Seminar @ Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln
Visual Music in the 1980s
June 7th, 2022
Jono Podmore, professor of Popular Music and chair of the master's degree program in Music Production at the prestigious Cologne University of Music, invited me to talk to his class about one of my favorite subjects, Visual Music.
In my two-day seminar we considered a classic in the realm of Visual Music, the 1982 American experimental non-narrative film Koyaanisqatsi produced and directed by Godfrey Reggio with music composed by Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke. Only a few months earlier on August 1, 1981 MTV (an initialism of Music Television) launched from New York City, and changed our perception of music forever. The students used both milestones to contextualize their own music and visualizations.