Solfege
Asumi Mizuo >

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Writing by Alex Bennet

Solfège (or solfeggio) stems from the word sense – the faculty by which the body perceives an external stimulus. Our ability to sense is essential for appreciating all forms of art. In music, solfège is a system whereby the notes of a scale are associated with individual syllables for the purpose of reading and sight singing a score. This combination of the sight and sound allow the musician to develop a true skill for sensing music, which is imperative during the listening/understanding process.
If we are to assimilate the reception of visual art and music, a fundamental difference lies in the presentation of the work itself. The artwork in its physical form is technically the score and the music simultaneously, while the artist is both composer and performer. In order for the music (or artwork in this case) to resonate with the audience, they must sense the melody of the colors, harmony of the lines and rhythm of the form, essentially, initiating the act of solfège.

Writing by Alex Taylor

Most people know Solfège from the Sound of Music (Do, a deer…), but this musical concept is more than just a cute little ditty. It is a conduit between notation and performance, that is, a way to transform notes on a page – a musical score – into sound, and conversely to capture live sound on the page. Asumi Mizuo explores this concept through photography, looking at the way in which art is experienced and represented; she treats the photographic image both as a musical score and as a performance of that score, dissolving the hierarchy between process and product, notation and sound. Solfège, according to common parlance, is a musical system whereby musicians can understand communicated (e.g. printed) notation and create sound equivalent to (as a representation of) the notation. For example, the note “do” can represent a fixed pitch, that is, a specific frequency that we can hear. The concept of “do” is a theoretical one but in practice it represents an actual physical event. Solfège is simultaneously an idea and a performative representation of that idea.

 The immediacy of this work presents the viewer with the challenge of experiencing it through their own lens; “reading” the score and “performing” the image as a real object. The viewer translates the image back into an object, the notation into live sound. Thus something captured in time is transformed into an experience shaped by memory and physical senses.

In order to function as a discourse, the artwork needs to possess the characteristics of a “score”, that is, the viewer must be allowed to “read” what the artist has “written” and process a response or performance that reflects the combination of artist and audience intent. The viewer must in a sense decode the image and translate it into a language that connects artist, image and audience. Of course, the viewer has the potential to misinterpret the artist’s intent, but ultimately the artist decides what the viewer sees; the
artist creates the score, so the freedom of the interpretation/performance depends largely on how prescriptive or ambiguous the score is. That is, the artist can to a large extent determine the framework of the performance: within that framework, however, the viewer brings his/her own ideas and preconceptions to creating an experience of the artwork. Thus both artist and audience have the power to create/alter the artwork in terms of its function as a discourse: both parties must exercise that power for a true “performance” to be realized.

Just as in Western art-music, a concept of connection between medium and performer (here both artist and audience) is the basis of photography as a performative art. The photograph itself is representational, a document of sorts, but when the photograph is viewed, when it is experienced by a viewer, this to me transforms the art from a representation into a performance. Much like in John Cage’s “4’33” the onus of the performance is transferred from the artist/performer onto the audience: listening/viewing becomes the performance itself. Crucially in photography, the concept of a “score” is even more foregrounded than in music; the viewer can simultaneously access the object (score) and image (representation/artist’s performance), and in doing so necessarily performs the work. There is a more direct transformation of the object into the artwork: the object is not only present, it is inseparable from its representation, its performance.