When you hear music coming from any screen, it’s usually there to accompany the images you’re seeing. But take away those images, and it’s almost impossible for your imagination not to do the opposite, conjuring up images of its own to accompany the music. And what if you could capture those images in some form, say as a LEGO creation?
Well, that’s exactly the idea behind Paul Vermeesch‘s collaborative project Symphony of Construction. We covered the first round of that project last year. And now a second round has just been completed, that we’d like to share with you here!
Symphony of Construction works a bit like the old game of ‘telephone’. The first participant builds a LEGO creation, which inspires a second participant to compose a piece of music. This piece of music then inspires a third participant to build another LEGO creation, and so on. None of the participants gets to see any of the other pieces of work until the project ends.
Paul Vermeesch kicks off the proceedings with this scene entitled “The Wasteland”, an open-ended piece of ‘dark surrealism’…
In Paul’s creation, Max Pointner saw the theme of independence, and composed the piece “Beyond Shadow” to accompany it. Toy percussion echoes the dark ruins of the scene, while a solo viola eventually emerges from this, representing the lonely white figure emerging from the wreckage…
When Daniel Church heard Max’s piece, it reminded him of many adventure themes from his past, and this is reflected in his scene “Water’s Berth”, in which an ancient treasure is discovered and a prophecy fulfilled…
For his musical contribution, “We Have a Story to Tell”, Mihai Marius Mihu decided to tell the story from Daniel’s scene in three acts, covering individually the peaceful landscape, the watery underground cavern, and the hero’s perilous descent…
The next build in the sequence, entitled simply “Woods”, is a collaboration between Dave Kaleta and Devon Wilkop. The three acts in Minai’s composition now become three moments in a scene involving the fleeting appearance of a deer. Their decision to shoot the scene entirely in shadow symbolizes the way the composers in this project were collaborating on a LEGO build without using any actual LEGO. (Click here to see how they did it)
Lee Muzzy and Ian Spacek took this frolicking deer and composed the following buoyant medieval piece, appropriately entitled “Land of Leaping Shadows”, which introduces some drama toward the end, in the form of an imagined huntsman in pursuit…
To close out the round, Mark Erickson‘s creation returns us to the earlier theme of adventure, with “The Temple of the Twin Jaguars”, a luscious jungle scene that conceals an overgrown Meso-American temple of some kind…
Click through to read each artist’s detailed notes on the creative process and inspirations behind each piece. Can’t wait to see what direction the next round of Symphony of Construction will take. But rest assured we’ll be covering it here!