Cover of Maple Leaf Rag
1 2016-12-05T19:13:50-08:00 Sarah Richman beb66f0b62cd0c55d75ac46cfcf447f52ffe6aa8 13556 2 Maple Leaf Rag (1988) by Ellen Banks; published by Nexus Press plain 2016-12-06T09:59:18-08:00 Sarah Richman beb66f0b62cd0c55d75ac46cfcf447f52ffe6aa8This page is referenced by:
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Maple Leaf Rag by Ellen Banks
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In Maple Leaf Rag, Ellen Banks, an artist who has recently begun focusing on the organized nature of music, reimagines Scott Joplin's piano score of Maple Leaf Rag into a visual coding where different notes and tones correspond to different colors and shapes. One particular example that I noticed is how a half-beat is represented as a triangle, and full beats are represented by full squares, thus employing the half-to-whole relationship between triangles and squares. By analyzing the form of this work, it's clear that Banks strives for her readers to focus on the visual aspects of the piece, such as the geometric shapes and color, but also the functional relationship between the negative and positive space she creates.
I find this book intriguing because what Banks is doing is replacing symbols that represent musical notes--which is its own symbolic language--with other geometric symbols to then represent those aforementioned musical symbols. In this way, Banks makes Maple Leaf Rag more accessible to those who don't know how to read music, due to the geometric aspects of the notes that she's translated. For those who don't know how to read music, they may not be able to recognize, for example, the symbol that represents a half-beat while reading music, but they can read the visual relationship between the triangles and the squares.
However, it is difficult, as a reader, to recognize what the colors specifically represent without some prior knowledge of music.Banks states that the color red (I'm assuming that it comes out more pink on the paper) denotes the key of Maple Leaf Rag. Due to the fact that some of Banks' readers will have musical background and some will not, it is entirely possible for each reader, or viewer, to have a different experience with the visual text, either attempting to read the colors and shapes as notes and tones that guide the music, or perhaps seeing those visual symbols in a completely different way, devoid of musical knowledge.
