When students at Neuqua Valley High School want to play a Beethoven quartet on their string instruments, all they have to do is look at the wall.
Orchestra members are putting the finishing touches on a 52-foot-long 5-foot-high score of the opening 30 bars of Beethoven’s First Quartet, Opus 18, No. 1 for violins, viola and cello.
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The wall, depicting the first 45 seconds of the 25-minute piece, shows the score for each of the four instruments, complete with forte (powerfully) and pianissimo (very softly) directives.
It starts with Beethoven’s notation that the quartet is to be played allegro con brio, or “fast with brilliance.”
The idea for the musical mural was hatched by music teacher Drew Austin last summer when the school was under construction. “When I first saw the wall, it screamed out to me that a musical score needed to be there,” Austin said.
For the last eight weeks, student violinists, viola players, cellists and bass players have labored atop a scaffold. “It was trickier to do this than I thought,” Austin said.
The students made six transparencies of the score, illuminated them on the wall with an overhead projector, traced the staffs, notes and markings with pencil and then painted them in.
The tricky part, Austin said, was getting the staffs to line up precisely from transparency to transparency so the lines would not be wavy.
The musicians/painters are Chris Macrander, Lindsey Barry, Jerry Tietz, Brett Sauve, Nichole Beedie, Bill Rietveld, Lisa Piper and Kristen Keiser.
Students said that Beethoven on the wall creates a professional atmosphere for playing classical pieces. “It adds character to the room,” Sauve said. “Before it was a bland room.”
“It’s going to be up there for decades,” Tietz said.
Students wanted the score to be a work of art, so they drew up and insisted each participant sign “The Wallpainters’ Constitution,” a pledge to abide by 12 rules including “Thou shalt work so slowly and painstakingly it hurts” and “Thou shalt not use a ruler with wet paint on it.”