I play the viola, and I love to play chamber music. String quartets often contain a movement using a form called "theme and variations". I confess to feeling irritated with these movements most of the time, for example the theme and variations movement of Schubert's "
Trout" quintet. However, one of my favorite quartet movements, interestingly also by Schubert, is the theme and variations movement from the "
Death and the Maiden" quartet. Schubert originally wrote the themes of these movements in art songs, which I suppose he used as the musical equivalent of sketches used by an artist as studies for a larger work.
(As an aside, this link to Death and the Maiden goes to a performance by the Borromeo Quartet, which is probably the first of the major chamber groups to perform not with printed music, but with PDFs on laptops. See if you can tell when they "turn the page". I found it to be much less obtrusive than turning a physical page.)
At this point, you may be wondering what this has to do with autism or with Singularity. Well, this post is all about a visual theme and variations.
Theme:
Variation 1:
Variation 2:
Variation 3:
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Many thanks,
Amelia