PAINTING THE MUSIC
Vladimir Tamari
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NATIONAL MUSIC
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I starting by listening and painting to Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody, to a concert of African music by Ahmadou and Mariam, to Dvořák’s New World Symphony (despite its title, it was said to actually reflect the composer’s homesickness for his Czech homeland ), to Sibelius’ Finlandia and to Smetena’s Moldau, the river that defines Moldavia. For good measure I listened and painted to Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony performed by the Palestinian Diwan Orchestra at Covent Garden, and finally to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. By the time I realised I had not listened to the quintessential ‘nationalist’ composer, Chopin, the painting had been complete. Whether it was the unusual scale and material of the painting, or the fact that at the time I had the full use of our apartment to spread the work, or the fact that I was painting it for an appreciative patron of the arts, I was pleased with the outcome. |
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SATIE
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RODRIGO & TÁRREGA
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BACH (7)
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GOUNOD
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| September 2015. My
daughter Mariam had just performed with the Palestine
Youth Orchestra in Lyons, France, where she brilliantly
sang the Jewel song from the opera Faust by
Charles Gounod (1818-1893). It happened that the
composer's great great grand-daughter was there and she
kindly lent a beautiful family heirloom for Mariam to
wear on stage. It was a splendid golden bracelet Gounod
had given to his fiancé Anna in 1852. Reading up on this
very French composer I decided to make a painting
listening to his Missa Solemnis in honor of St.
Cecilia. I made the painting in one session using acrylics on three canvas boards that made up an oblong triptych, adding gold foil as a finishing flourish. While engrossed in the work, listening twice to the beautiful Missa (heard on YouTube, performed by Nederland Symphonieorkest, and the Czech Philharmonic Chorus & Orchestra), my grandson Ruben contacted my wife and I on video chat. At the ripe old age of three years old he was an avid painter in purely abstract watercolors (none of those circles with eyes and a tail for a dog or cat!) Seeing me paint inspired him to start his own painting - as I am often inspired by the spontaneity of his painting. Gounod's beautiful music blared from my computer speakers and was heard across the Pacific Ocean that separated us, as we both painted. When he saw my finished painting Ruben declared that “It’s not finished, it needs a large circle”- like the one he was drawing, a huge "rainbow" he said. It was too late to make big changes in my painting but to obey the kid's command I did add a circle in disconnected white lines. Later that day during my regular checkup my doctor saw a photo of my painting and it really cheered him up. |
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MONTEVERDI (II) & PALESTRINA
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| January
2016. After a year of painting in acrylics on
large “loud” boldly colored canvases (including the last
two in this Painting
the Music series) it was time for a quieter
painting on a more intimate scale. Back to watercolors,
I meant this new painting to be to the music of
Palestrina - the master of polyphony of the late
Renaissance. I like his name because it is almost
“Palestina” the way the Japanese call Palestine. On
YouTube I put on his madrigals, unaccompanied vocal
songs for several voices, and started painting. Studying
the description further it turns out the music was not
by Palestrina at all! It was from Libro de Madrigali
by Monteverdi, the Italian master succeeding Palestrina
and credited with initiating the Baroque style in music.
Back to Palestrina I painted in two more sessions listening to his Motets for 5 voices and Canticum canticorum and finally Lamentationes Ieremiae. All of this music is for pure voices. Pure not only in the sense of a cappella that is sung without instrumental accompaniment, but because the music was so pure and lovely. Each phrase was perfectly modulated and timed, creating a magical musical world seemingly without effort. I tried to paint accordingly using simple brushstrokes and avoiding overworking the painting. Luckily I had bought a unique flat brush that had multiple points like a comb, and used it to give the nice wavy strokes with thin parallel hairlines that suited the simple transparent layered artfulness of this soft, deep, heavenly and perfect music. |
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TARTINI
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| February
2016 Where he alive today Tartini
(1692-1770) would have been marketed as “Mr. Violin” in
some quarters! Self-taught, he composed and performed
music in a distinctive personal style that perfectly
fitted both his temperament and his amazing technical
virtuosity. He was so highly regarded that he owned the
very first violin created by the famed violin maker
Stavidarius, an instrument that has survived to this
day. I first learned of his music on the same vinyl LP that included a selection of Baroque musicians back in my Ramallah days. I remembered Tartini’s modulations as sophisticated, intimate and readily enjoyable. For this painting I mostly listened to his Sonatas for violin, cello and cembalo during four sessions. In the next three painting sessions I listened to Tartini’s flute concerto, and lastly to his famous Violin Sonata in G minor better known as the Devil’s Trill Sonata. Here is the story behind the name in Tartini’s own words: “One night, in the year 1713 I dreamed I had made a pact with the devil for my soul. I gave him my violin to see if he could play. How great was my astonishment on hearing a sonata so wonderful and so beautiful, played with such great art and intelligence, as I had never even conceived in my boldest flights of fantasy… [when I awoke] I immediately grasped my violin in order to retain, in part at least, the impression of my dream. In vain! The music which I at this time composed is indeed the best that I ever wrote, and I still call it the "Devil's Trill", but the difference between it and that which so moved me is so great …” I discovered that a sequence of three descending double notes octaves apart followed by a long note in this piece greatly resembles a sequence in Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 2 in B Minor BWV 1067 composed in 1717, four years after Tartini's Sonata. I wonder if this is just a coincidence, or was it Bach's tribute to Tartini ? This is not too far-fetched as it is known that Bach admired and studied another Italian's music - Vivaldi. |
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ELGAR
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| May
2016 In my ignorance, the name Elgar
merely elicited his well-marched-to Pomp and Circumstance
that staple of high-school and college graduation
ceremonies. But then I read something about the depth
and complexity of his
Cello Concerto, and felt I ought to listen to
that. Further research on YouTube led me to this gem - a
performance by my favorite violinist, Hilary Hahn, of
Elgar’s Violin
Concerto in B minor, Op. 61 ( premiered in
1910 by the teenage Yehudi Menuhin, later one of the
greatest violonists of the 20th. c.) The concerto
started with what I can best describe as a melange of
sweeping emotions, interacting seemingly at random, but
softly, setting the stage for the violin’s sharp and
electric meandering line. I could imagine Hilary’s
beautiful face eyes occasionally closed playing in her
characteristic trance-like mode. Not that she dampens
the passionate or loud passages. Rather she so fully
knows and inhabits the music, or the other way round,
performing it effortlessly with consummate skill without
self-consciousness. I painted in “real time” trying to
follow the music in lines and colors. The smooth Arches
hot-pressed watercolor paper I used created its
characteristic random local textures, but I left that
aspect of the painting as it is without trying to clean
it up. I listened twice to this and the other Elgar compositions below resulting in a dense web of interweaving lines and color covering almost every inch of the painting. Next day I listened to the Cello concerto also beautifully played by Yo-Yo-Ma. It was a splendid piece of music starting from the opening cello theme and clearly defined movements,it seemed to me superior to the Violin Concerto as a composition. In the same session I listen and painted to the six Pomp and Circumstance Marches. The first one was very moving complete with its rousing choral paean to national hope and glory - never mind it was in confident praise of an “expand[ing]” British Empire in 1901. Expanding, I could not help think, to eventually envelop our little Palestine in 1917 and hand it to the Zionists in 1948, leading to our national despair and infamy. It is worth mentioning here that Menuhen's father Moshe was a committed anti Zionist and author of Jewish Critics of Zionism, and that Yehudi himself followed suit, giving a concert for Palestinian orphans following the 1967 war. My sister Tania met him in Amman where he encouraged young musicians there to study their Arab musical heritage. She remembers Menuhin gently touching a child by the shoulder telling him not to hold the violin rigidly, but make it move with the body. A pioneering violinist from Amman around that time, later an accomplished composer, was Mohieddin Quandour my fellow student in Delbert Reynold's violin class for children back in 1954. The third painting session was devoted to Elgar’s great Enigma Variations - astonishingly powerful orchestral sketches devoted to trivial incidents involving Elgar’s friends. In Variation X, I thought I ‘heard’ a small dog yelping. Not quite, it was his friend Dora Penny's musical 'stuttering'; but notes to Variation XI explicitly describes an episode of a dog falling into a stream and swimming to safety! |
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JAPANESE POPS
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| June
2016 Some years ago in a park I found
that somebody had thrown an early 2003 model Apple iPod.
It was partly covered with egg-yolk and had a damaged
connector. With my love for and experience with
tinkering with gadgets, cleaning and fixing it was quite
simple but it drained battery power badly so it had to
be played connected to the mains. I tried to find its
owner but to no avail. It was chock-full of great pop
music - but not the type I would deliberately record
then listen to- evocative of the nineties decade in
Japan. Decades earlier I experienced my one and only
live concert of pop music in Japan - a deafening
performance by the Japanese group Godiego. Anyway, after
finishing an emotionally intense canvas entitled Marching Forward Never
Doubting Clouds Will Break I was ready to
create a relaxed laid-back painting. I remembered the
songs on the old iPod - they were just right for the
purpose and would put me in the right happy mood. Swept
along by the songs of Yumi Arai, Hiroshi Takano I
started another large acrylic canvas with squares of
bright color. The surrounding white reminded me of
whitewashed buildings on Greek islands so I kept it
white. I enjoyed most Yano Akiko’s album of rhythmic songs that carry you with an air of innocent indulgence. Her superb bright musicality allows her to get away with affecting a girlish manner and petulant delivery in such earth-shaking songs like Ramen Tabetai “I wanna eat ramen noodles - right right away!” She is the ex-wife of the renown Sakamoto Ryuichi and I devoted a session to his album Cendre he made with Christian Fennesz - both playing “guitar and laptop” recorded in the relatively early years of experimentation with electronic music on the personal computer. After a session painting with no music at all, I listened to a piece by Yellow Magic Orchestra a group for whom my friend Chris Mosdel wrote clever mind-bending lyrics. I finished the painting listening to Mr. Children (the name of a group of four men.) The rich loud texture of music from many instruments reminded of a ‘wall of sound’ (a term describing a specific type of loud 1960’s American pops) - combining youthful exuberance with fine catchy rhythms. When the words “mizu tamari” came up in the lyrics (including my surname it means “water puddle” in Japanese) it happened to be time to stop painting :) |
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WAGNER (2)
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| March
2017 The first painting I made listening
to Wagner's music was, uncharacteristically for me, a
fairly large oil painting on a heavy board. I listened
to all his operas throughout the summer of 2001, and the
music together with the heat almost fried my
brain. A few months ago I was hospitalized for a
couple of serious operations that now require
chemotherapy. My mood was nevertheless upbeat and
I wanted to continue my usual activities. At the
hospital, influenced by the fabulous ethereal view of
distant mountains crowned by Mount Fuji, I resolved to
try to paint 'peaceful paintings'. My choice of music
for this painting and the actual dynamic painting, belie
that resolve! "The Ride of the Valkyries", is the popular term for the beginning of Act 3 of Die Walkyrie, the second opera of Wagner's Ring. I listened to it three times in succession and finished the painting in half an hour. The Valkyrie were eight sisters riding horses who carry a fallen hero from a mountaintop, and the stirring music is as powerful as it is wild and evocative. After finishing the painting I was surprised to find that a century ago the famed illustrator of children's books, Arthur Racham, had made an illustration of the same subject, not too different in mood than mine in its greenish tones and frenzied lines, with the action concentrated at the top over waves of billowing clouds. |
V CONCLUSIONS
After my experience of painting to music, I realized anew that essentially, a painting is a static object, and it needs to 'work' as a total composition whatever the emotions that inspired it originally. This must be true whether the finished work is viewed in silence or while listening to music. However, concepts like 'composition’,’ rhythm', 'mood', 'color', 'movement' and so forth are shared in a general way by both music and painting. Therefore, even when I used the traditional medium of watercolor on paper, listening to great music helped me to focus and energize my emotions and ideas. This led to a different kind of painting, the music providing an inspiration not normally found in my daily environment. I was moved in different ways by the spirit of the various composers, so the difference of style and content increased from painting to painting. It helped that I was able to choose from a large number of different watercolor techniques and styles that I learned or developed over decades. It was not too difficult to match a painting method to suit a particular musical oeuvre. With the music urging me on, I became a kind of translator, interpreting what each composer was 'saying', but in visual terms. This was only partly true, because in the end, I was still making my own painting within my own abilities and experience and using my own idiom needs and limitations. Perhaps the phrase 'an informal collaboration between the living artist and the unwitting late composer' best describes how these paintings were created!
A traditional painting cannot be the 'visual music' I envisioned, where colors and shapes are viewed (or even created) moving in 'real time'[36]. But at a few rare and auspicious moments such a merging of music and color did occur, as in the case of the horns in Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave and the opening bars of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1. On the other hand, I learnt that the excitement of the music might push me to paint too frantically, creating a mess (as in one stage of the Schumann painting). I would then stop and paint to a quieter piece. In general, I tended to compensate for the inability to make the painted forms move in time to follow the music by making the forms change from one part of the composition to the other. One area would be full of taut, sharp 'vivace' forms in strong colors, while another would be full of dreamy, diffuse 'adagio' colors: music in time transformed into shapes on a plane surface. This came naturally to me because in my cramped studio I could only paint while looking closely at one area of the painting at a time. In fact, I take the painting outside to the parking lot for a long-distance look, before each painting session. Sometimes I look through a reducing zoom lens to see the painting as if it were at a distance.
At other times I would listen to the music without reacting too consciously to it, painting at my own pace. Only rarely did I find the music distracting. Some unfamiliar operas were hard to paint to because of the need to try to follow the narrative. After the overwhelming experience of painting to the music of Wagner I have hesitated to paint to another operatic composer. The discipline of listening to music at all times while painting shut off my own emotions and impulses. This was acceptable at times when my mood coincided with that of the music, but not when it was different, as in the Mozart painting of December 1999. That is why I tried to anticipate my mood when scheduling the composer for a particular month. Regretfully I did not paint yet to many other wonderful musicians, because of time and energy limits. And now, after making all these 'musical paintings' I long to paint, in silence, following my own impulses, ideas and emotions as they occur from day to day.
Many other artists must have painted or are now painting their pictures while listening to music[37] . Centuries before, Giotto's paintings of celestial singers resound with sound from choirs he may have actually heard while painting. Leonardo da Vinci was such a good singer and virtuoso player on the lyre (made of silver with a horse's head, which he built himself) that the Duke of Milan invited him to join his court. And while he painted the Mona Lisa, he retained musicians continually to play or sing to keep her smiling[38] . But they also played for the painter as well! Vermeer made several paintings showing a woman playing a virginal (a type of harpsichord). Watteau often painted musicians. In one of his letters, Van Gogh said that he "wanted to express in painting what Berlioz and Wagner accomplished in music."[39] His painting Marguerite Gachet at the Piano has all the characteristic swirling brushstrokes of his last period, but they seem smoother and more ordered than usual. Was he calmed by the music? Picasso designed the sets and costumes for De Falla's ballet El Sombrero de tres Picos (The Three-Cornered Hat), 1919. Kandinsky theorized about and worked for a synthesis of painting and music[40]. Dufy's paintings often depict musicians. Chagall designed the sets and costumes for Mozart's The Magic Flute [41] .It is nice to imagine that these great artists heard music being played while they painted their masterpieces in oils. In my case, mostly using watercolors and a range of styles and subjects familiar to me, I made a deliberate effort to respond to the marvelous world of classical music. Lately I have started a sustained effort to study computer software that will allow me to create colored animations silently or accompanied by music. The resulting works do not yet have the richness of my watercolor paintings, but they move in time, and are in that sense nearer to the spirit of music.
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[36] A concept reminiscent of a remark uttered in an episode of the American TV cartoon The Simpsons, when one character corrects Homer by saying: "very few cartoons are broadcast live- it is a terrible strain on the animators' wrists!" [37] The International Herald Tribune of March 16, 2002 reported about Lou Zheng, a Chinese artist who has been painting while listening to music, inspired by his father, the composer Lou Zhongrong. Another contemporary artist who works while listening to music is Michiko Ebana, a Japanese oil painter who lives in Rome. She often depicts musicians in her works, some of which she paints during live concerts. [38] Vasari, G. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (Florence 1568). Selected Engl. trans. Lives of Artists Penguin Classics (London 1987) p. 261 & p.267 [39] Van Gogh, V. Van Gogh Letters. (N.Y. New York Graphic Society, 1959) [40] Kandinsky, W., and Marc, F. (eds), Der blaue Reiter (Munich: R. Piper & Co. 1912) [41] The Metropolitan Opera, New York. 1967 [42] AlQuds Fonts website is at http://vladimirtamari.com/alquds/ [49] Mariam Tamari can be heard singing Violon and other songs at http://mariamtamari.blogspot.com |