Designing The COT
by Brittain Peck
One the unique and creatively bold traditions of The COT is to commission a new graphic designer / illustrator each year, inviting them to take nearly complete creative control over the look of the materials for that season. I’m honored to being following in the footsteps of some superbly talented folks from previous years (Kasia Konopka, Napoleon Wright III, Anne Mauser, Matt Hunter) and I invite you to check out each of them and the work they have done for The COT.
As a kid, I was lucky to have chances to go with my family and school field trips to see the symphony. In addition to feeling the power and calm of the music coming directly from live instruments and live musicians, I used to love to look at all of the different faces, expressions, gestures, postures, habits, and mannerisms of all of the different musicians in the orchestra.
While each year’s look takes on the identity of the commissioned individual, with my focus being on the narrative illustrations for each concert, there are also some recurring elements from year to year that must be incorporated with some consistency to previous years. One of these elements is the “COT” logo, for which my approach was to make the logo a single color (either black or white depending on where it is being used) and to rely on a color palette of yellow, blue, and orange to loosely connect to the color palettes used in the illustrations. This is an admittedly minimal approach, but my intention was for the logo to feel connected to but not in competition with the illustrations, like these little black and white Mozart’s than ran all around and popped up throughout the various materials for the concert season.
In what has been a bit of a dream project for me, I have been thankful and honored to draw upon childhood memories like this in my recent work with The COT to create illustrations for the entirety of their 2024-2025 concert season. The work has included numerous illustrations for a variety of print and digital materials, including the entirety of their concert season program booklet, the front and back cover of which are shown above. Their season has just begun so you’ve got plenty of chances to see and hear them in person as well! Also, as a representation of his pervasive influence on classical music as well as his effervescent humor and personality, Mozart pops up throughout these illustrations, including here in the box seating at the Carolina Theatre of Durham.
The title of the first concert of The COT's ‘24-‘25 Signature Series was Music In Miniature as each piece in some way reflected some variation of the idea of ‘small things’, musically and thematically. Visually, I looked for ways to depict objects at a small scale as well, emphasizing the shiny, enameled surfaces of tin figurines, the crinkled wrapper of a fun-size pack of Skittles, the shifting hues on the skin of grapes, and the dimpled, leathery peel of an orange.
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I also had fun with assigning myself the task of representing a narrative element from the 5 pieces of music in the concert, with some choices being more obvious and others more subtle. The representation of Respighi’s piece, The Birds, is a little on the nose while my reference to Debussy’s Petit Suite (my favorite of the concert) was the much more subtle choice of the zoomed-in, miniature point of view for the illustration as a whole. I chose the Skittles to represent Anna Clyne’s Color Field because her composition is directly inspired by and named in reference to paintings by Mark Rothko, especially one named “Orange, Red, Yellow”. When I asked myself, “how the hell am I going to represent the colors orange, red, and yellow, and in that order?!”, somehow this arrangement of Skittles came to mind.
Music in Miniature
The tin soldiers represent Tchaikovsky, the composer of The Nutcracker, with the choice to have one of them dancing with a partner being a reference to his piece in the concert being a waltz, or a “valse”. This left me with Haydn’s piece, for which I chose the Nintendo characters Luigi and Princess, the least obvious of the references. I was very stuck on how to represent Haydn’s work until, after a lot of digging, I found out that the Violin Concerto No.1 in C Major has a sub-title of “fatto per il luigi”, which translates to “made for Luigi”. The "Luigi" Haydn had in mind was a well-known violinist at the time for whom he composed the piece to be played by. Unfortunately for me though, when I hear “Luigi”, my mind goes to one of two Italian plumbers from a Japanese video game. As a result, he and Princess ended up glazed on this Rococo-era, floral vase.
Amahl and the Night Visitors
From my earliest conversations with the folks at The Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle, Amahl and the Night Visitors stood out to me as a unique opportunity to create an illustration depicting two stories happening in one event. The story of the opera gives the account of Amahl and his mother and their visit by the three kings who are following a star to witness the birth of Jesus. One night at their modest home, Amahl tells his mother that there are the three royal visitors at the door, which she does not believe until she opens the door to see them and all of their grandeur for herself.
What follows is a story which The COT describes as celebrating “the power of kindness, curiosity, and sacrifice”. The story is touching, and personally, I was fascinated to learn not only of a Christmas story that I had never heard of, but also of how the opera was first produced nearly 70 years ago.
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Amahl was created by Gian Carlo Menotti in 1951 and first performed as part of a live broadcast on NBC on Christmas Eve of the same year. It was the first opera ever to be commissioned and composed specifically for television in the United States, with its first live broadcast being seen by an estimated 5 million viewers.
For this illustration, I combined these two stories (that of the opera and its production), depicting a 1950’s, middle class American family in their living room on Christmas Eve night, watching Menotti on a black and white TV giving the opening remarks to the first live broadcast. At that moment the family is visited by the three kings, each bearing gifts, as well as by Amahl and his mother, who is still in disbelief as she looks in through the window.
This concert is titled A Family Affair as all of the pieces played are composed by a member of the Bach family, and not just the Bach that we are all probably most familiar with (there were a lot of musical Bachs). When my friends at The COT said they wanted an illustration that reflected the depth of talent and musical proliferation of this single, musically dynastic family, I was fully expecting them to look at me sideways when I told them that what I had in mind was to depict “Johan Sebastian” more like the type of family man that I grew up with: “Carl Winslow." The fact that they laughed and responded with an emphatic “YES!” only set the tone for the entirety of our working together.
From there, everything about this illustration and the accompanying typography of the concert title was a tribute to family-based sitcoms of the 1990’s, with ‘Family Matters’ being the primary inspiration. I promise you not every illustration in this series includes a reference to Nintendo, but this time the controller gave me an excuse to have the red, white, and yellow RCA cable running out of the front of the tv, presumably to the SNES console or a VCR.
A Family Affair
