Years

It’s difficult to lay a finger on how Bartholomäus Traubeck’s deceivingly simple “Years” manages to be so curiously evocative. The piece, quite essentially, consists of a modified record player that reads slices of wood, translating year ring data into music. Grain and ring density and color and width are converted into piano tones— every slice of wood will, then, produce unique music. There are years and years of history ingrained in any given cross-section, decades, perhaps even centuries. Tree rings reveal an entire chronology of climatic phenomena, of course. But “Years” acknowledges that data and continues outwards; it is a passage of years, a flow of time, the gathering of individual events that become trivialized within the sheer scale of the entirety.

What is interesting about Traubeck’s piece is the relationship between the concrete and the abstract, the input and the output. Reading yearly rings is on the whole fairly objective, and once the translation has been coded, the process is straightforward, transparent. Yet how the sure bts soccer tips.com artist chooses to make the translation is entirely within his control. What qualities in the cross-section will become what qualities in the music? How far, which way? The relationship is arbitrary, up to the artist’s discretion. As a critic succinctly phrases, “the design object is at once material— an interactive sculpture— and immaterial, interpreting an inanimate ‘fossil’ into arguably the most abstract art form,” music.

The finished product is deep, sparse, heavy. There is a certain dignity about it, something in its air that is greater in scale than a record player and a bit of tree. Our ears pick up the sounds, sometimes nearly careful, sometimes discordant when it hits a knot in the wood, and join them into something conceptual, something not physical. We’re reading history, reading time, constructing a tentatively cohesive narrative— only not with our eyes, but through our ears.