Beethoven's Eroica Symphony is considered by many classical music historians to be the definitive break between the Classical and the Romantic periods. The forceful use of the orchestra combined with his unusual for the time harmonic composition said goodbye to Mozart, Haydn, and all that. There's the legend that Beethoven had first dedicated the Symphony to the memory of Napoleon Bonaparte and once having learned the truth of the man, how he wasn't the democratic liberator he styled himself as, Beethoven scratched the name out and then dedicated the work to the memory of a "great man." The Two Chords at the beginning of the piece struck me in this violent way and I imagined it like when a car hits one of those pop up pylons for parking in the city. If the Eroica was Beethoven's attempt at cutting off Napoleon, then this modern one could be against the figure of a dictator.
Originally created with the idea of the dictator being a Hitler-type figure, the masked character now resembles those horrible photos from Abu Ghraib. Joseph Campbell in his book, "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," says that the danger in not changing, not evolving is that the hero of today becomes the tyrant of tomorrow. Is the lesson of the Eroica that what we see as a virtuous act becomes deplorable with time?
These two are various movie poster illustrations for local showings of classic film. See my Film Poster Projects
Poster for the band, "Computer Perfection," on their New York tour. Hand-Drawn type based off the kind of work I was doing with the Portland Plates project.
When it comes to teaching the CD Cover as an art form in my classes, we scrub the music (Ralph Vaughan Williams' Sinfonia Antarctica in this case) and try to pull out visual images and qualities to use to evoke a certain feeling in the audience. We derive this effect from T. S. Eliot's use of the "objective correalitive" in communicating through design. The CD Cover exists as a fundamental project in my classes as it encourages the student to begin visualizing a way of describing the indescribable (music).
Student Work
