Beethoven & Toscanini - "Only the Sprit"

The image at the top of the work is an enlargement of Beethoven's handwritten musical notation for one of his symphonies. The red, swirling background is a close-up photo of stained glass which has been manipulated in Photoshop.

In a documentary done on the great conductor Arturo Toscanini, a brief clip records him exhorting the symphony orchestra at rehearsal. These words are a short excerpt from that. Whether it is music or calligraphy it is not the literal notes or words we want to dwell on but the transcendent spirit that overtakes and transports us to a higher sphere.

The calligraphy was written with a broad edge metal nib on paper with black ink. Several size enlargements and reductions were made of it. These were cut and pasted and were touched up by hand, scanned into the computer, and were reversed. This was printed out, and cut out, and after many attempts shuffling the phrases around over the background ,they were lightly glued down. This was then scanned, and color copies were made.

The intention from the outset was to have a reproduced piece suitable to make multiple prints from. For years I have been inspired by this quote and have done it in several ways. Once I saw the musical notation handwritten by Beethoven I knew I had to integrate it with other elements. Over the course of months I pursued different ways of doing this and had limited successes and many failures. I would let go, and inevitably a new pathway would suggest itself. I came up with a way of breaking up the text that seemed satisfying. In doing the lettering I wanted a form of blackletter that was not “pretty”, that reflected the text and imagery. The lower case forms came somewhat naturally. But the upper case letters stumped me. Especially “A”. After researching and trying all permutations of traditional and non-traditional blackletter capital “A”s, I simply had to invent one! DONE.

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