An Eleven-Metre Drawing Becomes a Musical Score

An eleven-metre hand-drawn score will be the starting point for a new music performance at the 42nd Langenloiser Herbst in Lower Austria on 8 November.

The work, titled Sie werden schauen mit den Ohren—approximately, You Will See with Your Ears—originates with filmmaker and producer Rudolf Klingohr. Wanting to compose without being able to read or write conventional notation, he set down musical ideas through colours and lines.

The premiere will bring those visual instructions into contact with live interpretation. The score’s physical length is striking, but the central artistic question lies in the relationship between what can be seen on the page and what musicians make audible.

Unlike a conventional staff, a drawing does not necessarily specify every pitch, duration or instrumental gesture in the same way. Its performance depends on the conventions and decisions established between the maker and the interpreters. The announcement describes a meeting between visual composition and musical response, rather than claiming that the image can be translated automatically into sound.

The project also extends Klingohr’s work from moving images into another time-based medium. A film unfolds through an edited sequence; this performance invites a sequence of visual marks to become the basis for an event heard in real time. That comparison helps explain the premise without prescribing how the result will sound.

For the festival, the premiere adds an experimental form to its autumn programme in the wine-growing town of Langenlois. The audience will encounter a work whose score is itself a visual object, with the act of interpretation forming part of its interest.

The announced date is 8 November, so the performance remains forthcoming. Its success cannot yet be judged from the scale of the drawing or the novelty of the idea. The premiere will reveal how Klingohr’s visual thinking and the musicians’ responses combine in a shared musical experience.