This next project’s music came into the light on a morning walk with my trusted companion, Zelda. It is on my Like Songs list from Spotify, so I have heard this music before, but that day was different. What I was listening to was a cover version of The Beatle’s song, For No One, from the 1966 Beatle album Revolver. It was the soft assuring voice of Anne Sofie von Otter, and the music’s simple and flowing melodic sound that caught that morning mood. The music lasted long enough in my head so that it then became this new project.

Here are the three stages of this artwork’s design:

Once I have my cover music notation, I than grabbed the Soprano Saxophone part of my sheet music that I would like to display on the artwork

Next, I decided on the size of the notation. Since my selected saxophone part comprises a small number of notes I knew I could go large. The biggest note I can cut from a 1/4″ thick aspen wood that is 3.5″ wide is 3.25.” I then chose two 15×30-inch canvases that were long enough to display 8 notes spaced. The two smaller 10×10 inch canvases will become the speaker boxes. The last addition was a piece of loose gesso canvas. It is on this that I will paint the words from the music.

I do not know what colors I am going to use for the music. I also do not know what colors or how I am going to handle the words on the loose canvas. Last, I do know this is going to be the 2nd in a series of three artworks where I am experimenting with ChatGPT. I am curious to see how much better of a poem I can coax out of it. I may even try different methods of handling the music’s lyrics to see what different rhymes that it may come up with. We shall see.

Scott Von Holzen