Music For 18 Musicians — Visual Booklet

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This project was one of the many exercises of my degree preparation course. We students were asked to come up with a leaflet for the audience of the 40th anniversary concert of Steve Reich's "Music For 18 Musicians" that had to double as a poster inspired by the music and made with elements of other artists' works.

Thinking about minimalist music and broadly about minimalist art I remembered about Sol LeWitt wall arts, especially the ones that were made using a kind of graphic code. These pieces are full of rithm and time, exactly what I wanted to convey in the poster from the score.

Sol LeWitt's "Wall Drawing #260" displayed at MoMa in New York.

Studying more "Music For 18 Musicians" I found that despite it's fluid feeling the piece was composed following a strict scheme diveded in 14 parts (12 sections and 2 pulses). For this reason I "composed" the poster following the same rules translated in a layout sistem made of colums in wich I used only two graphic elements at a time, trying to express the music and it's evolution into paper.

The grid used is 14 by 8 and the graphic signs are 4 different types.

The leaflet had to display a brief biography of the composer and a description of the work. Imagining the audience reading this before the show start I worked with an extremely simple layout in wich graphic elements from the poster interacted with the text popping out through the paper like the notes that you can hear when the orchestra tunes up before the show.

The leaflet was designed in a way to pop when closed for it's extreme semplicity and then to wow the audience once opened, kind of the same felling when listening to the score for the first time.