Greetings. My name is Niles Luther. I am a classically trained cellist & composer currently on the National Tour of the Les Misérables broadway show. Performing nightly in this show provides stability while I pursue my deeper musical interest: Art music, or bespoke scores that attempt to transmedialize the narrative content of visual art into music.

This article aims to provide a brief introduction to a collection of Art Music NFTs that I’ve been developing since October of 2022 when my tour started. Mirror.xyz will serve as the documentation site as I work on the collection. Rollout will ensue in midsummer of 2023. Continue reading to join me on this journey.

https://nilesluther.com/

As a genre, Art Music lies somewhat unexplored; there exists only a handful of notable examples from the canon. These include:

• Rachmaninoff’s ‘Isle of the Dead, Op. 29’ after Arnold Bocklin’s namesake painting

• Mussorsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ after a series of photos by Viktor Hartmann

• Debussy’s ‘La mer, L. 109’ after Hokusai’s ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’

Each composition probes a concept known in poetics as ekphrasis, which can be defined as follows:

“Ekphrasis has been considered generally to be a rhetorical device in which one medium of art tries to relate to another medium by defining and describing its illuminative liveliness.” (Wikipedia contributors. “Ekphrasis.” Wikipedia, 8 Jan. 2023, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekphrasis.)

Musical ekphrasis, the core artistic exploration of this project, is then the attempt to capture the spirit of a painting through the language of music, thusly enhancing the experience of the original visual. Here is an example of musical ekphrasis, an original composition of mine which doubles as my genesis NFT minted on Catalog:

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x0bC2A24ce568DAd89691116d5B34DEB6C203F342/157

The nature of my Here on Tour project lies within the predetermined logistics of the Les Misérables National Tour. I have taken my home studio and broken it down into three Pelican cases that travel in one of the eleven Les Misérables eighteen wheelers.

Our weekly schedule consists of traveling to a new city on Mondays to perform the show. Once we arrive we perform 8 shows Tuesday-Sunday before flying to our next city on the following Monday. In each city I visit a major museum in search of paintings that speak to me. My selection criteria is based on works within the public domain (this is invariably typified by the old masters) which resonate with me aesthetically and/or narratively. My mornings and afternoons are then spent in the flow of composing, a musical response to these found paintings.

The resulting body of work will be a formal collection of music NFTs to be released at the close of my time on tour. This collection will be comprised of 20-30 Art Music compositions inspired by paintings that I have curated from coast to coast of the United States of America. The assets of the collection will be .jpegs I have personally taken of each painting, and .wavs produced from recordings I make of my fellow instrumentalists in the Les Misérables orchestra.

As a cellist of 22 years and composer for 5, I am deeply passionate about the dissemination of music that marries the storied tradition of classical music with modernity.

Historically, a composer would need the sponsorship of a major centralized player to support an endeavor such as this. However, smart contracts have, in so many ways, liberated the savvy composer who is capable of recognizing the potential offered by tokenized works on-chain.

Therefore, in this specific moment, and for this specific project, I am interested in the power of the blockchain to provide tangibility, collectibility, and financial solvency to my output, irrespective of any authority other than my own.

Once I have selected a painting, and typically on the plane to the next city, I briefly journal in an informal note on my phone what my thoughts and feelings were as I stood in front of that work. In the next city’s hotel I will record a voice memo of an initial melody, motif, or harmonic idea I believe captures the spirit of the painting. These voice memos are improvisatory, organic, and unpremeditated. They signal the inception point of my creative process and I consider them the initial sketches of what will be my larger opus. I will include them as unlisted NFTs in each mirror entry for my day ones to witness and appreciate.

I am 8 compositions into the collection already, so the following articles will be a backlog of entries from my notes app that I’ve only recently decided to share publicly. They are my uncensored thoughts, opinions, and experiences of the paintings from each city’s museum. The goal with the publication of these notes is to quietly build provenance as well as provide a historical documentation for the concretization of Art Music as a niche, but respectable genre of music in the world at large and on the blockchain.

Welcome to my tour within a tour.

Greetings. My name is Niles Luther. I am a classically trained cellist & composer currently on the National Tour of the Les Misérables broadway show. Performing nightly in this show provides stability while I pursue my deeper musical interest: Art music, or bespoke scores that attempt to transmedialize the narrative content of visual art into music.

This article aims to provide a brief introduction to a collection of Art Music NFTs that I’ve been developing since October of 2022 when my tour started. Mirror.xyz will serve as the documentation site as I work on the collection. Rollout will ensue in midsummer of 2023. Continue reading to join me on this journey.

https://nilesluther.com/

As a genre, Art Music lies somewhat unexplored; there exists only a handful of notable examples from the canon. These include:

• Rachmaninoff’s ‘Isle of the Dead, Op. 29’ after Arnold Bocklin’s namesake painting

• Mussorsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ after a series of photos by Viktor Hartmann

• Debussy’s ‘La mer, L. 109’ after Hokusai’s ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’

Each composition probes a concept known in poetics as ekphrasis, which can be defined as follows:

“Ekphrasis has been considered generally to be a rhetorical device in which one medium of art tries to relate to another medium by defining and describing its illuminative liveliness.” (Wikipedia contributors. “Ekphrasis.” Wikipedia, 8 Jan. 2023, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekphrasis.)

Musical ekphrasis, the core artistic exploration of this project, is then the attempt to capture the spirit of a painting through the language of music, thusly enhancing the experience of the original visual. Here is an example of musical ekphrasis, an original composition of mine which doubles as my genesis NFT minted on Catalog:

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x0bC2A24ce568DAd89691116d5B34DEB6C203F342/157

The nature of my Here on Tour project lies within the predetermined logistics of the Les Misérables National Tour. I have taken my home studio and broken it down into three Pelican cases that travel in one of the eleven Les Misérables eighteen wheelers.

Our weekly schedule consists of traveling to a new city on Mondays to perform the show. Once we arrive we perform 8 shows Tuesday-Sunday before flying to our next city on the following Monday. In each city I visit a major museum in search of paintings that speak to me. My selection criteria is based on works within the public domain (this is invariably typified by the old masters) which resonate with me aesthetically and/or narratively. My mornings and afternoons are then spent in the flow of composing, a musical response to these found paintings.

The resulting body of work will be a formal collection of music NFTs to be released at the close of my time on tour. This collection will be comprised of 20-30 Art Music compositions inspired by paintings that I have curated from coast to coast of the United States of America. The assets of the collection will be .jpegs I have personally taken of each painting, and .wavs produced from recordings I make of my fellow instrumentalists in the Les Misérables orchestra.

As a cellist of 22 years and composer for 5, I am deeply passionate about the dissemination of music that marries the storied tradition of classical music with modernity.

Historically, a composer would need the sponsorship of a major centralized player to support an endeavor such as this. However, smart contracts have, in so many ways, liberated the savvy composer who is capable of recognizing the potential offered by tokenized works on-chain.

Therefore, in this specific moment, and for this specific project, I am interested in the power of the blockchain to provide tangibility, collectibility, and financial solvency to my output, irrespective of any authority other than my own.

Once I have selected a painting, and typically on the plane to the next city, I briefly journal in an informal note on my phone what my thoughts and feelings were as I stood in front of that work. In the next city’s hotel I will record a voice memo of an initial melody, motif, or harmonic idea I believe captures the spirit of the painting. These voice memos are improvisatory, organic, and unpremeditated. They signal the inception point of my creative process and I consider them the initial sketches of what will be my larger opus. I will include them as unlisted NFTs in each mirror entry for my day ones to witness and appreciate.

I am 8 compositions into the collection already, so the following articles will be a backlog of entries from my notes app that I’ve only recently decided to share publicly. They are my uncensored thoughts, opinions, and experiences of the paintings from each city’s museum. The goal with the publication of these notes is to quietly build provenance as well as provide a historical documentation for the concretization of Art Music as a niche, but respectable genre of music in the world at large and on the blockchain.

Welcome to my tour within a tour.