Think of it as a new spin on the old line, "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." Architect Gabriel Calatrava, Santiago's son, designed a stage set for the Seeing Music festival held last weekend at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, a flexible series of lines that suggests geometric obsession runs in the family. A mathematician himself who also studied engineering, the younger Calatrava created the installation as a backdrop for the Brentano String Quartet's live performance of J.S. Bach's "The Art of the Fugue," a work filled with counterpoints and compressed and stretched phrases. The rotating series of plastic bands, inspired by the child's game Cat's Cradle and set within a 24-by-17 foot frame, was fashioned from the same elastic you might find in your waistband.
"The geometric nature of it is very inspired by mathematical formulas," says Calatrava. "I used the precision of math to help me create something I thought really represented Bach."
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