Music

Music renders the auditory experience of sound through visual means — the rhythmic patterns of a musical performance translated into the shapes, textures, and color relationships of the carved woodblock surface. Hagiwara's Music compositions were among his most purely synaesthetic works, the visual representation of sound requiring both abstract compositional freedom and precise technical control. The subject had deep precedent in the modernist tradition of visual music, from Kandinsky's color-sound correspondences to the graphic scores of experimental composers working in Hagiwara's own era.