10.4 New development?

video clips. The best known of these is probably Ridley Scott, the director of Alien and Blade Runner. Before those landmarking films, he made many commercials, including the 1973 Hovis commercial ‘Bike Round’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mq59ykPnAE Another classic in commercials is Honda’s choir advertisement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjyWP2LfbyQ and Apple’s somewhat pompous 1984 super bowl commercial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zfqw8nhUwA

Likewise, teams of talented filmmakers worked on making music videos more than simply recording a singing, crooning, and sweating pop artist doing his or her best. Some interesting music videos are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMThz7eQ6K0 David Bowie: Ashes to Ashes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P4A1K4lXDo Janet and Michael Jackson: Scream (one of the most expensive of all times).

The problem is, though, that the music remains pop music with its fixed rhythmic patterns and other limitations that cannot be uplifted by the visual spectacle. The pop artists, often clearly not gifted actors, tend to be overshadowed by all this visual violence, also sometimes of themselves (Marilyn Manson or Alice Cooper).

The music clip and the commercial made it clear that short visual statements without narrative and driven by digital techniques can sometimes lead to something new. They also made it clear that creating something beautiful is not cheap and that it is possible to make something as a symbiosis of music and visuals, even when on their own these have little to say.

10.4 NEW DEVELOPMENT? After 2000, developments in technology enabled composers/theatre makers to make music videos themselves, at home and with friends, that at least look quite professional. The images can be recorded by digital cameras and then be edited and processed with advanced video video software (for instance Reaper is quite popular). A similar development took place in electronic music: the entire studio became digital and could be stored in a laptop. Music editing software that used to be only available to professionals is available for free on the Internet these days (for example Audacity and Supercollider) or can be acquired for a few hundred euros (for example the professional Pro Tools, Max MSP and Reaper). The combination of visuals and electronics has already produced some amazing results, probably also because composers of electronic music are familiar with complicated digital programs and algorithms. In the end, digital creation and processing of visuals and electronic sound are quite similar.

This is still a young medium. What follows is a list of interesting videos that can be found on YouTube. Some of these were also presented at the latest festivals of Donaueschingen: Michel van der Aa, One with Barbara Hamigan. Gaudemaus 2003. Alexander Schubert – Star Me Kitten [soundinitiative] Brigitta Muntendorf abschminken – Ensemble Garage Fausto Romitelli – An Index of Metals 2003 (this is a video that was made later for the music) Sergej Maingardt – It´s Britney, bitch Jagoda Szmytka – Lost play 2 and 14 Michael Beil – Thierry Bruehl – sugar water – Ensemble Modern Michael Beil exit to enter 2013 NADAR Ensemble Patrick Hartono – Noise to Signal (a young composer of electronic music who also makes his own visuals) Ryoji Ikeda – test pattern [100 m version] – Ruhrtriennale 2013 (in this case too, visuals and sound were made by the same artist. It is more like an installation) Johannes Kreidler – Shutter Piece Heiner Müller – Der Mann im Fahrstuhl (this is a new staging of an existing work, processed in video afterwards)