Music
The colour of music
Published 01 November 2007
The dissonance and abstraction of 20th-century composers influenced a generation of visual artists
In the early years of the 20th century, artists were straining at the boundaries of figurative style, pushing and distorting the purely representational to the borders of abstraction with cubism and expressionism, developing ways of using colour with primitivism, and eventually moving into entirely new structures that bore little relation to formal, conventional modes of painting.
At the same time, the carapace of tonalism in classical music was beginning to crumble. The orchestra had expanded to enormous, virtually unmanageable, proportions by the late 19th century with the addition of instruments that were just being invented, such as the family of horns designed by Adolphe Sax (including not just the saxophone, but also forerunners and relations of the euphonium). Composers began to abandon chordal resolution, tearing up the rules of symphonic composition. Post-Romantics such as Mahler curdled the warmth of the great German sound, while Stravinsky's savage, dissonance-tinged portrayal of ancient pagan sacrifice in the music for The Rite of Spring famously led to a riot at the ballet's premiere in Paris in 1913.
It is tempting to see a connection between the breakdown of old styles in music and the visual arts from the mid-to-late 19th century onwards. Were the impressionistic works of Monet and Debussy both expressions of the same spirit? Were Matisse's "jazz" cut-out pictures of the mid-20th century linked to the postwar bebop revolution? The answer is: only sometimes. However much Debussy may have disliked the term "impressionist", the parallels between his compositional palette and the one used by the artistic school of the same name are obvious. In the case of Matisse, however, it would be quite wrong to suppose that his "jazz" series had anything to do with the explorations of Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk.
"Eye Music: Kandinsky, Klee and All That Jazz", at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, shows that the relationship between music and art is complex, and has often been quite contradictory. Artists and musicians who were contemporaries may have been similarly bold, and endured similar variations in fortune as a result. The Bauhaus school was condemned as "degenerate" by the Nazis and shut in 1933; at the same time in Russia, socialist realism imposed a dreary uniformity on art and classical music, while the "hot" music coming from America was banned. "Today he plays jazz," went the Soviet line, "tomorrow he betrays his country." The generality that anything "modern" had important experiences in common is true. The way those music and art forms influenced one another, however, was vastly different.
The most divergent example in "Eye Music" concerns the two artists in the show's subtitle. Wassily Kandinsky was drawn to the radical musical avant-garde spearheaded by Arnold Schoenberg, the man who did most to develop the serialist and twelve-tone theories that shattered conventional harmony. The two were friends and admirers, writing frequently to each other. Schoenberg also painted (his eerie self-portraits are part of the show), and Kandinsky included some of his friend's works in the seminal "Blaue Reiter" exhibitions from 1911-14.
Kandinsky's close colleague Paul Klee, on the other hand, regarded modern composers with contempt. The excellent accompanying catalogue quotes Klee's deliciously tart remark after Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire had a mixed reception in 1912: "Perish, philistine, your last hour has struck!" Klee thought the musical answer to visual problems was to be found several centuries earlier, in the work of J S Bach.
This seeming dichotomy is explained by the stages of development the two art forms had reached. To visual artists moving beyond formal representation, music provided a guide because they considered it already to be in a state of pure abstraction. As Frances Guy, the curator of "Eye-Music", puts it: "Its freedom from representation or narrative content, and its ability to communicate directly with the soul and evoke an emotional response, was an inspiration for artists who wished to do the same."
Despite the large body of classical works with clear storytelling intentions - Richard Strauss's tone poem "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks" (1894-95) being just one very obvious example - the point still holds. Music did and does belong on a different plane; but its abstraction did not mean that it had not developed a huge array of often quite rule-bound theory. So Kandinsky was attracted to Schoenberg's controversial idea of a new relativity, that dissonances were merely more remote consonances (this, in layman's terms, is what makes so much 20th-century classical music, up until the minimalist movement of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, so unmelodious and difficult to listen to). But Klee preferred the clearer lines and harmonies of the baroque and early classical period.
It is particularly interesting that although later artists such as Jackson Pollock were intrigued by what might loosely be referred to as "modern" jazz - from Parker, Monk and the bebop pioneers onwards - "Eye Music" shows how visual artists thought of as being equally "modern", such as Piet Mondrian, were inspired by the pre-war, "hot" jazz and boogie-woogie styles that are generally considered to be basic and relatively unsophisticated today .
Too little time and space is devoted to whether separate art forms can genuinely communicate with each other. The answer suggested by this fascinating exhibition is a tentative "yes". But whether that dialogue has developed beyond a form of signing into a deep and complex language is left unresolved - as the greatest questions in art perhaps should be.
"Eye Music: Kandinsky, Klee and All That Jazz" is at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, until 9 December. Details: www.scva.org.uk
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