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Pictures of Pictures from Pictures of Pictures(1975-79) 1988
500 copies, unsigned
LP

In March 1975, KP Brehmer's exhibition »Pictures at an Exhibition« opened at the Block Gallery in New York. The ten pictures on display by KP Brehmer are visualizations of the ten movements of Modest Mussorgsky's piano cycle of the same name, »Pictures at an Exhibition«, which he had composed in 1874 after seeing an exhibition in memory of his friend and architect Viktor Hartmann, who had died a year earlier. The ten movements of the cycle, in which Mussorgsky set mostly lost drawings and watercolors by his friend to music and named them after him, are linked by musical promenades that evoke a walk around the exhibition. Brehmer's retranslations into visuals also follow the titles of Hartmann's pictures and Mussorgsky's motifs. Brehmer chose excerpts of 4 to 5 seconds each from the movements of Mussorgsky's piano suite and visualized the sound waves with the help of a sonagraph. The installation-based first presentation of Brehmer's cycle in the New York exhibition also takes up Mussorgsky's promenades. Via five cassette recorders with endless loops, which stood on pedestals between individual picture panels, visitors could listen to the corresponding promenades from Mussorgsky's composition and »ideally«, according to Brehmer, »be guided through the exhibition by the promenades«. It was also in New York that the idea of reinterpreting Brehmer's »Pictures at an Exhibition« musically was born, for which the composer Philip Corner was invited at John Cage's suggestion. In a composition process lasting several years, Corner first created the score »Pictures of Pictures from Pictures of Pictures« (1975-1979), based on Brehmer's visualization and with recourse to Mussorgsky's motifs, and recorded it in 1985 at the Electronic Studio of the Technical University of Berlin. The LP »Pictures of Pictures from Pictures of Pictures« was released in 1988 by Edition Block in an edition of 500 copies.