Excerpt from:

Optical Expression: Oskar Fischinger, William Moritz and Visual Music

An Edited Guide to the Key Concerns

By Cindy Keefer

Oskar Fischinger is credited as the father of Visual Music, but what does this really mean? What were his thoughts on “visual music,” a phrase not found in his writings until the mid-1940s (along with “optick music” and “augenmusik”)? Is he labeled the father of the genre due to his far-reaching influence on generations of animators and filmmakers, rather than as its strongest practitioner?

Yet any question as to Fischinger’s place in the genre presupposes a more basic one: what exactly is visual music? There is a hundred year history of Visual Music on film, and a bibliography stretching back centuries. Interest in the correspondences of sound to color, and music to image, extend back to Aristotle, Pythagoras, and Issac Newton. Today, definitions of Visual Music rapidly change as the field expands.[i] William Moritz, who devoted thirty-five years to the study of Fischinger and Visual Music, described in 1986  “A music for the eye comparable to the effects of sound for the ear,” and asked, “What are the visual equivalents of melody, harmony, rhythm and counterpoint?”[ii]

Simplistic ideas of Visual Music presume a direct illustration or translation of music and thus Fischinger’s earlier films are sometimes mistakenly written off as “Mickey Mouse synchronization.” Yet a more accurate preliminary definition of Visual Music would be “the translation of a specific musical composition (or sound) into a visual language, with the original syntax being emulated in the new visual rendition.”[iii]

“My films are no illustrations of music,” Fischinger declared in a 1947 statement, “Corrections to Richters [sic] Article.” He explained that in his early Studies he used music simply as “an architectural ground plan” from which he took the time and rhythm [transcription of original]:

With the absolute film, music is used to put it over, but the development of optical expression, the invention of new ways of motion in coordination with the Rythmus given in the music … the invention of new Ways of motion is the main … Idea, the main force.  and the time—or Rythmus cordination with music is secondary of less importance. People who say that [these] films are illustrations to music, are…poor in their imagination…or say so intentionaly to lessen the impact of [these] works (for personal reasons…Probably Richters reason). I found out this way of saying (illlustrations of music) is mostly used by people who feel themselfes to be my adversarys because maybe subconsciously they would like to have done it themselfes but for some reason were unabble to do it.[iv]

Fischinger also noted in this 1947 statement that not all of his films are sound films; according to his dates, he made silent films for ten years before making any of the synchronized Studies. In a letter to Hans Richter written in the same period (June 16, 1947), he stated, “I never tried to translate sound into visual expressions.”

© Cindy Keefer, 2012