NOODS is short for NOODLES, of course. The imagery brings to mind nurturing food, sloppy slurping, community, love, shared meals, squabbles, messiness, deliciousness, and family both given by birth and chosen throughout life.
The music is intricate choreography for the hands, often stacked, with fingers weaving between fingers. Like noodles, we’re tangled up together on the fork of life, not always harmoniously coexisting but dissonance has its own poetry, its own beauty. It’s those who clash with us that expand our worldview and fortify our sense of self. And that’s yummy!
Every one of the notes within NOODS appears on the artwork, but with repetitions to fill in odd space. The overlapping noodles around the CHOPSTICKS hold bits of the larger piece already illustrated in the dangling noodles. This piece marked the point when I departed from the art score being something legible to be used in performance, the way that the art scores for HUMAN and HALO SCOPE were made to be.
The art score became less of a tool for performance the way that the typed score is, and more a visual expression of the music, allowing for artistic license and flexibility in expression from piece to piece. Reading off of an 18 x 24 page at the piano isn’t very practical anyway! I decided here to let go even further of my practical preoccupations, deciding that I would type out a beautiful score of each piece for instrumentalists and let the visual artwork stand on its own.—Thérèse-Marie ChaiX
THERE’S AN ART FORM LOST TO TIME CALLED EYE MUSIC, OR AUGENMUSIK. IN THE EARLY RENAISSANCE, MUSIC COULD BE FOUND HAND-DRAWN ON ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS IN THE SHAPES OF CIRCLES AND HEARTS. ARTIST AND COMPOSER THÉRÈSE-MARIE CHAIX TAKES THIS ANCIENT ART FORM TO CONTEMPORARY WHIMSICAL EXTREMES CREATING SCORES IN THE form of a MUSICAL GAME OF CONNECT THE DOTS, RAINBOWS ON PUFFY CLOUDS, SATURN’S RINGS, AND NOODLES TANGLED AROUND GIANT VIOLET CHOPSTICKS. SHE METICULOUSLY HAND-DRAWS HER ORIGINAL COMPOSITIONS FOR SOLO PIANO WITH GRAPHITE, COLORED PENCIL, WATERCOLOR, AND PASTEL. HER PROCESS BEGINS WITH THE DESIGN OF THE ARTWORK FULLY FORMED EXCEPT FOR THE NOTES. THE LENGTHS AND SHAPES OF THE STAVES THEN DICTATE THE LENGTH AND SHAPE OF THE MUSIC. THIS VISUAL APPROACH TO MUSIC COMPOSITION IS INTEGRAL TO THERESE-MARIE’S CREATIVE PROCESS. EACH PIECE TAKES BETWEEN TWENTY AND TWO HUNDRED HOURS TO COMPLETE FROM THE CREATION OF THE HAND-DRAWN ART SCORE TO THE COMPOSITION OF THE MUSIC ITSELF. “IT’S puzzled ME FOREVER that CLASSICAL MUSIC IS DEFINED AS ‘SERIOUS MUSIC’ AND YET MUSIC IS SOMETHING WE PLAY. WITH MY WORK, I TAKE PLAY VERY SERIOUSLY.”
