Presto 126/4 - a bagatelle!

Despite the literal meaning of "trifle", a bagatelle in Beethoven's work is far more than just that. As a musical aphorism this bagatelle captivates the audience through its brevity and rightly has been called "modern". Beethoven composed the piece around 1823/24 as part of his third Bagatelle Cycle, op. 126, which he himself described in the following way: "6 bagatelles [...] for piano only, [which] are likely the best of this type I have ever written...".

The piece is ideal for a visualisation in a virtual environment (VE). It is short - storytelling productions in a VE can hardly finance more than five minutes - and clearly divided into four main parts with a lot of repetitions. For the optical performance of the piece on the Stage for Music Visualisation (production: Fraunhofer Institute for Media Communication) two types of visualisation were combined:

In a classical sense, visualisations go in line with the musical structure and illustrate more or less the notes. Opposed to this approach, a new type of music visualisation has been established during the last years: Computer applications such as "iTunes" or "Windows Media Player" offer not only music but also generate coloured images by means of the music's physical data.

"Presto 126/4" transfers such a visualisation software to a VE for the first time. Through a scientific approach to music, precision for all frequency ranges can be established in a three-dimensional and interactive way. Using a music interpretation typical for humanities, the anonymous data flow is divided into units to create a clear competition between technical and musical experience.