Artistic responses to the Debussy Nocturnes with emotional and intellectual timbre, reflected in an amazing range of experimental films.
This year, Morley’s advanced piano students are performing in a concert in the Emma Cons Auditorium. In a collaboration between the college’s music and visual arts teams, Digital Image Making students have created experimental films or animations to accompany this performance.
Debussy is known as one of the first truly ‘modern’ composers, breaking with traditional concepts and known by his contemporaries as a rebel, nicknamed ‘the prince of darkness’. A sense of fluidity, ambience, and impressionistic haziness were important to much of his work and challenged the more rigid established conventions of classical western music.
Students’ experimental films or animations that accompany the music also have the ambition to break with traditional concepts of image making, sympathetically supporting the tone of the performance. It is important that the imagery and narrative of the films or animations are also open and undefined, allowing for a combined subjective experience of music and film in the performance space.
