Music for Airports

During the first weekend of the festival a huge and impressive LED outdoor screen will be set up on Schouwburgplein to ensure some warmth for those walking between the Schouwburg and the Pathé theatre on the cold winter days. On this enormous eye-catcher, some sections of the festival programme will be screened: the loop temps-travail by Johan van der Keuken, as well as several productions in Exploding Cinema Japan and a few Sonic Fragments, and certainly Music for Airports by Frank Scheffer, that was premièred in the last Holland Festival at Schiphol Airport. The transformation of the musical principle into images is the starting point for many films by Frank Scheffer. The basis for Music for Airports is made up of original compositions by Brian Eno. Scheffer added Eno’s ambient music with images that have the same function as the music: ever present but not emphatic, interesting but not overbearing. It is the intention that these pictures should be screened in public places where they form part of the environment. Unlike the rhythm of music videos, newsreels or
commercials, the ‘ambient images’ have to radiate peace.
The blurred, overexposed images that Scheffer uses in Music for Airports originate in his experimental films for which he used chance in shooting and editing. Scheffer calls the result ‘the emancipation of blur’. Both Eno and Scheffer were inspired by the work of the American composer John Cage, who used chance operations based on the ancient Chinese book of the I Ching. Brian Eno, who also once made a video installation around his Music for Airports, was inspired for his images by the Russian Suprematism of e.g. Malevich. Scheffer’s images have a more organic character, related to the sound of the instruments, and were more inspired by early watercolours such as those of Klee and Kandinski.