NOMAD: Visualizing music (original) (raw)
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NOMAD: Drawing Music brings together two artists from Quebec City and a group of elementary school students from Ottawa to collaborate on an original work where drawings and sounds converge. Every pencil stroke, every colour, and every constellation of tiny dots is transformed into a melody that showcases the young participants’ creativity. Developed for the BIG BANG Festival and co-produced by Arts Alive, NOMAD: Drawing Music explores the relationship between music and visual art, inviting us to look at music from a whole new perspective.
This year, multi-instrumentalist and multidisciplinary artist Benoît Fortier and theatre artist Gabrielle Bouthillier from Quebec City’s E27 musiques nouvelles collective were matched with a group of Grade 5 and 6 students from the Foul’Arts program (in French, directed by Vikie Lemieux-Viau) at École élémentaire catholique Jean-Robert-Gauthier in Barrhaven. The two professional artists invited the students to dive into a world where sounds become colours, gestures, and shapes, and where drawings turn into sound. A musical idea becomes an image, a pencil stroke becomes a rhythm, and presto! Magic happens!
“It’s all about discovering sounds. I think the students are a little surprised at first, but they quickly get into it. The games we invite them to play involve imagining, drawing, and playing music according to codes that we invent together. By creating our own codes through creative thinking and discussion, we hope to make the process of composing music more accessible by eliminating the need to learn the rules and conventions of traditional notation.”
Benoît Fortier, Multi-instrumentalist and multidisciplinary artist
During the three days of workshops, students enrolled in Foul’Arts—a program designed to foster their love of the performing arts—explore musical creation through improvisation and visual expression. The objective is to create an original and poetic work, both visual and sound-based, that will be unveiled at the BIG BANG festival.
Through his workshops, Fortier aims to “stimulate the participants’ imagination and creativity, develop their spontaneity, and encourage them to trust their instincts. And help them enjoy being exposed or introduced to this modern approach to making music.”
“We cover educational elements—for example, sound can be described in terms of its timbre, intensity, duration, and pitch. We encourage the students to explore the full spectrum of these characteristics without any constraints on how the music is written.”
Benoît Fortier, Multi-instrumentalist and multidisciplinary artist
The result is a rich and vibrant mosaic where music and drawing intertwine, revealing an imaginary world as luminous as it is surprising!
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