Thomas Clark – composer / digital artist

Tag: abstract art

  • IMAGINED WORLDS

    serial music

    surreal images

    YouTube podcast

    2026 . . . abstract serial music and surreal digital images . . . 13 minutes

    While the Belgian Magritte began making surrealist art in 1920s Paris, the Russian Kandinsky was at the Bauhaus in Weimar making abstract art. In 1923 Vienna, Arnold Schoenberg unveiled his newly developed “method of composing with twelve tones related only with one another.” This serial 12-tone row technique became a prevalent compositional method through the middle of the 20th century.
    A hundred years later, IMAGINED WORLDS synthesizes music from VIENNESE SKETCHES, which draws on material from my earliest 12-tone work in 1975 through 2023.

    12-tone rows

    The five rows generating each of the tableaux are distinct but subtle variants of each other.

    Standard Pitch Class numbers (C=0) are identified.

  • MATH MUSIC

    YouTube podcast

    How do prime numbers sound? Or Pi, or the Fibonacci series? It depends completely on how these patterns are interpreted as sound.


    This YouTube podcast by composer/professor Thomas Clark brings them to time-life with many eclectic compositional styles of contemporary art music. Interesting number patterns are realized as intriguing sound colors, chords, melodic lines, even as the ancient musical technique of canons, over a kinetic visual background of my semi-abstract art images.

  • Crystallography

    2024 . . . Abstract video and digital sound

    This is the first time I began a multimedia piece with the visual element as primary design concept rather than the music, with visuals joining after. The visual concept, as suggested by the title, is an exploration of patterns in nature featuring complex masses and threads of color. They resemble busy Jackson Pollack action paintings revealing isomorphic patterns. The title evokes the abstract patterning of molecular crystal growth.

    The synthesized “soundtrack” is music adapted from my 2022 work, STONEHENGE for solo classical guitar: