To my knowledge, I am the only sculptor who incorporates a genuine article in his sculpting.
My sculpture I named :Air on the G String” is one such scuspute. that is a real violin with Bronze hands “playing” it. I came up with the idea by realizing that casting the violin would not add to the artistic value of the sculpture, not to mention adding a lot of weight to the piece. With the cost of bronze having doubled in the last few years, I chose to put a real violin in its place. The name comes from a composition by Johan Sebastian Bach. Before he became the renowned composer, he worked for a nobleman, Prince Leopold von Anhalt. Sometime between 1717 to 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote “Orchestration No. 3 in D Major.” He composed this piece especially for his patron. Bach was in his early 30s and not yet an established composer; furthermore, the Anhalt family was not enamored with Bach’s music. Orchestration No. 3 did not get much exposure and languished in a drawer for around 150 years, very much like J.S. Bach’s other famous Opus, the six Brandenburg Concertos, that he composed as an application for a new job with the Margrave of Brandenburg. Since his career with Prince Leopold von Anhalt was at risk, he tried to entice the Margrave to hire him. He sent the six Concertos to him, but just like the “Orchestration No. 3 in D Major,” the Margrave didn’t even listen to any of them, nor did Bach get the job when Prince Leopold unceremoniously fired him.
Luckily, a wise and music-savvy scientist named Carl Sagan was in charge of picking the music for a gold-plated CD that was to be sent into deep space for a future Alien to find. The second Brandenburg Concerto went out on Voyager I in 1977, but the job application to the Margrave of Brandenburg was just a few hundred years too late. The Orchestration No. 3 in D Major at least had a second chance to be heard sooner.
A very talented violinist, a friend of Richard Wagner and the son of Prussia’s Chief Prosecutor, thought to be Germany’s best violinist, discovered Orchestration No. 3 in D Major. In 1871, August Wilhelmj re-scored Orchestration No. 3 so that he could play it on just one string on the violin by changing the key to C Major and lowering the entire score one octave. That string happened to be the lowest string on the violin, the G-string. Audiences came to call it “Air on the G-string.” It was an immediate success and remains so still today. You would recognize it instantly, as it is frequently played at weddings, or you can just Google “Air on the G-string” to hear it.
So how did the G-string get its other, lustier connotation? The 1939 World’s Fair opened in the Queens district of New York. We did not enter World War II until 1941 on the Day of Infamy. The World’s Fair attracted 44 million people, including King George V and his Queen, along with Albert Einstein, and many more notables. But it also attracted a less lofty group, strippers! Mayor Fiorello La Guardia made it the law for strippers to wear a Bikini-like bottom in New York when performing. First, Fredericks of Hollywood and then Victoria’s Secret repurposed the G-string in their naming of the skimpy garment. The G-string on the violin is just a thin wire, and it happens to be the lowest in position and sound of the violin strings. What could be a more appropriate name for Mayor La Guardia’s mandated tiny modesty vestment?
My most recent “handy work” comes from one of my favorite conductors, Bruno Walter, probably the most famous conductor of the twentieth century. He was a friend to Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. I first heard him conducting the Chicago Symphony as a guest conductor when my family lived in Illinois. I did a charcoal sketch of him conducting. And later used that drawing to serve as a model for a sculpture. The right hand is holding a conductor’s baton. The baton is a real conductor’s baton that I incorporated into the work.
The work in progress sits on top of a turntable that makes it easy to view it from all angles. The sculpture is first done in a polymer of clay. Then it is cast in bronze by a technique that has existed for thousands of years, originating with the ancient Greeks: the lost wax technique. A plaster cast is made of the original clay work. The cast is bivalved in order to remove the original clay. The cast is put back together and wax is poured into the cast. Then the wax is removed. That wax is then covered again with plaster. It is melted out by heating the inverted cast so that the wax flows out of a bottom opening. That cast is then filled with bronze, and the cast is chipped off the newly created bronze sculpture. The finished product looks like this.
