2.7 Ideocalligraphy and music

The use of two or more colours creates yet another dimension, further enhancing the meaning flow, its mood and emotional content. There is an analogy between music and the movements, points of rest, distances and proximity to be encountered in Ideocalligraphy. This was made clear to me by the interest expressed in Ideocalligraphy by the English composer Michael Parsons, who has followed the development of the ideocalligraphs from their inception in the early 1970ies and to whom I owe a very great debt of gratitude for his unwavering interest and his insistence on my reading the revelatory work 'Seeing Voices. A Journey into the World of the Deaf', by Oliver Sacks, which introduced me to the world of Sign and signing. And most recently I have him to thank for his invention of the neologism Ideocalligraphy. Giving the ideal name to what is now the work of fifty years was no small gift.

Some years back, prompted by one of the compositions of the late P.H.Nordgren, the Finnish composer, I wrote out for him what could be described as an ideocalligraph commentary or response. Across the years his music prompted further ideocalligraph responses. He had them on the walls of the room in which he worked on his compositions and told me that there were times when he liked to pause and look at them. Did he see a correlation between them and the scores on which he worked? And did he on occasion sense, perhaps, a proximity of content and methodology, a shared involvement with the interplay of space and time, sound and quiet, meaning and process, balance and variance?

(c.f. P70 - P71 Sacks: Scott Liddell and Robert Johnson see signing not as a succession of instantaneous "frozen" configurations in space, but as continually and richly modulated in time, with a dynamism of "movements" and "holds" analogous to that of music and speech.)