forgery #24 (2013) for violin and video

"forgery #24" performed by Marina Kifferstein at the Columbia University Computer Music Center in New York City

In "forgery #24", for amplified violin, video and tape, I was filmed reproducing the last five bars of Paganini’s twenty-fourth violin caprice. While the fragment lasts less than a few seconds when performed, it takes several minutes to reprint the bars by hand. I found that the pencil’s “rubbing” and “scratching” suggested a rather virtuosic anatomy of its own. I transcribed the audio from this brief documentation, turning it into readable, though rather complex musical notation. In my score, the violinist performs the “scratch-tones” associated with the pen strokes of my documentation. The piece highlights the disparity between music’s articulative forms, i.e., the “sound-itself ” in either performative or prerecorded projections, and the symbolic and ‘digital’ representational schemes commonly found in musical notation and scores.