HARMONIELHERE / OSM

A Symphony for Your Senses

The SAT Presents a Visual Voyage Inspired by John Adams’ Orchestral Work
Orchestral symphonies can sweep listeners away into faraway worlds with their atmospheric ballads, breathing inspiration and wonder with every note—and Montreal’s Société des Arts Technologiques wants to take that feeling to a literal level.

Through the magic of eight video projectors and 157 surrounding speakers, the dome functions as a cinema for the metaphysical and the awe-inspiring—in this case, Harmonielehre creates a visual life for a work of music.

The film is a phantasmic visualization of a symphonic piece of the same name by American composer John Adams. The piece is performed by the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, and the accompanying film is an image-based materialization of the music. The result is an often-overlapping kaleidoscope of imaginary and real landscapes, all set to the soundtrack of the powerful symphony.

Johnny Ranger was responsible of the second segment of the 40 minutes animated film.
The brooding second movement, based on the legend of the Fisher King, shuns minimalist processes, favoring bleak Sibelius-like soundscapes, building inexorably slowly to twin climaxes of brutal dissonance, the second of which is drawn from the climactic sonority of the first movement of Gustav Mahler's unfinished Tenth Symphony.

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