Oxford American | Absolute Music in Austin

Artist: Tracy Anne Hart

Project: Absolute Music: Proximity and Perception

Description: In my pictures and my writing, I preserve returning to a Hermann Hesse citation from considered one of my favourite books, Demian. I used it because the title of an exhibit I had at Antone’s Nightclub in 2017. Perhaps its validity and its succinct and evergreen summation of the sounds that I really feel in my soul are so exact and exquisite that I do know I can’t probably prime it:

“I like listening to music, but only the kind you play, absolute music, the kind that makes you feel that someone is rattling at the doors of heaven and hell.”

I’d name “Absolute Music” a therapeutic and transcendent plunge into one thing past simply the bodily realm, though that core-shaking feeling is most definitely part of its energy. It’s meditative to make sure, however on the velocity of sunshine. Or the beat.

My different ardour is architectural pictures, particularly of buildings adaptively reused as venues, and I’m incorporating a number of these pictures in my undertaking. I see no distinction in these two disciplines, and each, like pictures itself, mix artwork and science. After all, Goethe referred to structure as “frozen music,” however the strings and the spirits vibrate with life.

I’m at present compiling a career-spanning (and past) e-book, and as I’m going on my archeological dig by means of my outdated, unscanned negatives and choose the very best of the hundreds of digital pictures that I’ve created since 2008, I’ve found that my core of artists with connections to the Austin music scene stays fairly steady. With the unlucky exception of the late Stevie Ray Vaughan, a beautiful muse and the topic of my first e-book, Seeing Stevie Ray, an incredible a lot of my favourite topics have performed on the Austin City Limits Music Festival since its inception in 2002. Among them: Jimmie Vaughan, Joe Ely, Ian Moore, Charley Crockett, Leon Bridges, Gary Clark Jr., and the Arc Angels. These are just some of the Texas musicians whose “Absolute Music” attracts me in and holds me, whereas I return time and time once more to attempt to seize their sonic essence.