Wölflilieder features Felipe Rossi (Ph.D. candidate in Music Composition) and Johannes Regnier (Ph.D. student in Computer Music) with collaborators including Music professor Stephanie Richards, Anna Robinson (2nd-year MFA in Scenic Design), and new media artist Abe King (an MFA student in Visual Arts). The intricate and rich images of Swiss painter Adolf Wolfli reflected themes that preoccupied the schizophrenic artist.

The title of this work evokes the name of Swiss painter Adolf Wolfli (1864-1930). A team led by UC San Diego Ph.D. candidate in Music Composition, Felipe Rossi, and Computer Music Ph.D. student Johannes Regnier, will mount a large-scale, immersive multi-movement work evoking parallels to the dark themes of the Swiss artist’s oeuvre. Those themes included mental disorder, horror vacui, arcane cosmologies, siin and resurrection, logorrhea, iconophilia, terrae incognitae, tantric mandalas, psychopathologies, paratactic accidents, apotropaic incantations, and so on.

Wölfli conceived of himself as a multimedia artist in a way only a schizophrenic could imagine: his drawings were also musical compositions. His multi­cultural symbols were imbued with sounds, and to the artist, time was reconceived as a unit of space. In modern parlance, his work was a mash-up of hallucinatory representations, ingenious poetry, fiendishly complex musical notation, ingenious mathematics (whole sections consist of only numbers), imaginary travelogues, and webs of keywords. First and foremost­, however, came his most imaginative storytelling. For the intricate world he devised, Wolfli created rich images and musical calligraphy. (at times, he tried to play the notes on a trumpet made of cardboard).

The performance will involve live trumpet music with electronics, modular schemes for improvisation, recursive structuring within audio and visual dialogues, interlaced visual elements – including images, texts, movies, and more – and exploration of complex sonic and visual spectra.