A multi-disciplinary project with sculptor Julia Stratton Celebrating The Center for Emerging Visual Artists, Astral Artistic Services and The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts

Originating from the memory of sitting beneath my mother's piano as a child, "Music Box" is a twenty-foot cube with scrim sides and a grand piano on top, inside of which an audience of seventy-five sits beneath the piano while surrounded by video projections inspired by the music of Alexander Scriabin. Each string of the piano on top of the cube is separately miced, with the wires from the microphones arching in an enclosing tent around the piano and continuing down through the roof of the cube into eighty-eight speaker-cones suspended above the heads of audience members. The listeners hear more treble or more bass, depending on their location beneath the cones, and experience the music more intimately than is possible in a concert hall.

Imagery from the bronze sculpture and photographs of “Scriabin Music Boxes” is the basis for the video projections. Scriabin is a particularly appropriate composer for a visual and musical collaboration because he had synethsia: the ability to see specific color in relation to specific notes. For example, he experienced C as red, F-sharp as light blue, A-flat as pink. Using his color-to-note assignment, the dominant color of each small sculptural world is determined by the key signature of the corresponding music. The audience is therefore surrounded by a monochromatic environment in the video projection rotating around them for the duration of each piece performed, then the color and environment changes with the next piece of music in the program.

Influenced by Janet Cardiff's "40 Part Motet," I want the project to involve a new way of experiencing the piano as an instrument. A pianist myself, I love the physically surrounding sound when I play. I encountered the same aural experience as a girl listening beneath my mother's piano. I aspire to bring an entire audience the intimate sound heard and felt beneath the piano with "Music Box."
Installed in the street-level glass atrium of the Kimmel Center, "Music Box" will attract a cross section of Philadelphians. Apart from performances, "Music Box" is a compelling visual object in itself, lit from within to reveal eighty-eight hanging cones inside its scrim enclosure and encircled with an exhibit of the small, music box sculptures. My hope is that "Music Box" will attract adults and children who may not usually attend classical music or visual art events.