Presented here are zoomable versions of the main lightboxes of Breath, which allow you to examine it as if under a microscope. Bear in mind, though, that the original lightboxes had two superimposed layers of translucent film set against very bright white neon. This web version can only show the front layer.
note: View these lightbox versions only via a high-bandwidth connection. The display of the zoomable pages requires the removal of the navigation sidebar, so please use your browser’s back button to return here. As you zoom into the picture, the image will at first be a blurred low-resolution approximation, but if you wait a moment it will then resolve into sharp focus.
Click on the links in the left margin to start.
The starling’s song is at the very limit of human comprehension.
So concludes Peter Marler, a leading authority on the science of birdsong. If he’s right, then the starling’s song would call for a supreme musical intelligence to grasp it.
For the starling not only sings at fast speeds and at high registers, but it also improvises constantly while mimicking the world all around. Listen closely and you may hear it busily interweaving fragments of other birds’ songs and snatches of human speech — as well as a teakettle whistling, a doorbell ringing, a neighbor sneezing…
Now it so happens that in 1784 Mozart acquired a starling of his own, which he cherished until it died three years later — a death he observed with a full funeral service and a poem he wrote for the occasion. One week later, he completed a composition that may have been his musical mimicry of the starling’s song (“A Musical Joke” k 522).
Mozart’s attraction to the starling must have been immediate, for on entering the pet store he’d been startled to find it singing a theme seemingly snatched from one of his own piano concerti (k 453), with just one note altered (g → g#).
— This lightbox diagrams an imaginary starling making sense of what it hears and then recomposing it in song.
At bottom, our conjectural bird listens to the poem, written in German, that Mozart dedicated to it. The inverted tree diagram shows the bird’s primitive parsing of the poem’s rules of syntax — as if by understanding its form, it could then improvise on it in song.
At top, our bird listens to a fragment of another starling’s song, on which it performs the same analysis, this time diagrammed in an upward tree.
He who sings well prays twice.
This traditional paraphrase of St. Augustine suggests the power of song in Christian observance, where sacred music usually means choral music.
You could say that singing is an elaborate act of breathing. It originates silently in the lungs, where the exhale begins, but when that rush of air is sent to vibrate through the vocal chords and is then shaped by mouth, tongue, teeth, and lips, what comes out is song. And song raised up in praise of God is a venerable way of worship.In other practices, simple breathing — the silent intake and exhale of air — becomes a kind of prayer on its own. There it forms the subject, the cycle, and the rhythm of meditation.
— This lightbox captures a body in the act of breathing. We recorded the physical movements in a motion-capture studio, then rendered this data as a sequence of time-lapsed abstract anatomies. We leak color into the figuration at the maximum points of inhale and exhale.
I will lift up my hands and call on your name. (Psalm 63)
The Book of Psalms is the central body of songs in Judeo-Christian tradition, collected over a period of about eight centuries before coalescing into their final form around 300 BC.
Rather than commandments handed down from on high, they are the gathered expressions of a community’s faith — laments, supplications, praises, declarations — raised up in song. As such, they have long stood at the foundation of devotional practice. In Hildegard’s abbey, for example, the nuns sang through the entire Book of Psalms over the course of every week of every year.
— This lightbox illuminates semantic threads running through all 150 psalms. At the point of departure stands the short stanza we chose from a Song of Ascents, which is then linked in chains of association to other stanzas in the Psalms. At the roots of the image we depict the Hebrew text from which the English translation derives.
In these visions my spirit rises, as God wills, to the heights of heaven & into the shifting winds, & it ranges among various peoples, even those very far away.
So wrote Hildegard von Bingen in 1175, who by age 77 had ranged very far herself — miraculously so for a woman of the Middle Ages, when she was renowned as a mystic, revered as an abbess, and respected as a writer of science and theology.
It took some 800 years for the world to rediscover Hildegard’s singular music, now restoring her name to music history and celebrating her works in recordings and concerts.
Yet it was the intensity of Hildegard’s mystical visions that gave rise to all the rest of her accomplishments. Cloistered from the age of 8, she was immured from the world until
when I was forty-two years & seven months old, Heaven was opened & a fiery light of exceeding brilliance came & permeated my whole brain & inflamed my whole heart & my whole breast…
With permission from the Pope, she revealed these mystical revelations by dictating accounts of them to a monk in self-taught, mistake-prone, meticulously detailed Latin. The first publication of these visions provoked an international sensation, opening doors to Hildegard that she did not hesitate to cross.
— This lightbox illuminates “Adam’s Fall,” a vision described and depicted in the first book of Hildegard’s major work Scivias .
At bottom, we take the original depiction as our root. From this we retrace the six basic steps of Hildegard’s account of her spiritual vision, recomposing it in stages until we reach the fallen Adam at the top. Our visual procedure heightens and unsettles the picture to approximate the tumult of inner vision.
I believe in God — Bach’s God. (Glenn Gould)
The Latin text of the Roman Mass has been set to music repeatedly throughout the history of Western music. Since that text has been relatively stable since the 11th century, it forms a useful constant when set within different musical scores, allowing us to make unusual but telling comparisons among them.
Having chosen Bach’s Mass in B minor of 1749 as the canonical work, we compared it to two other contrapuntal compositions. In this lightbox we compare the “Gloria” sections of Bach’s composition and Ockeghem’s Missa Mi-mi of the 15th century. In the next lightbox, we compare Bach with Beethoven.
The paired scores are rotated counter-clockwise, allowing time to run upwards. The words of the Mass are arranged on their inner margins. We track and inscribe the order in which the singers advance through the words, illuminating the ebb and flow of vocal time in counterpoint. In this fashion, the unique differences of the musical structures disclose themselves to the eye: the concise clarity of Ockeghem, the intricate enumeration of Bach, and the complex convolution of Beethoven.
As the previous lightbox, we compare the “Gloria” section of Bach’s Mass in C to that of another contrapuntal mass — in this case, Beethoven’s Mass in C major of 1807.
The paired scores are rotated counter-clockwise, allowing time to run upwards. The words of the Mass are arranged on their inner margins. We track and inscribe the order in which the singers advance through the words, illuminating the ebb and flow of vocal time in counterpoint.
I fear I am writing a requiem for myself.
These words, imputed to Mozart, may never have passed his lips. Perhaps they were put there after he died, feeding a hungry legend: the tale of the uncanny Requiem commission delivered by the mysterious messenger, the musical testament belying the pauper’s grave.
But even so: Some such thought must have run through Mozart’s mind as he lay on his deathbed. Among the last of the sacred lines he had set to music were these from the Latin:
On this day of tears / the accused rises from the ashes / to be judged.
When death came to Mozart in his 35th year, it was brutally profane. Nothing exalted in the actual performance of his death:
Suddenly he began to vomit – it spat out of him in an arch – it was brown, and he was dead.
Thus the words of his widow, who soon engaged another man, Mozart’s student Süssmayr, to complete the unfinished work. This she passed off as entirely her husband’s own, though slight differences in the handwriting would eventually bare the truth.
No matter. Rising above the compromised life and score, the Requiem reached a pinnacle of sacred music, where it still stands today.
— Our lightbox draws upon three elements to illuminate Mozart’s last days and final work.
At bottom, Mozart’s wardrobe from a list of his remaining effects, drawn up by the tax assessors after his death.
In the middle, a walkthrough of Mozart’s last apartment, as described (evocatively if not accurately) by a writer visiting it a few decades later.
And at top, the score itself, rotated counter-clockwise, with Mozart’s last measures rendered in his own hand. We link these last notes to the music Süssmayr ghostwrote afterwards by drawing arcs between similar sequences of pitches, with width of line indicating degree of similarity.
What is body without spirit? Earth or muck, isn’t it? The spirit must rise from the earth… Ludwig van Beethoven
It was against terrible odds — but perhaps in part because of them — that Beethoven created the music that clearly marked him for immortality.
If Beethoven now seems the very figure of the tormented genius — rebellious, explosive, and isolated — he had ample physical reason to be. Deaf by age 30, he was cut off not only from hearing his own music performed, but also from joining in the social solace of ordinary conversation.
Less well-known is that Beethoven was wracked by mysterious but debilitating pain, the cause of which was to come to light only 178 years later. A lock of his hair and fragments of his skull, collected at his death, now gave up their secret to a bombardment of x-rays, which revealed the lead poisoning that had made his life one of harrowing physical agony.
For his Choral Fantasy of 1808, Beethoven commissioned the poet Christopher Kuffner to set lines of verse to the measures of music he’d already composed. One such line — Night and storm turned to light — gives us not only the kernel of meaning that we trace through Beethoven’s life in words, but also the visual form of our composition.
In 1951 another German poet, Michael Hamburger, selected and translated into English the most telling letters, journals, and conversations by and about Beethoven. Having highlighted passages from this work, we link them as we search upward through a chain of associations.