Artwork for Musical Offering

Saturday, January 13, 2018

In January 2018, Yellow Barn's residency of J.S. Bach's Musical Offering, with interludes by Lei Liang's Garden Eight, toured from Putney to Symphony Space in New York, and to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. Yellow Barn designer John Kramer and Artistic Director Seth Knopp collaborated on graphic interpretation of the program.

John Kramer describes the image:

The central geometric form in the cover art is derived from the shape of a fountain in the gardens at Sanssouci, the summer palace of Frederick the Great. The superimposed image of a bare oak tree is rotated 12 times, aligning with the radial symmetry of the fountain’s design, and alluding to Bach’s branching polyphonic structures as well as the 12-pitch theme. Paths leading to the fountain from north, south, east, and west were converted to compass points in acknowledgement of the four-point directionality of Garden Eight.