PAINTING THE MUSIC

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

March 2007. One of the wonders of concentrating on the works of a given composer is that his musical personality emerges and becomes clearer with each new piece listened to.  At first all I knew of Vaughan Williams was his lovely but all too short Fantasia on Greensleeves, a love song dating back to sixteenth century England. His Fantasia on a Theme by Tallis confirmed this impression of a cheerful composer doling out expansive gentle music. With his Sea Symphony and Antarctica Symphony the view widens considerably.  The gentle green hills of the composer’s England as I depicted them in the painting make way to vistas of heaving blue depths and the view of an iceberg to the left. Vistas. I must admit here that the pretty blue-green splash screen of the new Windows Vista operating system also seems to have inspired my choice of colors as well! I especially enjoyed hearing the Antarctica Symphony with its howling winds and clownish penguins: as a child I was fascinated by the several books I read about polar exploration. I also once made a very large painting sent to the Imagining Antarctica international exhibition^[32].

Then I listened to Williams’ moving The Lark Ascending. I have never seen or heard a lark but the music gave an impression of a noble ascension or prayer. It inspired me to draw the vertical form of a creature of sea and wind and spirit, wings stretched to encompass the whole world.  Again it was a theme that had appeared in several of my earlier paintings, of Christ's Resurrection.  The music of Williams is never quite 'abstract' - one feels he is always trying to draw a picture of some sort. That at least is how I justified to myself these pictorial elements in the painting. His London Symphony however, conjures up anything but the sedate foggy London I experienced for a year as an art student around 1962 - it is the exciting cinematic music of ships unfurling sails and embarking on voyages of adventure and discovery. Only the fourth movement, which includes the notes of Big Ben's chimes, seems to hint at a staid royal parade typical of London. His Fourth Symphony was rather noisy and recalls Shostakovitch.

The painting was finished before I could listen to many of the other symphonies, operas or other smaller compositions he composed. The overall impression is of an optimistic, vigorous and, in a personal sense, religious music. As a student of Ravel, Vaughan Williams learned all the lessons of modernity and used them inventively to serve his purposes. He sometimes touches and even teeters on the borderlines of sentimentality or bravado without ever falling into those traps, saved by the disarming sincerity and generous emotions of his fresh and uplifting music.

GRIEG

May 2007. Grieg, the preeminent Norwegian composer is one of those major 'minor masters' who have left a number of mostly short but marvelous compositions in a style of their own. He is only 'minor' in comparison to just a few others of his contemporaries such as Tchaikovsky, who befriended him and praised his work, and to a lesser extent to Liszt, who was also his friend. I started painting the broad stripe that has a white background in the lower half of the painting, while listening to the well-loved incidental music to Ibsen's play, Peer Gynt. Then I listened and painted to some of Grieg's other music such as the Piano Concerto in A Minor (the indigo, yellow and maroon blocks in the center represent the three movements) then the Symphony in C (the large rosy circle). It soon became obvious that Grieg wrote in an abridged mercurial style that shifts mood swiftly and without warning. This style is well suited to the many lovely songs he wrote (the bluish panels to left and right). The website dedicated to his music^[33]confirmed my first impressions, stating: "Grieg's production was not particularly large. There is accordance between the person and the work. He was in his nature fixed on expressing his opinions and points of view in a very concise form... It never became dry and sensible for that reason. With a poetic clarity he could express the big in the small." Inspired by this, I only heard each composition once or twice as I painted specific areas of the painting reserved for that piece. The painting was mostly made with broad, sketchy yet precise brushstrokes. I worked with a calligraphic Zen spontaneity or in the spirit of Japanese haiku poems. This was appropriate. Apparently Grieg’s late works influenced the light ‘impressionistic’ style of Debussy^[34], a style associated with Japonism- the craze for Japanese art that swept Europe in the early 20^th century!

Grieg Painting Key

LISZT

June 2007. The purple patch (pun intended) on the right edge of my painting was painted to the famous Hungarian Rhapsody no. 4 with its magnificent mixture of moods- unabashed peacock-like boastfulness and delightful child-like playfulness. Liszt wrote these rhapsodies inspired by the music of the gypsies of his native Hungary. It was this almost vulgar virtuosity that I remembered most of Liszt's music. But then I knew he wrote great piano music as well. I was reminded of that when Ibrahim Souss emailed me a photo of a watercolor drawing I had made of him at the grand piano in his Arab Jerusalem home, in 1964. He had been playing for a group of his friends one of Liszt's difficult piano sonatas. Coming to think of it that must have been one of my earliest musical drawings! 

I listened to two Liszt pieces that were related to painting. Evocation of the Sistine Chapel includes a rearrangement of Allegri's Miserere which the teenage Mozart memorized note by note when he heard it at the Sistine Chapel. Unfortunately for Mozart it was an evening service for Holy Week when the candles are put off one by one - so he could not have enjoyed Michelangelo's magnificent ceiling on that occasion. Liszt however was quite familiar with this masterpiece of painting - he played the piano in the Sistine on the occasion of his ordination to holy orders in his later years - the Pope had asked him to reform the music played at that chapel. Liszt's Hunnenschlach (Battle of the Huns) was inspired by the rather phantasmagoric  mural of the same name by Klaucher that Liszt had seen in Munich. I saw the painting online^[35], and thinking to return the compliment to my fellow-painter, I almost ruined my painting trying to imitate a few lines from the red-robed figure.I abandoned the attempt, saved by the sweep and nobility of Liszt's music.

Liszt Painting Key

1 Faust Symphony a.Faust. b.Gretchen. c. Mephisto.
2. Hungarian Rhapsodies No. 1 and No.5
3. Hungarian Rhapsodies No.6
4. Hungarian Rhapsodies No. 3
5. Hungarian Rhapsodies No. 4
6. Polonaise No.2, Scherzo in G minor,Trübe Wolken, Consolation 6, Klavierstück, Mephisto Polka, Etude d'exécution transcendentale, 3 Etude de Concert, 2 Etude de Concert.
7. Songs for Soprano S numbers: 284,276,283,282.
8.Piano Concerto No. 1
9.Piano Concerto No. 2
10. Symphonic Poems: Les Preludes, Orpheus, Mazeppa, Hamlet, Hunnenschlacht
11. Piano Sonata in B Minor
12. Compositions for the Organ
13 Mazeppa, Tasso: Lamento e Trinfo

BRITTEN

August 2007.  The painting is divided into rectangles, each painted to a different composition by this unique modern English composer. Some of the painted areas overlap each other (as shown in the diagram below), as with the breathtaking transparency of the music itself. Britten led an acclaimed but sometimes controversial life ^[42]. His music however is faultless: it is original, crisp, dynamic, and melodious at once. He wrote many operas but I did not have a chance to listen to any of them. Instead I painted to some wonderful shorter pieces such as the choral Ceremony of Carols, Illuminations and the sprightly Piano Concerto. As a declared pacifist, he wrote his moving War Requiem commemorating the fallen soldiers of the two World Wars. That piece evinced some figurative shapes in the khaki square to the top right. On the whole, it was easy for me to make this painting because Britten's musical forms were clear and pure, and moved in unexpected directions, inspiring a calligraphic response from my brush.  The space left for the last piece, the Violin Concerto was so small that each of its three movements were crowded into an area no larger than a postage stamp. However I found no difficulty in working on this miniature scale. At one time I had written an anniversary greeting to my wife Kyoko - on a grain of rice!  The painting as  a whole has the haphazard texture of a  bench decorated by Gaudi, the surface made up of innumerable broken pieces of colorful ceramic tiles juxtaposed in seeming disarray.

Britten Painting Key

a= Simple Symphony
b= Hymn to St. Cicilia
c= Fantasia for Oboe, Violin, Viola and Cello
d=Ceremony of Carols. A Boy Is Born
e=War Requiem
f= Variations and Fuge on a Theme by Purcell
g=Four Sea Interludes (from Peter Grimes)
h= Passacaglia Op 33b
i= Suite on English Folk Tunes
"A Time There Was"
j= Cello Symphony
k= Illuminations
l= Piano Concerto Op 13
m= Missa Brevis Op. 63
n= Violin Concerto (movements 1,2,3) Op.15

SIBELIUS

October 2007. This painting was finished just a few days before the 50th. anniversary of the death of Finland's revered composer. Before starting, I read in a critique about Sibelius that each of his symphonies built on the previous one, adding to and developing the earlier musical ideas. This meant that the First Symphony (usually criticized as being derivative from Tchaikovsky and others) was in fact a watershed of ideas that characterized Sibelius' mature works later on. Someone said something similar about painters: each painter makes only one original painting early on in his or her life, and all the other works are variations on that rich source. If so then in my own case my primordial painting was a watercolor of the gently rolling Ramallah hills receding to the horizon. I mention this because the finished Sibelius painting has the same pictorial rhythm as the hills. Anyway, I had planned just seven painting sessions, each devoted to one listening of Sibelius' seven symphonies.

The First Symphony was sketched in colored lines with a pair of very thin brushes. This allowed the lines to be drawn almost in real time with the music. For example an expansive musical phrase was drawn as a blue curved line sweeping the painting horizontally, while some rapid staccato notes translated as the green zigzag brush-strokes at the right edge of the painting. In the next session (Second Symphony) I used a slightly larger brush and overlay any lines from the first symphony that had a similar feeling or musical expression. In this way I painted to each Symphony in order using successively larger brushes. The last, the Seventh Symphony won a huge Japanese brush I inherited from my mother-in-law Hoshiko who was a master of Japanese calligraphy.

This method of building up an image using many lines of various thickness has a loose parallel in mathematics: in Fourier analysis any curve however complex (for example the outline of a mountain range) can be built up by the addition of a great number of sine and cosine curves (harmonic wavy lines that go up and down regularly and smoothly) of different wavelength and height. The details are expressed by waves of high frequency (fine ripples) while the shape in general is defined by low-frequency waves (perhaps a single large swelling curve). The process is often applied to image and acoustic analysis. Planning the Sibelius painting using this conceit was rather fanciful, but it worked for me because it imposed a discipline on the process of painting to the music. The transparency of watercolor allowed the Fourier concept of 'adding waves' to have a meaningful visual counterpart in adding colored shapes. The final painting came out rather raw, but the colors are fresh, lively and deep, true to all of Sibelius' music.

BRAHMS (2)

November 2007. Another autumn, another Brahms painting.  The only scheme I followed this time was to alternate the music I listened to in the painting sessions between  'heavy' orchestral and choral works and hopefully quieter chamber music or piano solos.  I started listening to soprano duets, painting rather restrained shapes, but the singing was surprisingly passionate. Brahms is supposed to be a romantic composer - and he is generous with music that has all the hallmarks of the genre at its best - one of my new favorites is his Clarinet Quintet in B minor with its sprightly melodic lines . Yet as I painted  I felt  there was an undercurrent of restraint and formal order even when the music seemed wildly emotional. Listening to the moving Ein deutsches Requiem, I felt that the composer was in full and deliberate control  of the thunderbolts of sound he let fall.

It is well known that Brahms was a great admirer of Bach and  hung an engraved  portrait of the master  above his bed. I could well understand how he may have been torn between his own rich powerful feelings full of beauty and tenderness, the prevailing musical culture of his time, less than a generation after the revolution launched by Beethoven (and continued by Brahms' great friend and mentor Schumann ), and by an inborn sense of order and restraint perhaps even frustrated classical aspirations. On the other hand another explanation has been offered: that Brahms found an inborn romantic strain in Bach's music! In any case this tension, the barely resolved strain between emotion and order - Dionysus and Apollo - within Brahms' heart, lends his music  its inimitable flavor. This painting is more turbulent than my first Brahms painting, but perhaps overall it reflects this aspect of his wonderful music better.

VILLA-LOBOS

January 2008.The haunting strains of the Bachiana Brasileras No. 5 by South America's foremost composer streamed through my head one summer day in New York, when I met a girl on a bus. We walked together for a while afterwards. But instead of talking to her, I started humming this music, elated by a strange feeling of deja-vu, and we parted quietly without saying anything...for her part, who would blame her!? A strange episode of my youth around 1965- I was in New York visiting my friend Ramzi Rihan where I may have heard this Bachiana. Ramzi started his studies as a composer, but turned to physics instead - I was happy to hear some of his early piano compositions recently, evidence of great talent.

In his own youth Villa Lobos was said to have spent a decade exploring the outposts of his native Brasil, and it is debated whether these adventures were real or just stories he invented. What is beyond doubt is the rich torrid atmosphere of his Bachiana suites - nine of them composed between 1930 and 1945 in which he tried to merge the classical cadence of Bach with the street, folk and native Amazon Indian music of Brasil, including even the influence of the song of tropical birds. The juxtaposition of the haunting soprano melody soaring like a bird over the dense Amazonian jungle of the eight strumming cellos of the Bachiana Brasileras No. 5 has to be heard to understand why I used such deep colors and closely-packed shapes for this painting.

BEETHOVEN (5)

March 2008.I first heard of Beethoven's late Quartets (Nos. 12 -16,  Opus  127, 130, -135) in the sixties through the writings of Aldous Huxley, and had ordered the LP records from a store in Amman these many years ago. I then heard them in Ramallah and Beirut during years of my life filled with experiences ranging from a fatal tragedy that befell two close friends, my love and marriage, the 1967 war in which we lost Palestine, then revolution and a religious experience, suffused with periods of great happiness and creativity. These five relatively short pieces of music for four string instruments now seem to me to encompass all that passion and more.

Here Beethoven cast aside any pretense of grandstanding before the world: he had become totally deaf and was essentially writing for himself, giving rein to his innermost feelings as simply and honestly as he felt them. There are feelings of joy, pain, sadness, regret, piety, wonder, anger, defiance, loss, playful humor, irritability, pensiveness, nostalgia, contentment and the urge to shout or dance. The moods jostle each other for expression in this lucid, seamless and brilliant music. As an example, I had written to my sister Tania of how Beethoven expresses a flash of pain with the six accented quarter-notes immediately repeated an octave higher in the the third movement of Quartet No. 12 (bars 529 to 531 then 803, 804 in the score). Barrages of similar repeated notes an octave apart occur in the last movement of Quartet, No. 16, and the effect is absolutely spellbinding- it gave me goose flesh to hear them, but now I sense defiance in them as well.

Through Google, I just found out that T.S. Eliot writing in The Music of Poetry ^[43] . confirmed that he had structured his Four Quartets with Beethoven's late Quartets in mind. The poems open with

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past . . .
all time is eternally present.

A note about the so-called Grosse Fuge, originally the finale of Quartet No. 13 but which was found too long, and is often heard independently.I felt it was a mistake to do so. It is Bethoven's last work, written in sickness, and features the fantastic cacophony of loud phrases and dissonant notes that Stravinsky so admired (“this absolutely contemporary piece of music . . . I love it beyond any other.”) - it may make more sense contrasted with the other calmer movements of that Quartet.

COPELAND

May 2008. I am glad I made the effort to listen and paint to the music of Aaron Copeland, the 'dean of American composers'. In a sense I had been familiar with some of its aspects through his imitators. As a teenager I loved West Side Story whose music was written by Bernstein, a student of Copeland's. I could now hear jazzy passages in Copeland's music that are almost identical to those in the musical. Besides jazz, Copeland was influenced by Mexican and American folk music in such works as Rodeo. In fact the music for all those great cowboy movies of the 1950's and 1960's was written in the Copeland style. But that came later.

In his youth Copeland came under the influence of Stravinsky and of French composers such as Fauré. And like many intellectuals of the 1930's he was attracted to the ideals of the Communist Party, which might have resulted in some forced passages simulating the strains of Shostakovitch's music. On the whole Copland brilliantly managed to incorporate all these influences into a new blend of 'American style' music, for example for the ballet Appalachian Spring. It is vibrant, extrovert, optimistic and easy to listen to, despite its sophisticated modernism.

More soulful music such as that of Quiet City is really beautiful. So is that of the songs of 8 Poems of Emily Dickinson. I enjoyed listening to the moving A Lincoln Portrait with readings of texts by and about the most admired of America's presidents. Lincoln's noble words against slavery warning that the powerful should not plunder the weak were marred for me because the narrator was General Schwarzkopf. He was the author of military plans for a 'defence' of the Persian gulf oil fields, and later presided over the first of the disastrous wars in Iraq. The music of Copeland, who died in 1990, belongs to the other, the beloved side, of the American Century.