kandinsky, art and music

[Jerry L Young]

Reply to: RE>kandinsky, art and music

armando lofts out a can of worm openers

:- what other music suggests art and, vice versa, which art suggests music?

This is too big of a topic, and I'm going to use a pretty wide brush with
this response.

I always tend to think of perspective and tonality as being somehow
equivalent in the role that they played. Debussy began to explore static
harmonics that stretched out, lingered amd floated and didn't give in so
easly to tonal urges -- likewise the "impressionist" paintes like Monet were
less interested in unfolding some sophisticated perspective as they were
luxuriating in flat surfaces and coloristic effects.

Lots of people have compared Stravinsky and Picasso, to a great extend for
the sort of fracturing and mixing of perspective. This makes a lot of sense
to me. Also in the way that Stravinsky would take some existing music (like
Tchaikovsky, Rossini, Gesualdo, Bach, "Pergolesi") and recompose it in the
way that Picasso would too (Velasquez's Las Maninas).

Kandinsky also was a close colleague of Schoenberg, and both were involved
with the Blaue Reiter,and a lot of the philosophy of music and art overlap.
But I don't see a visual connection so much between Kandinsky and Schoenberg
so musch as I do between Schoenberg and other angsty types -- like Oskar
Kokoshka. But that cooler, more geometric style of a lot of Kandinsky's seems
to find more parallels in the music of Webern (one of his paintings is on the
cover of the old Boulez box set, and it seems just right -- litttle,
detailed, hard edged geometric shapes indifferent to gravity.)

Klee, who was also a musician, incorporated lots of music stuff in his
paintings, and one of his painting's looks to me like an abstraction of one
of the busier pages out of the Rite of Spring. I'm almost convinced it was
supposed to be, and it just seems like something Klee would have done. He
used to play in a string quartet, and there is an interesting picture of them
playing, not at music stands, but at easels.

Cage absorbed a great deal from Marcel Duchamp -- esp. wrt the use of chance.
He was big buddies with lots of people in the art world -- Max Ernst, Isamu
Noguchi, Morris Graves, Willem DeKooning, Rauschenberg, Johns, etc, and Cage
in many ways may have had more of an influence on those painters than he has
had on younger composers. At least, for a long time you were more apt to find
art schools that acknowedged Cage's importance than you would music schools.

One very big one for me is the composer Morton Feldman, who was very closely
associated with the New York School (abstract expressionists) patiners. Lots
of his pieces refer to those painters -- _De Kooning_,, _For Philip
Guston_, _Rothko Chapel_, _For Franz Kline_. There are a lot of parallel's to
Rothko's paintings especially. Very soft sounds, often very long, as
unobliged to tonality as Rothko's paintings are to perspective, and as
interested in the simple, sensory aspects of the sound produced as Rothko is
interested in the surface of the paint. Where you have to adjust your hearing
to Feldman's soft dynamics (you are instructed not to turn it up) Rothko felt
that the colors of the paintings were richer when viewed in low light. So at
the Rothko Chapel, the light comes from indirect natural light, filtered, and
changing depending on how cloudy it is. Anyway, they share a lot of the same
sensibilities.

You can also see a connection between the action painters (like Pollock and
Gorky) and jazz. The painter Larry Rivers is also a jazz musician.

Likewise, so many of the same treatment of American themes you find in Grant
Wood and Thos. Hart Benton are unmistakeably in the music of Copland, Roy
Harris, and Virgil Thomson.Same period and influenced by a lot of the same
kind of thinking -- consciously working toward a very self-consciously
American style that often draws on familiar American images/melodies.

There are plenty of others too. The "minimalist" painters used a lot of the
same techniques as the "minimalist" composers -- an interest in form based on
repetition and an attractino to hard eged, geometric regularity. One of the
"minimalist" painters, Larry Poons, often used little regularly placed
lozenges in his paintings that look like whole notes to me. He was also a
composer, and I have wanted to hear some of his music, but never have.

Certainly a lot of composers in the last 30 years have used many of the same
ideas of visual art -- the idea of using found objects is a big one, and
elements from "popular culture" is another one.

Skipping across the surface.

Jerry.

[el nino del mal]

"kandinsky liked to talk about art in musical terms. he believed art aspired to
the condition of music. (likewise, listening to wagner's 'lohengrin,' he once
recalled, made him envision 'colors in my mind' and 'wild, almost crazy lines.'
) and to him the allusions in [his] 'compositions' were like melodies, the canv
ases polyphonous symphonies. they do seem musical, as much as painted images ca
n. their rhythm creates a sense of forms moving moving to some unheard score.
but even without seeing them as musical, exactly, it's hard not to think about
their lyricism and dissonances."

michael kimmelman, "paintings that make music of color," (nyt, 1/27/95)

- what other music suggests art and, vice versa, which art suggests music?

armando