Animated string quartets

 

Two years ago Open Culture posted about a music lover’s life’s work–Stephen Malinowski aka smalin on YouTube–and how he has produced animated, side-scrolling scores to classical music. He just recently completed a major work: adapting all of Beethoven’s String Quartets.  And for this he turned to San Francisco’s Alexander String Quartet for their recordings.

These animations harken back to the Disney animations.  But they're more "technical" -- I find they really reinforce/ help me see the structure of the music.  You can SEE the canon take shape.  You can see the pedal points.  You can see the how there are extended repeated downward runs of notes, or how one instrument traces a scale or arpeggio that encompasses top and bottom what the other instruments are doing.  

One important point: Malinowski does not choose colors randomly or because they are pretty. Instead, he uses “Harmonic Coloring”:

I’ve assigned blue to be the “home pitch” (the tonic, notataed Roman numeral “I”) because that seemed the most “settled,” and chosen the blue-toward-red direction as the I-toward-V direction because motion toward the dominant (“V”) seems more “active” compared with motion toward the subdominant (“IV”).

 Malinowski has adapted a huge number of these animations.  Here's Mozart String Quartet #14 in G Major, the final movement (and Malinowski's YouTube channel).

Adapted from a new article about Malinowski at Open Culture here.