Seeing New Music

Over the last 10 years, Copenhagen-based graphic designer Denise Burt has been on a unique discovery of contemporary classical music through her work designing covers for hundreds of art music releases. In Seeing New Music she tells, from a personal viewpoint, the stories behind the creation of 24 of her CD designs. She also explains how - starting out as a music novice - she learnt to enquire and engage with the ideas behind the often-complex music in order to create more meaningful designs. She takes us on a visual journey through a diverse range of new music projects and gives us an easily understandable entry-point into a genre of music that is generally considered difficult or elite. 'I've been repeatedly told over the years that the CD is dead... I don't worry any more about them becoming obsolete. What interests me is not the format itself but the challenge of finding a way to represent and communicate conceptual music to new audiences. It's the ultimate design task to try to make someone understand something about a piece of music before they have heard it.' (Denise Burt)