Richard Ayres: The Garden

We all know that music can conjure up images within us. In Richard Ayres’ No. 50 (The Garden), a work lasting slightly over an hour, things are somewhat the other way around. The Garden of Earthly Delights, a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, is the central point of reference, but also Dante’s Divine Comedy. Searching for the deeper meaning, a man digs through his garden, only to ultimately end up in his own company again. A grotesque drama, tragicomical and full of black humour. The decidedly visual music is underlined graphically and dramatically by image sequences by the experimental filmmaker Martha Colburn. A densely-woven array of moving images, sound, narrative and sung texts, for which the composer has borrowed from Dante, Shakespeare and Poe, to name but a few. Ayres’ composition is as narrative, in a similarly concrete sense, as Colburn’s film is rhythmical and music-oriented. Animated musical theatre? Musical cartoons? Gothic novels set to instrumental music? Richard Ayres calls it "cinema between the ears".