Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2001 07:06:23 -0800
Subject: Re: Chord Characteristics
From: Stu Mark
Newsgroups: alt.fan.frank-zappa
Robert Garvey at robertgSPAMVERBOTEN@dnai.com wrote on 11/20/01 10:42 PM:
> While cruising the internet at work (lunchtime only, of course) I learned
> that Kandinsky was a musician in addition to being a wonderful painter.
> He had some ideas about music and colors (or colours).
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/K/kandinsky.html
Excerpted from "Kandinsky: Compositions", by Magdalena Dabrowski
Kandinsky and Music
"The term "Composition" can imply a metaphor with music. Kandinsky was
fascinated by music's emotional power. Because music expresses itself
through sound and time, it allows the listener a freedom of imagination,
interpretation, and emotional response that is not based on the literal or
the descriptive, but rather on the abstract quality that painting, still
dependent on representing the visible world, could not provide.
"Kandinsky's special understanding of the affinities between painting and
music and his belief in the Gesamtkunstwerk, or the total work of art, came
forth in his text "On Stage Composition," his play "Yellow Sound," and his
portfolio of prose poems and prints Klange (Sounds, 1913). Music can respond
and appeal directly to the artist's "internal element" and express spiritual
values, thus for Kandinsky it is a more advanced art. In his writings
Kandinsky emphasizes this superiority in advancing toward what he calls the
epoch of the great spiritual.
"Wagner's Lohengrin, which had stirred Kandinsky to devote his life to art,
had convinced him of the emotional powers of music. The performance conjured
for him visions of a certain time in Moscow that he associated with specific
colors and emotions. It inspired in him a sense of a fairy-tale hour of
Moscow, which always remained the beloved city of his childhood. His
recollection of the Wagner performance attests to how it had retrieved a
vivid and complex network of emotions and memories from his past: "The
violins, the deep tones of the basses, and especially the wind instruments
at that time embodied for me all the power of that pre-nocturnal hour. I saw
all my colors in my mind; they stood before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy
lines were sketched in front of me. I did not dare use the expression that
Wagnet had painted 'my hour' musically."
"It was at this special moment that Kandinsky realized the tremendous power
that art could exert over the spectator and that painting could develop
powers equivalent to those of music. He felt special attraction to Wagner,
whose music was greatly admired by the Symbolists for its idea of
Gesamtkunstwerk that embraced word, music, and the visual arts and was best
embodied in Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung, with its climax of global
cataclysm. One can also presume that Kandinsky, philosophically a child of
the German Romantic tradition, was strongly attracted to Wagner's use of
medieval Germanic myths and legends, including those of the world's creation
and destruction, as symbols that allowed for the translation of his
philosophical attitudes toward the world view, religion, and love. For
instance, Kandinsky was enthralled by Tristan and Isolde as an expression of
undying love and spiritual transformation. But in Wagner there is also an
affinity with the philosophy of Schopenhauer, who considered music to be of
central importance in man's emotional life.
"Among his musical contemporaries, Kandinsky admired the work of Aleksander
Scriabin, whose innovations he found compatible with his own objectives in
painting. What especially intrigued Kandinsky were Scriabin's researches
toward establishing a table of equivalencies between tones in color and
music, a theory that Scriabin effectively applied in his orchestral work
Prometheus: A Poem of Fire (1908). These tonal theories parallel Kandinsky's
desire to find equivalencies between colors and feelings in painting:
indeed, one of the illustrations included in the essay on Scriabin published
in the Blaue Reiter Almanac was a color reproduction of Composition IV.
"Kandinsky's conviction that music is a superior art to painting due to its
inherent abstract language came out forcefully in the artist's admiration
for the music of the Viennese composer Arnold Sch÷nberg, with whom he
initiated a longstanding friendship and correspondence and whose Theory of
Harmony (1911) coincided with Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art.
Kandinsky's complex relationship to Sch÷nberg's music is central to his
concept of Composition, since Sch÷nberg's most important contribution to the
development of music, after all, occurred in the area of composition.
"Sch÷nberg's innovations, such as discarding chromaticism and abandoning
tonal and harmonic conventions, unleashed a new future for musical
explorations and formed an important turning point for compositional
practice. In particular, two of the composer's innovations radically opened
musical compositional structures. Beginning with his First String Quartet in
1905, Sch÷nberg introduced a chromatic structure that he defined as a
"developing variation," in which there was a continual evolution and
transformation of the thematic substance of the musical piece, rejecting
thematic repetition. This inspired the constant unfolding of an unbroken
musical argument without recourse to the svmmetrical balances of equal
phrases or sections and their corresponding thematic content. As a result of
this practice, Sch÷nberg achieved a musical continuum that was richly
structured, densely polyphonic, and in which all parts were equally
developmental.
"These new compositional structures led him toward free chromaticism, which
emphasized nonharmonic tones and "emancipation of dissonance" (i.e.,
unresolved dissonance), one of the principal features of atonal music.
Having such constant transformations, rather than the repetition of melodic
pattern, endowed the work with a totally unconventional psychological depth,
evocative power, and emotional strength. Sch÷nberg's innovations, which
permitted any pitch configuration, ruptured traditional conventions of
musical composition.
"The magnitude of this revolutionary change can be compared to the
fundamental transformation in Kandinsky's painting from a figurative idiom
to free, expressive, abstract work. The kinship between Kandinskv and
Sch÷nberg (who was also influenced by the philosophy of Schopenhauer) is a
special example of the intellectual affinity of artists in search of new
vehicles for expressing their inner emotions. These diverse artistic and
philosophical influences were all important for the conception of
Kandinsky's first seven Compositions before World War I.
"Although Kandinsky created Composition I about a year before he became
immersed in Sch÷nberg's new musical concepts, the objectives of his
pictorial search seem nevertheless to coincide with those of the composer.
As Sch÷nberg had done, Kandinsky searched for a free chromatic field,
probably best exemplified in his Composition VII (1913), where richly
structured, polyphonic motifs create spatial and compositional ambiguities,
visual beauty, emotional impact, and intellectual stimulation. The elements
"constructing" Kandinsky's Compositions that are at first glance abstract,
such as in the three pre-war works, Compositions V, VI, and VII, could be
compared to Sch÷nberg's use of unresolved dissonance: one dissonance,
followed by another, and then the next, without completing the expectations
of the musical destination. In Kandinsky's Compositions, numerous
motifs-either abstracted from natural objects as in the first six works, or
more purely abstract as in Composition VII-are organized into visual
structures that can be experienced simultaneously, without expecting a
resolution, and that can exert emotional impact on the viewer on several
physical, psychological, and emotional levels.
"In his conclusion to On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky again resorts to a
musical metaphor to describe the deliberately cloaked pictorial construction
of form and color. In a passage in which he is primarily concerned with the
issues of composition and where Composition II is reproduced as a reference,
he divides compositions into two groups: "1. Simple composition, which is
subordinated to a clearly apparent simple form. I call this type of
composition melodic. 2. Complex composition, consisting of several forms,
again subordinated to an obvious or concealed principal form. This principal
form may externally be very hard to find, whereby the inner basis assumes a
particularly powerful tone. This complex type of composition I call
symphonic."
"He goes on to discuss diverse elements of the Compositions in overtly
musical terms, clarifying his understanding of a melodic composition as
being that in which the objective element is eliminated to leave only the
basic pictorial form-such as simple geometrical forms or a structure of
simple lines that create general movement. The movement is either repeated
in the individual parts of the painting or is varied by using different
lines or forms. These are compositions that possess a simple inner soul;
their creation and perception occur on a less complex level, where the
perceptual and spiritual elements are fairly simple.
"In Kandinsky's view, melodic compositions were revitalized by Paul CÈzanne
and later by the Swiss Symbolist Ferdinand Hodler. As an example of melodic
composition, Kandinsky illustrated CÈzanne's Large Bathers within the text
of On the Spiritual in Art, stating that the picture represents "an example
of this clearly laid out, melodic composition with open rhythms." Indeed,
one observes a clear rhythm in the arrangement of trees and the figures
gathered under the triangular canopy of rhythmically leaning trees. As in a
musical composition, the rhythms add vitality to the pictorial composition,
inviting the eye to travel from one form to the next according to a
regularly determined motion.
"The section on rhythm in his conclusion to On the Spiritual in Art reveals
much about Kandinsky's philosophical approach, whereby every phenomenon in
nature, not only in music but also in painting, has its own structural
rhythm. He felt that numerous pictures, especially woodcuts and miniatures
from earlier periods, represented excellent examples of "complex 'rhythmic'
composition with a strong intimation of the symphonic principle. Among these
types he included the work of old German masters, of the Persians and the
Japanese, Russian icons, and particularly Russian folk prints. But he
observed that in most of these early works the symphonic composition is very
closely tied to the melodic one, where principally the objective element
underlies the structure.
"For Kandinsky, if that objective element of a painting were taken away, the
building blocks of the composition would reveal themselves to cause a
feeling of repose and tranquil repetition, of well-balanced parts. A similar
feeling is evoked by diverse modes of musical expression, for instance early
choral music or the music of Mozart or Beethoven . However, when the
objective element is in place, especially beginning with Composition IV, all
of the juxtapositions, conflicts, and dissonances are arranged in a manner
that parallels Sch÷nberg's own innovations."
