On Saturday night at Heliconian Hall, some of Toronto’s most creative young musical minds present new works inspired by visual art. On their website, the Toy Piano Composers invite us to “hear what art sounds like and music looks like.”

Each composer has prepared this little word sketch to introduce us to the thoughts behind their work:

Chris Thornborrow

The film Walking is a playful and skillful animation of people in motion by Ryan Larkin.

What fascinated me about the work is that we only get a quick glimpse of these characters as they shuffle, saunter, and dance across the screen.

These brief encounters foreshadow Larkin’s relationships and experiences with people in years to come. A few years after the completion of Walking, Larkin’s life would unravel, and he spent the majority of the rest of his life living on the streets in Montreal.

In the 2004 documentary Alter Egos, Ryan Larkin said, “I decided it was more interesting to live on the street. At least I get to meet a hundred people a day. . . It’s kind of interesting. . . meeting all these people for just two seconds.”

I tried to capture these fleeting, but energetic moments in my music. The film Walking can be seen here http://www.nfb.ca/film/walking

Christian Floisand

The artwork by Sylvain Coutouly is a piece of fan art of the game Sword & Sworcery (although not officially art for the game, the artist does work at the studio that made the game).

In writing music inspired by this art, my aim was to capture the very atmospheric mood of it, yet also bring across a sense of wonder, adventure, and quirkiness that the game is known for.

I also wanted it to have a more contemporary feel, inspired by pop/rock, so that’s how the hammered guitar idea came into play.

The artwork was created on May 4, 2012, and can be seen on the artist’s blog site here http://slyve-sketchbook.blogspot.ca/

Monica Pearce

In the forest, glow. is based on the illustration Don’t Feed the Deer by Brandon James Scott, a Toronto-based artist and also a good friend of mine.

His works have a decidedly playful feel to them, especially in his work with animation and illustration. Animals are a frequent subject, often popping up in unusual settings, such as kitchens, bars, and rock arenas.

I was originally enamored with Don’t Feed the Deer because it has a mysterious, magical, and yet almost foreboding quality to it.

Scott says of the work: “When I originally made it… I wanted to make something dreamlike, fantasy-based: the colours, the glows, the design of the world. But are we walking down this path, are we supposed to see what’s beyond it? Are we meant to observe but not touch things, because of a hidden danger? Are there always deep dark fears lying hidden amidst beauty?”

Fiona Ryan

Strange Gazes and Birdsong was inspired by Kate Domina’s “The Hideout.” I wanted to compose a piece inspired by an artist I had actually met, and the Toronto-based Kate Domina came to mind.

There is something both haunting and playful about the characters in her portraits that reminded me of the toy piano. A lot of her paintings include elements of nature, such as the leaves and little red bird in this painting, and I wanted to use some nature sounds in my piece.

I chose this particular painting because it seems to be an intersection of nature with the secret world of human thoughts. My composition plays with juxtapositions of melodies with a secretive character and the sounds of birdsong. I imagined that the bird in the painting has just finished singing something to the girl.

Patrick Murray

Skin and Bone was inspired by the oil painting “The Light Keepers II” by Bulgarian-Canadian painter Ognian Zekoff.

I first experienced Zekoff’s large-scale oil paintings of human hands several years ago in the Thompson Landry Gallery in the Distillery District of Toronto, and they are among the most captivating visual works I have ever encountered.

Perhaps more than any other part of the body, the hand seems unable not to express, and that’s what strikes me time and again when I return to these works.

Musically, Skin and Bone is a departure from my previous pieces, where melody and harmony was my primary focus. This is a piece almost exclusively about colour and timbre; as colours are mixed on a silent canvas, the meaning of those materials is continually transformed. To find out more about the artwork of Ognian Zekoff, visit here http://www.zekoffstudio.com/paintings.html

Glenn James

I chose to work with a Vancouver artist, Zoë Cilliers to create my sextet Get in Line.

Zoe and I worked last summer together at a plant nursery. She listened to some of my music and we decided to pick a piece of hers that reflected the character of my music.

On the experience of our working together, Zoë notes: “Listening to Glenn’s music and speaking of process and inspiration, we fond reflected a fascination in the quality of this search, across both music making and art, tracks that for most of our lives have run parallel.

“His Teeth Grew So Long makes transparent this kind of searching- a collage of historical symbols and images, it represents an attempt to find my own story strung out from in-between the pieces of the past that color the present.  In this way art making becomes a kind of composing – gathering, sorting, and in of itself, the act of creation.”