PAINTING THE MUSIC

February 2001. The emotions in Schumann's music can be dreamy or agitated, exciting or mellow, but are always expressed honestly and directly with little artifice. This suited one of my own styles of painting when I sketch spontaneously, very rapidly and enthusiastically, using strong clear strokes of color. That is why I often left some brush-strokes with rough edges, whereas I would normally smooth them. The excitement of the Quintet for Piano, 2 Violins, Viola and Cello, however, provoked a rather too wild barrage of color which left the painting looking particularly garish. Later I washed out some of these colors (using a spray bottle) and repainted them while listening to a quieter piece. The beauty and variety of Schumann's songs came as a surprise to me, as I had been familiar only with his symphonies and the marvelous piano piece Symphonic Etudes (Variations). Once, while I was painting, listening to the famed soprano Elizabeth Schwarzkopf sing Der Nussbaum  (the walnut tree) Mariam came to the room saying this was her favorite song. She sat down and closed her eyes, and her face became an eloquent visual rendition of Schumann’s music, drawn from a heavenly source within. In general, Schumann's music is made up of skillfully woven passages that alternate between assertive and gentle feelings of great depth. The finished painting has clashing colors and shapes overlapping lyrical areas of flowing brush-strokes. But now, more than ever before, I feel that if painting could actually move in time it would be a better tribute to such music.

DVOŘÁK

March 2001 . The word mellifluous - tasting like honey - might have been invented to describe Dvořák's music. The music has a deep soft edge to it, even when it is exciting and dynamic: the melodies are always made up of harmonious layers of sound. Saved by his talent from succeeding his father as a provincial innkeeper, Dvořák the composer pleases his customers with a magnificent feast, impeccably served at a lovely location in Musicland. When I realized this I chose to do the painting in color "chords", separate areas each consisting of a cluster of modulated colors that went well together. For example, when I heard the electrifying first theme of the third movement of Dvořák 's 9th Symphony "From The New World", I painted the two large vertical blue shapes curving in opposite directions dominating the center left of the painting. Later I added other shades of blue and aquamarine. Apart from this painting I made a quick pencil drawing of Mariam when she was listening to a recording of another of her favorite songs, Dvořák 's Invocation to the Moon from his opera Rusalka, sung be Teresa Stratas. Ms. Stratas had graciously befriended Mariam in Japan (during an operatic tour) and in New York, and hung one of my early watercolor paintings in her home.

MOZART (2)

April 2001. I started this painting, entirely devoted to Mozart's 40th Symphony  which I first came to love in Ramallah, some forty years ago!) during the height of the cherry blossom season in Tokyo.  Every year at this time I am virtually obsessed with painting the magnificent trees, and have made scores of watercolors or pastel or stereoscopic drawings of the subject. In vain I try to capture the appearance and feeling of hundreds of great trees crowding the earth and sky with bridal veils^[18] made up of luminous clusters of millions of evanescent white blossoms, tinged with very pale pink. It is a climax of the gradual awakening of dormant nature here. Perhaps this outburst of luminous joy is a sort of substitutes, for me, for the moving Orthodox Easter celebrations that I used to attend. The delicacy of the blossoms contrasted with the powerful black tree trunks and branches supporting them, reminds me of the suffering of the Cross leading to the light of Christ's Resurrection. Mozart's 40th Symphony, like the best of his music, has the same enchanting delicacy of the blossoms, supported by powerful passages of masterfully interwoven dramatic music. I tried to make of this painting a kind of abstracted blooming cherry tree. I started the painting with white lines (first drawn with masking solution); they were calligraphic scribblings I drew in response to the various passages of the four movements of the symphony. The areas allotted to each movement are shown in the following diagram:

SCHUBERT (1)

May 2001. I hesitated to include Schubert in this cycle of paintings, doubtful of my ability to   express the too youthful emotions of his music.  Although he only lived to be 31, he wrote a great deal: his lieder  (songs), his chamber music, the focused beauty of the 'Unfinished' Symphony, or the joyful  "Great" Symphony   all gush with sincere emotions of love, excitement, or wonder. How can I paint to music so fresh and direct, so seemingly free of structure and design? I need not have worried. The answer came as I started the painting, while listening to some soprano lieder. The colors and shapes came out spontaneously and easily. I tried to emulate the precise yet supple and expressive brush-strokes of the Japanese master Sesshu (1420-1507), who was both a Zen-Buddhist priest and painter. His sepia-colored ink emaki  (picture-scroll) landscape paintings had so inspired me when I first came to Japan and visited many Zen temples in the enchanted months I lived in Kyoto. Schubert composed intuitively, decisively and spontaneously, the same qualities advocated in Zen teaching! So I too used my usual painting style, without any prior planning beyond dividing the paintings into rows. These had sections reserved for specific compositions (like frames on a comic book page). Then I simply let the colors and shapes follow, as best they could, the lovely and unforgettable tunes of Schubert's music. The five rows of the painting, from top to bottom, refer to the following compositions: 

1. (Left) Quintet in C-major  (Right) Mass in A-flat, and Hymns D.948  2. (Left) Impromptu Op. 142 and Klavierstüke D946. (Right) Sonatine Op. 137-2, Violin Sonatas Op. 162, Fantasie Op. 159. 3. (Left) Piano Trios Op. 99. (Right) "Trout" Quintet Op.114.  4. Various Lied, and the song cycles Die Schöne Müllerin, Winterreise and Schwanengesang. 5. (Left) Symphonies No. 5, 6 and the "Great" Symphony No. 9  D.944.  (Right) Symphonies No. 3, 4, and the"Unfinished" Symphony No. 8. I strictly followed this scheme, except for some very minor retouching across the painting at the end, as I listened to some lieder, the purest form of Schubert’s music

SCHUBERT (2)

May 2001. In this second painting devoted to Schubert, I restricted the music to some of his pure, intense sonatas and selected chamber works. The blue area to the bottom right was painted to the Arpeggione and Klavier Sonata D821. For the bottom left quadrant of the painting I listened to Piano Sonatas Nos. 15, 18, 20 and 14  (listed in the order I heard them). The inspiration for the yellowish upper-right quadrant (including the colorful semicircle on top) was from the sunny and vibrant Octet in F-Major Op. 166.  The remaining upper left was reserved for those jewel boxes of musical delights, the string quartets: No. 13 "Rosamund", Nos. 8, 15 and 12.   But in the lower right corner, as I listened to the Piano Sonata  "Fantasie-Sonate", Op. 78, I found my mind wandering to Al-Quds, the peaceful Old city of Jerusalem.  I depicted that beloved place in a graphic style I had first used in my early twenties ^[19] ,[20]. In those salad days I must have been positively Schubertian!

WAGNER

An oil painting made in June, July, August 2001. I had decided to finish the cycle of watercolors painted to music: after 18 months of almost daily work, the experiment was successful in its own way, and I felt ready to start in a new direction. I wanted to paint a large 'silent' acrylic painting; yet a nagging feeling that Wagner's music belonged to the cycle persisted. As a compromise, I started a large acrylic painting dedicated to this amazing composer.  Unlike watercolors, acrylics give very strong patches of vivid unwieldy color that dries too quickly to be adjusted nicely. Acrylics are 'loud' - a quality that matches the high drama often encountered in Wagner's music.  I started the painting with an image of yellow luminosity in the center. I was surprised afterwards to read that Debussy had said, in referring to Wagner's opera Parsifal, that the orchestration had its "unique incalculable beauty...that color that seems lit from behind."^[21] This is a particularly apt remark about Wagner, the composer who enthusiastically advocated Gesamtkunstwerk ²⁵ (theory of the unity of the arts including music and painting) as will be discussed in the appendix  'A Brief History of Visual Music' below. And when I actually listened to Parsifal I felt it was time to continue the painting with the only medium that can give the rich deeps and luminous heights of the music: oil colors.  This was a very exciting 'discovery' for me, after some two decades of working mainly with watercolors.  Oils can express both the most exciting of Wagnarian passages, such as the Ride of the Valkyries ^[22], as well as the most beautifully tender of love scenes. It was particularly enjoyable, applying the gold to the ring shape dominating the painting, while listening to the heroic strains of Das Rheingold, the first of the four operas of the great Der Ring Des Nibelungen. I listened, and 'painted to' the Ring cycle twice, as well as to all of Wagner's other operas, except Rienzi, of which I could only find the overture. Wagner's great music and the strength and expressiveness of oil paints - my inexperience in using them notwithstanding - have now propelled me into a new world.

CHOPIN

January 2002. I started the Chopin watercolor while I was engrossed in installing Windows and Internet software on my computer. The Microsoft logo might have influenced the basic design of the painting – a wavy pattern of squares! Soon afterwards an Internet search led to my belated discovery of recent sophisticated work in the computerized rendition of music into animated computer graphics (see the appendix below). But what has this to do with Chopin?  He is undoubtedly a romantic composer who plays with the listeners’ emotions from first to last. The wonder is that he does so with a polished, precise and finely tuned musical language.  The score is as perfect as a smoothly running computer program where the addition or subtraction of a single character might ruin all^[23]. The piano melodies sweep on in dizzying runs, but each step is crystal-clear, the timing honed to breathtaking perfection. To combine the intense emotionalism of Chopin with the mathematical precision of the techniques he invented and used to express these emotions, is clearly the daunting challenge I faced in this painting.

RAVEL

March 2002. Ravel’s music is startlingly fresh and ‘listener-friendly’ if I may use the term. The composers he sometimes wittily and ironically ‘quotes’ in his music, Debussy, Stravinsky or Gershwin are more self-consistent in the style used in any one piece. Ravel throws in several musical elements and often incongruent styles, but weaves the melodic phrases with such skill and lightness of touch that his music always brings joy to the listener. For this painting I gave up trying to produce ‘clean’ neat shapes, emulating the polished score of this French master. Rather I let the sounds whip up the colors in the spur of the moment, concentrating on the verve of the music rather than on its formal perfection.

SAINT-SAËNS

April 2002. This painting was started while news of the war at home was disturbing me daily.  But as Shakespeare said of music- it “soothes the savage breast” and Saint-Saën’s music in particular was just right:  it is beautiful, pitched to technical perfection, entertaining and often very moving.  More than in Ravel, the music was eclectic but transformed into a joyous passionate whole.  I might mention that in my youth I had the pleasure to meet a young French lady who said she was Saint-Saën’s great grand-daughter- a reminder that this marvelous composer was also a real person, living into the twentieth century we all shared together! Other reminders came when I listened and painted to his opera Samson and Dalila.  This brought several reminders of the ‘situation’ in Palestine- the action of the opera takes place in Gaza, and one of its melodies – I remembered with a start - was used as a signature tune by Kol Israel the radio station of our enemies, in the early fifties. Finally there was an uncanny and ironic resemblance in Samson’s combative self-sacrifice and those of latter- day kamikaze pilots or the suicide bombers of our own horrific times.

BRUCH

December 2002. For many months I hardly painted (except for small pictures, and experimenting with various techniques) nor listened to serious music, being mostly occupied with learning about computers and trying to research a difficult paper in physics. I then decided to make a large “non-musical” watercolor and readied a sheet of paper on a panel. However, by chance I started listening to an online program “Composer of the Week” on BBC Radio 3 when Bruch’s great Violin Concerto No.1 started flooding the room. On the spur of the moment I started painting to this wonderful music I knew so well- it was on the reverse side of an LP I owned in Ramallah of Brahm’s great Violin Concert.  From the radio program I learnt that Bruch was a close friend and countryman of Brahms. I heard and painted to other stirring music by Bruch- the First Symphony and “Scottish Fantasy” among others.  Whether I was starved for hearing music or for painting in watercolors, the result was that I finished the painting spontaneously and without revisions in one hour and twenty minutes.