Eye Music: Series & Performance

“Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang”

Janet Boulton’s ‘Eye Music’ watercolours began with still lifes of the glass shelves and jam jars installed in her studio window, coupled with the graphic forms of the scores of medieval plainchant. The series has since evolved into complex compositions, which integrate musical motifs with the resonant architectural and sonic spaces of liturgy and ceremony. This book gathers examples of these series of images and their sources—from the early studio works to those responding to the interiors of ecclesiastical buildings—with readings and descriptions of performances and recitals by players and archivists, who have explored the work’s possibility for musical improvisation.

Included is Joe Scarffe’s essay ‘An Introduction to Eye Music’; and with further contributions by Jonathan Arnold, James Crockford, Daryl Green, Lynda Sayce, Tom Soper, Giovanni Varelli, and Simon Whalley.

Fully illustrated in colour and black & white