In my last post, I said that music is thought. First and foremost, of course, music is made of sound, but the way it is embedded in our consciousness and our being connects it readily with everything else that goes through our minds.
Although music can connect with anything, many people experience strong connections with specific nonmusical corollaries. For some, music is a sonic embodiment of mathematical principles. For others (and I seem to hear more about this lately than ever before), music aligns naturally with architecture and spatial concerns. Still others generate powerful emotional responses. All of these are valid; all are variations on the same idea of music as thought.
For me, music closely aligns with literature. To be more specific, I feel a particularly strong empathy for the challenges and opportunities faced by novelists.
What I value most in the novel is character development and language as a conveyer of more than literal meaning. Compared to those elements, I don’t experience plot as a very powerful hook. The critical connection for me is the fact that novels unfold over time: information accrues from page one to page last. I like to think of my compositions that way, with characters that develop and deepen over time, sometimes because of layers peeled away, sometimes because of an accrual of experience.
Milan Kundera said a novelist should never be smarter than his characters. I’ve found that viewpoint a helpful directive in composition: rather than trying to force my ideas into preconceived scenarios, I listen to them as if they were living, breathing beings, respectfully trying to gauge their needs and implications.
That approach doesn’t work for every kind of composition, but I’m not interested in finding a single approach that works for every kind of composition. More important is to find something in each composition that resonates internally — subjectively — reflecting and embodying a certain set of artistic goals.
Its fascinating how other disciplines sometimes invigorate musical impulses and even compositional processes. While diverse literary forms have absolutely influenced my creative and intellectual development throughout my life, what stands out from reading this pertains to painting.
The year I moved into Manhattan, I began taking advantage of my close proximity to a number of museums, and began frequenting them, in part, for the possibility of discovering aesthetic entities that transcended any particular art form. What truly transformed myself was viewing the paintings of Ad Reinhardt for the first time, subsequently learning it was impossible to experience these works without approaching them in person.
Reinhardt’s paintings imparted to me the idea of combining seemingly disparate elements into one composition while maintaining their individual personalities, a conception that I immediately developed in a new composition titled Thursday Evening, named after the free night I was able to view what seemed like nearly an entire large room of Ad’s canvases at the Museum of Modern Art. After Thursday Evening, I unleashed a more dynamic and cathartic delving into the principle of gaining energy and substance from the individual yet unified tensions inherent in traditionally opposing musical elements with a work I titled Trembling Flowers. Fortuitously, these two compositions were featured on WNYC, along with a few other pieces only a few months after they were completed. At the time, I was working for C.F. Peters in Manhattan, and the manager there told me this was remarkable because many of their published composers had been unable to obtain such an invitation for an hour-long interview together with music.
I am an artist, an abstract painter. I wouldn’t want to try to list all the pieces of music I’ve encoded in my work … from Sibelius violin concerto to Philip Glass to Pink Floyd.
Your article touched a big nerve within me. I think in words, instrumental music, and visual forms. They are all connected in logical and illogical ways. A few years ago, in 24 paintings, I composed a visual symphony … entitled THE HOUSTON SYMPHONY, in a show about music … entitled ARS MUSICA.
I am fascinated by the many different ways music is connected to my work … mostly in ways alien to words … the fact of the matter … we don’t have a vocabulary nuanced enough.
“just as writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas”.
Confucius
As I said earlier, all my work is abstract, coded abstraction. Everything I do is related to the larger outside world surrounding me. I’ve chosen abstraction for the same reason composers may limit theirselves to instrumental music … avoiding the human voice in words. I prefer the nonspecific, and open-endedness encoded in poetry, instrumental music and painting. We live in a peculiar time. I’ve found that by creating works that lie at varying depths … beneath today’s varied and overlaping cultural radars … I am free to be as politically incorrect as I desire. I am convinced that many composers and literary wordsmiths have and do operate in the same manner.
Music has been abstract from mankinds earliest beginnings. Art historians claim Wassily Kandinsky created the first pue abstract watercolors in the early 1900’s … that said, visual abstraction is in it’s infancy.
Cheers,
Ron Hartgrove – Houston Texas
I’ve had a few hours to reflect on your assertion that music is a language … of course it is. Words make the ineffable … effable, art makes the invisible … visible and music makes the inaudible … audible. All three genre are in the business of giving logical shape and coherent meaning to everything following their last endeavors.
Mondrian and Matisse both said the artist is nothing more than a channel (paraphrase). I read these statements at different times … and I understood them intellectually, however, I now know them experientially. There was a time when I felt the need to explain my paintings, in words … and I tried, but now, there are very few words available for that task. Words are mostly about the outside world. My paintings, a language unto theirselves, now stretch from a distant past into an uncertain future. The logic of the work, for me, is there and it is undeniable. Music affects me in the same way especially when coupled with words … words as distilled … as poetry.
Ron Hartgrove
As you begin to realize that every different type of music, everybody’s individual music, has its own rhythm, life, language and heritage, you realize how life changes, and you learn how to be more open and adaptive to what is around us.
Yo-Yo Ma
“People usually complain that music is so ambiguous, and what they are supposed to think when they hear it is so unclear, while words are understood by everyone. But for me it is exactly the opposite…what the music I love expresses to me are thoughts not to indefinite for words, but rather too definite.”
– Felix Mendelssohn
We are delusional … We bump about, thinking we understand life … but … In the main … We don’t. We are terrified of everything surrounding our understanding of reality … which in nuanced ways is different kind of animal for every person alive.
Ron Hartgrove
“…we, and I mean humans, are meaning makers. We do not discover the meanings of mysterious things, we invent them. We make meanings because meaninglessness terrifies us above all things. More than snakes, even. More than falling, or the dark. We trick ourselves into seeing meanings in things, when in fact all we are doing is grafting our meanings onto the universe to comfort ourselves. We gild the chaos of the universe with our symbols. To admit that something is meaningless is just like falling backward into darkness.”
― Benjamin Hale