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Seeing Music, Hearing Art: Artists Find Inspiration Across BoundariesVisual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900," a major exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles through May 22, will travel to Washington, D.C.'s Hirshhorn Museum from June 23 through September 11, 2005. This show, particularly relevant for the Juilliard community, will not come to New York City, but it will be running throughout the summer and is within easy traveling distance.
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| James Whitney, Lapis, 1963-66, 16 mm, 9 min., color, sound, © The Estate of John and James Whitney |
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As background to this review, I would like to mention that, in 1990, composer Samuel Zyman and I decided to try an experiment. We agreed that teaching the arts separately in Juilliard's L&M and Liberal Arts Departments did not serve them well. We therefore began to collaborate on an undergraduate, cross-disciplinary class focusing on the interrelationship between music and the visual arts. We titled this "experiment" (now in its 15th year) "From Bach to Braque and Beyond." Fortuitously, "Visual Music" includes many of the artworks and movements we analyze in class. This multimedia show, true to its spirit, goes far beyond what we can do in our class!The exhibition—like the extraordinary "Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider" at the Jewish Museum in the winter of 2003-04—takes seriously the visual art/music connection so crucial to the understanding of 20th-century Modernism. Its major premise is that 20th-century art strove to attain the "condition of music" (quoting English essayist and critic Walter Pater, back in 1877). Its organizers claim, justifiably, that it is the first exhibition of its kind. Most museum exhibits feature one artist, movement, or specific thematic idea. This one, instead, traces "the history of a revolutionary idea: that fine art should attain the nonrepresentational aspects of music."As we know, unprecedented innovations in style and media took place in all the arts during the 20th century. Some of these innovations can be attributed to the fact that non-objective artists, especially (but not exclusively), took the pure, non-representational nature of instrumental music as a starting point and parallel for their own art forms.
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| Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Conception Symphony, 1914, oil on canvas, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden |
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"Visual Music" demonstrates a few of the myriad ways painters have used music as inspiration; it features a number of very famous artists, such as Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, some well known ones, such as Frantisek Kupka, and some very little known, such as the Lithuanian Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis, and the Russians Mikhail Matiushin and Daniel Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné.Conflicted between a career in music and painting, Paul Klee, a trained violinist, eventually opted for painting. He made use of visual polyphony to "compose" many paintings, such as Plant Growth (Pflanzenwachstum) (1921). Here he takes several shapes—equivalent to musical thematic material—such as circles, squares, and ovals, and develops them through intricate layers, in various sizes, colors, and placements. As in a fugue, one voice sounds a theme, and another answers, while all voices continue to pursue their own path.Kandinsky, in Fugue (Fuga) (1914), takes a different approach, perhaps reflecting his admiration for Arnold Schoenberg, while Klee preferred Bach and Mozart. Kandinsky emphasized swirling, dynamic, "dissonant" colors, lines, and textures in his search for an inner voice, and what he called "the spiritual in art." Here his more symphonic goal can be opposed to Klee's chamber-music-like painting. Kandinsky's earlier, non-objective paintings interestingly "emancipate the dissonance" in parallel to Schoenberg (with whom he corresponded for many years), as his later works use more geometry, consistent with the Austrian composer's development of the 12-tone system.
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| Oskar Fischinger, Radio Dynamics, 1942, 35 mm, 4 min., color, silent, © The Elfriede Fischinger Trust/The Fischinger Archive |
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A lesser-known figure, the composer and painter, Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis (1875-1911), actively pursued both fields, producing more than 300 musical compositions and 200 paintings during his short lifetime. In Sonata No. 6 (Sonata of the Stars) (1908), he uses no exact representational imagery, but instead evokes a solitary mountainous landscape, illuminated by galaxy-filled skies. In the "Allegro movement," the artist employs repeated, sharp, peak-like shapes and bands of irregular but rapid-seeming, curvy lines. The "Andante movement" features simpler, fewer, and rounder forms.French Orphist painters Robert Delaunay (the favorite painter of the French composer and synesthete, Olivier Messiaen) and Sonia Delaunay-Terk, and the Czech Frantisek Kupka based their color harmonies and tempos on musical impressions, as did their American counterparts, the "Synchromist" painters Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell.For many artists, the format of painting, while it could parallel music in many respects, lacked the actual sound and movement of music. The show goes on to feature early devices that made use of sound, light, and movement. These ranged from primitive apparatuses to various color organs. The composer Alexander Scriabin unsuccessfully attempted to make a color organ (a "luce"), which he nevertheless included in his score for Prometheus: Poem of Fire (1908-10). Thomas Wilfred (1889-1968) actually constructed a light organ he called a "clavilux" in 1919. "Visual Music" includes several "lumia" pieces, or sculptured light that Wilfred composed.
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| Jennifer Steinkamp, SWELL, 1995, computer generated projection and installation with soundtrack by Bryan Brown, the Musuem of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles |
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Also included are film pioneers Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter, as well as mid-century experimental filmmakers like Oskar Fischinger. Eggeling, for his eight-minute film Symphonie Diagonale (1924), used abstract forms that corresponded in his mind to movement. He collaborated with Richter, employing stop-motion photography to animate their drawings on paper. Fischinger's Ornament Sound Experiments (1932) and Radio Dynamics (1942) (both four minutes) led to his working in Hollywood. Indeed, he contributed to the popular Disney film Fantasia, which opened in 1940 (and has been redistributed in a new and presumably more complex version).More recently (and continuing up to the present), there are sound installations like those of Jennifer Steinkamp and Jim Hodges, among others.In addition to visual art, the richly illustrated catalog accompanying the show contains an essay on synesthetic composers by musicologist Olivia Mattis. It addresses, to some degree, one problem the show does not deal with: the difference between genuine synesthesia and the metaphorical use of the term.It is always hard to convey the power of an exhibition in words. But in this case, it is even more difficult. Color, light, movement (or implied movement) are all essential to the central notion of visual music. This art simply must be seen and experienced.While "Visual Music" goes far to explore the music/art connection, it is really only a beginning. The subject is so vast that, when looking up "visual music" on Google, I found no fewer than 65,000 entries! There is no point in mentioning the numerous artists and composers who could have been included in the show. Instead, I would hope that this very successful venture will whet appetites for more."Visual Music" runs through May 22 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. It will then open at the Smithsonian Institution's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., on June 23 and run until September 11. I will be giving a gallery talk at the Hirshhorn on July 8 at 12:30 p.m.Art historian Greta Berman has been on the liberal arts faculty since 1979.
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