Prometheus 2015 Symphony for Orchestra, Light and Video installation at the Muttertagkonzert “Sound and Colour” 14 x 5 m (46 x 16 ft) Graf-Zeppelin-Haus, Friedrichshafen, Germany; 2015
For Philippe Wozniak’s version of Prometheus 2015, I developed a series of short videos from the landscape, and urban settings. I am onstage with the orchestra using VJ software Resolume Arena with an AKAI controller to coordinate moving photographs, layered imagery and moving light to correspond with the music. The colors shift in speed, intensity and transparency to the movements: Will of the Spirit, Humanity, Dreams, Damnation, and Freeing of Prometheus.
Felicia Glidden
Live Video Composition
Philippe Wozniak
Composer
Symphonisches Jugendblasorchester Friedrichshafen
Alain Wozniak
Musical Director
Daniel Dominguez Teruel
Sound Design
Winfried Schlerde
Poem
Viola Sauter
Reader
Improvisation
Julius Rreger
Bassoon
Nicolas Wozniak
Oboe
I saw the Art or Sound exhibition at the Fondazione Prada in Venice in 2014 which showed the original color keyboard by Scriabin. The catalog had this to say about the symphony Prometheus: the Poem of Fire:
“The symphony “Prometheus: the Poem of Fire (1910) by Russian pianist and composer Alexander Scriabin (Moscow, 1872-1915) was the first composition in history to include notation for lights, interlacing color with sound to create multi-sensorial harmony.
Scriabin envisaged the use of a color keyboard to transpose the “Luce” part of his score into colored light projections for his symphony, associating the 12 tones of the chromatic scale with 12 colors that changed in conjunction with the basic tones of the harmonies.
A specially designed multi-color light projector with colored light bulbs was made from the model by physicist Alexander Moser for the first performance of Prometheus, which was given in Moscow on March 15th, 1911, but the machine that was supposed to perform the lighting part did not operate. The first public presentation of Scriabin’s symphony accompanied by colored lighting happened a year later at the Carnegie Hall in NY. The color portion of the score was played with a color-projection instrument, later named the Chromola, made by Preston S. Miller, a specialist in lighting.” From the Catalogue for “Art or Sound” exhibition at the Fondazione Prada in Venice in 2014.
Composer Philippe Wozniak on this work:
“Every sound that surrounds us, every note, which is played is oscillation. Each color and structure that we see is also a vibration. They all obey similar laws. Where do the combination of these oscillations of color, structure and music lead us?
This question that composer Alexander Scriabin asked in the early twentieth century are revisited by these artists today. Based on Scriabin’s orchestral work “Promethee” (Le Poeme du feu; op. 60) and the myth of Prometheus, Philippe Wozniak collaborates with musicians and visual artists to create a contemporary sound, music and moving light installation.”
This work is supported by Netzwerk Neue Musik , Baden-Würtemburg Stiftung, Kulturbüro Friedrichshafen and Sparkasse Bodensee.