William Waite: Music, Painting, Puzzles, and Text

This is a story about William Waite. For me, interviewing William was much like taking a trip to someplace I’ve never gone before. The road to discovering the basics behind all the creative things he does is like entering a giant maze with many exciting alternatives. I use the word maze because my own education was so far removed from the curriculum William chose that my understanding of what he does was pretty much nonexistent. With his simple style, however, he removed the roadblocks to understanding and shared with me his world, which, in fact, includes another galaxy called Nemmelgeb Murr - a place far, far away from William‚s home in Ferryville. Stay with me and I’ll see if I can get you there.

Born in Prairie du Chien, William says he remembers one of his three sisters telling him that as a child he was always making things and never the same thing twice. Anything he saw, he wanted to try doing or making. The need to be creative seemed to have been born within him. His parents were supportive in that they would supply the materials he needed for whatever was his next project - be it learning to knit or building a clubhouse or anything in between. If he wanted to try something, within reason his parents allowed it.

The connecting thread that runs from his childhood projects through his college achievements and adult experiences, to his current enterprises seems to be the need to figure things out. That is, to find out what makes things work. It’s fairly logical, then, that he chose chemistry as his college major. A music theory class in his freshman year altered his course. “I was in band in grade and high school and had started to play the piano and had a beginner‚s understanding of music,” he explained, “but now I was learning how music is put together - the science of music, if you will - and it opened up a whole world that I hadn’t realized before and found tremendously exciting.”

William went on to get a bachelors degree with a double major in piano performance and music theory. He then went on to get both a masters and doctorate degree in music composition. His secondary area of expertise was in visual art and painting.

He taught one of his first courses to students at the University of Cincinnati. If I had been one of his students I would have learned what it means to have a structural correlation between painting and music. For example, William writes a piece of music that has, say, five movements. He then does five paintings - one for each movement. For every note in the music, he explains, there is a mark on the painting, building up the same structure in both.

As he explained more in depth, William said as a matter of coincidence there are 12 notes in the western scale and there are 12 different pitches. He matches each of the 12 pitches to the 12 colors. So, for instance, for every C note in the music, there is a red mark on the painting. For every E in the music, there is a yellow mark, and so on. In music some things repeat; you can also repeat colors in paintings. In music there are things like crescendos (gradually increasing in loudness). In a painting, you can begin very light in color and get more brilliant. You can have that gradual movement in both. When the music ends, the painting is also completed.

The first time William combined paintings with piano pieces was when he was an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse. “They related on a referential level,” he said, “but not on a structural level. For example, on a referential level in the first movement there was the painted head of a carousel horse and the music sounded like carousel music so we get the idea of carousels going between the two, but there wasn’t a structural relationship of the form that is going on in the music matching the form in the painting. So I didn’t really feel like they went together. After considerable thought I started doing more research into the structural side of it.”

What William found was that there was a structural area where music and painting overlapped. He also learned that a classical music composer/painter who lived about 100 years ago by the name of Mikolojus Ciurlionis had also used musical structure in his paintings. He did not use the music itself, rather the musical form such as the sonata (a form of a movement consisting of three sections, the exposition, development, and recapitulation) or fugue (when you have two or more musical lines going on at once.) It was similar to what William was doing, but Ciurlionis did not write music to match his paintings.

William’s studies took him to Lithuania via a Fulbright Scholarship, a program that sends 800 scholars and professionals each year to more than 140 countries to conduct research in a wide variety of academic and professional fields. The wonderment of this journey was still reflected in his voice as William recalled the museum there that is devoted entirely to Ciurlionis‚ work and the association with the music academy that enabled him to meet the world’s foremost expert on Ciurlionis, Lithuanian President, Dr. Vytautas Landsbergis. Landsbergis, the leader who brought to fruition his country’s goal of freedom from Russia, is also a noted music theoretician in his own right.

“I sat right there in his office in the Parliament buildings,” William remembered, “and at the same time he was discussing his wealth of knowledge of music theory with me, he would answer phone calls and other interruptions, completely switch gears, and deal with head-of-state matters. He was brilliant in his knowledge of Ciurlionis. What he didn’t know for certain, he would use his deductive reasoning from what he did know to give me answers that were most likely correct because they were based on facts. I was totally amazed with the man.”

From Lithuania, William traveled to Denmark where he taught at the University of Copenhagen. It was during his seven years in Denmark that William stumbled into the career that currently supports him financially. Puzzles. Not the jigsaw kind. The brainteasers. The ones like a maze that completely confuse you - even the one that has 2,124 solutions hidden in the millions of ways the pieces don’t fit.

It began with his collection of boxes. “It was a little like music and painting,” he began to explain. “In a way, the correlation between music and painting is a puzzle because to really understand it you have to decipher how the music has been put on the painting - where it is beginning and where it ends and what’s the basis behind it. I had collected lots of small, empty boxes, and it occurred to me that I could design puzzles to fit into those boxes. So I used the shapes and materials to inspire designs. I mean, it’s hard to come up with puzzle ideas from scratch, so I used the designs as a starting point.

“For instance, say a box is decorated with diamond shapes. I look at all the ways to alternate diamond shapes. I can put three diamonds in a line, or put two across and connect one down, or put four together in different ways. I try to find out what are all the mathematical possibilities. Then I figure out how they can all fit into the shape of the box, which could be square or oblong or circular. In about eight months‚ time I designed about 50 or 60 puzzles.”

William says Stellar Burr is probably his most difficult design and estimates that for most puzzle aficionados the solution will take several days‚ efforts. William’s brain teaser puzzles are sold at the River Road Gallery in Lansing, at Kindred Threads in Viroqua, or through his website, www.nemmelgebmurr.com. There is an explanation on the website for each puzzle accessed by clicking on the photo.

The thread that started with his childhood zest to learn what makes things work, that wove it’s way through music and art, next attached itself to the alphabet. William calls his newest game idea “text.” In describing what that means, he said, “It has to do with scripts of the world. I am very interested in how the different alphabets of the world developed. Some of them, about three or four, came about independently, such as the Chinese script, cuneiform, or Mayan hieroglyphs.” (Independent meaning that it was invented without seeing another script and thinking, ‘Oh, an alphabet is a good idea. Let’s create one of our own.’)

Exploring what is the basis of alphabets and how they work to record what is voiced led William, not surprisingly, to his latest puzzle - the humdinger of them all - the rainbow script from Nemmelgeb Murr. If that sounds like something from another galaxy, well, it is. William’s latest venture is to create the ultimate book of various puzzles designed to capture the world’s fascination with the universe. “When I finish it, the book will be a kind of humorous, satirical study of Nemmelgeb Murr. Like an anthropology that looks at societies and their various customs and practices, the puzzles will tell the origins of this galaxy. To do that I am inventing different things for it - like their script, their calendar, and their number systems. The puzzle is to decipher what each represents.”

How does one begin to translate a foreign language, or in this case, script? Within the educational portions of the book, Bill plans to give hints by developing an awareness of how different scripts develop. “For instance,” he explained, “some are more word oriented like Chinese and some are more syllabic. Some are more alphabetic or phonemic (sequence of individual sounds). In Nemmelgeb Murr there will be a letter for every sound in the language. Color will play a part, also representing something. As you follow the hints more information will gradually help to solve the puzzles, some of which will be simpler than others. There will be a variety of puzzles with various levels of complexity. Beginners might even work up to the really challenging level designed for the really serious puzzler.”

Like his other creations, the puzzler will need to figure out whether to move up, down, right, or left; what colors have what significance, which are repeated often enough to be common words, and all the other tools used by those proficient in encoding and decoding. William says his market will include puzzle collectors. William travels each year to some part of the world where for four or five days he meets with an international group of people whose life is, literally, puzzling.

And, as puzzling as it may sound, it is not unusual in the puzzle world for several people to discover the same puzzle at different times and in different places. According to William, that is because there is a mathematical idea behind each puzzle.

What is unusual in the puzzle world is for someone to actually make a living with their creations - as William does. With a smile, he says, “I suppose it is kind of a silly way to make a living.”

Just as happens in a maze, just when you think you made it to the end, you find you have not. Having found your way through the art and the music and the puzzles and maybe even the big one - speaking the language of Nemmelgeb Murr - you might well find that there is yet another turn that leads to yet another road that leads to William’s latest creative endeavor. What that is William himself has yet to discover.