheel shows how the transparent colors incorporate different percentages of the complementary color located directly across the color wheel. As a sound becomes more dissonant it includes an increased percentage of the 'opposite' color; so a pure consonance is 100% one color, a little dissonant is 10% complementary color and 90% original hue, then the algorithmic system proceeds to 20% complementary and 80% original hue, 30% complementary and 70% original hue, 40% complementary and 60% original hue, and finally 50% complementary and 50% basic hue creates a grey that represents the most dissonant chord.

The drawings that follow serve as the scores I used to make the painting. The first one is the actual part of St. Florian's Monastery where the changing scale of the image shows the changes in loudness and softness of the music. The next two drawings show the actual mapped music in this painting, with the parts of the architecture over the music where they appear in the score. Click here or on the last image, and you can read about this third theme from movement one on page four. Let your mouse hover over the images below to find the hyper-linked images to a large version.

more Bruckner paintings