Product Description
This four-movement
composition contains musical interpretations of four of Georgia OKeeffes New
Mexico paintings. The score prints on legal size paper and the parts on letter.
I. From the Faraway Nearby
The
highly charged contrast of closely viewed foreground details and hugely distant
horizons, which typified the New Mexican Views of O'Keeffe, was not a mere
optical illusion. The large scale, bright light, and clear air of the region
permitted one to see for the proverbial "forever," and the
juxtaposition of faraway and nearby was an integral aspect of desert vision. Soft
dynamics and orchestration represent the faraway while the loud dynamics and
orchestration represent the nearby. Near the end, the faraway and nearby begin
to merge.
II. Jimson Weed, White Flower No. 1
This
painting depicts one of O'Keeffe's favorite subjects: a magnified flower. To
her, the delicate blooms stood as some of the most overlooked pieces of
naturally occurring beauty, objects that the bustling contemporary world
ignored. So she made it her mission to highlight their complex structures,
explaining: "When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it,
it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most
people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I
want them to see it whether they want to or not." This movement is slow
and lyrical reflecting the beauty of the close-up image.
III. Red Hills and Bone
O'Keeffe
's most effective composition of bones in the landscape appeared in 1941, with Red
Hills and Bone; the large canvas is also among her most ambitions
evocations of the arid country of which she was by then an owner, having
purchase the house at Ghost Ranch the preceding year. In 1939, O'Keeffe had
written of the bones as "strangely more living than the animals walking
around," and in the 1941 painting her response is given visual from. The minimalistic
noodling represents the red hills and the bold triplets represent the mystique
of the bone.
IV. Ladder to the Moon
This painting shows a handmade wooden ladder suspended in
the turquoise sky. In the background are the pitch-black Pedernal Mountains and
a pearl colored half moon. This painting was very similar to a picture taken of
O'Keeffe and her surroundings at Ghost Ranch. In the picture, a large wooden
ladder is leaned against an outer wall of a patio from where it rises up into
the sky with the Pedernal Mountains in the background. In Pueblo culture the
ladder is used to symbolize the link between the Pueblos and cosmic forces. The
fact that the ladder is pointed up in the sky may represent the link between
nature and the cosmos.
While
there are motifs that depict specifics of the painting, such as the scale-wise
ascending and descending figure for the crescent mood and rising arpeggios for
the ladder, the focus of this movement is the spiritual element. The music rises
and grows in intensity from a ground bass-like theme to a soaring ending.
This product was created by a member of ArrangeMe, Hal Leonard's global self-publishing community of independent composers, arrangers, and songwriters. ArrangeMe allows for the publication of unique arrangements of both popular titles and original compositions from a wide variety of voices and backgrounds.