Equipped with the latest in animation, and a large jazz ensemble, students at Parsons the New School for Design and The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music create “visual music works,” where
music and animation come together in new and compelling ways.
The event marks the culmination of the university's first studio
course in Jazz and Animation, in which students created original
work through an unusually high level of collaboration.
“From Wassily Kandinsky to Oskar Fischinger, artists have long been exploring the relationship between image
and sound,” said Parsons faculty member Ernesto Klar, a media and sound artist whose work was just featured at
the PULSE Contemporary Art Fair in New York. “Today’s technology brings the work of visual artists and musicians
to a whole new level, and over the past several months our students have experimented with a variety of analog
and digital technologies to create innovative audio-visual works.”
In the course, Parsons animation and New School Jazz composition students worked in teams where they took on
the roles of composers, writers, directors, production managers, animators, videographers, concept artists,
character designers, set designers, and technical directors to complete original works of visual music. In
preparation for this highly collaborative process, the student composers participated in a composition course
taught by Klar in the fall and spring where they were trained to think critically about sound-image relationships,
and encouraged to conceive musical composition beyond its conventional accompaniment role.
The Jazz and Animation studio is co-taught by Parsons faculty member Ben Katchor. An award-winning and widely
published illustrator, Katchor recently wrote, animated, and directed the highly acclaimed production of “The Slug
Bearers of Kayrol Island,” a collaboration with musician Mark Mulcahy.
Among the works to be presented on May 4 are an animated ecosystem that changes and grows in response to
the musical score; a piece that brings to life children’s dreams with the music moving the animation from the
conscious to unconscious state; and another that transforms the live musicians into on-screen avatars, who act
out virtual stories through the music performed live onstage.

Claudio Midolo from MFADT