“above paint, above colour, above design”

— Emily Carr

 

Recently I came across an old article of mine about art. More precisely, my very first such article, written in 1991, soon after I first toured the United States as an artist. The piece had gone unpublished — not only due to Russia’s conditions at that moment, but also because I considered it too unpolished. That didn’t keep it from circulating among my acquaintances for a while in a classic samizdat version.

Since then, I have occasionally returned to that first article’s themes, developing and deepening some of them.

Revisiting the article in an already accelerated new millennium, I realized that the piece’s age and imperfections, along with changes in certain details of the context, not only had not dated it but, quite the opposite, had made it even timelier to share openly.

 

SOMETHING MUCH MORE

 

At one of my exhibits, at the House of Scholars in St. Petersburg, among an evening discussion’s attendees was an elderly academic. Describing his impressions, he admitted his inability to view my paintings as art. To him, he clarified, they seemed more like research. I felt a bit dismayed by his accentuation of research and painting — that is, art — as opposites: after all, I had always approached them as essentially the same. Indeed: isn’t art in itself already a search, a study? A study, put more finely, of accessing the image of eternity?

Art has no duty to come equipped with knowledge; it functions to connect with knowledge, to trailblaze toward it. Much as a window, not fit with knowledge of what it shows, permits seeing the scenery beyond (unless blocked by shutters of mannerism or intellectual fabrication). Except art, unlike a window, acts selectively, can decide which side or angle to prefer. And a viewer or listener also makes his own choice between the depths of the scenery or the limits of perusing the window itself.

“…doors and windows open there to all the heavens” (H. Hesse on art).

 

When I speak of art, I speak of music. In general, whatever the subject, for me it is always music. Ranking music beside other arts never seemed fair to me. And not even due to its customary standing as the most exalted art, the most universal, the most intelligible, and so on. I firmly believe it is wrong to categorize music as one of art’s types. Quite the opposite: all art as such is really only just music. Furthermore: art’s other “subtypes,” in my view, are just mimicries of music by extramusical means. Distinct models of producing music without sounds: silent music-making. Goethe’s well-known definition of architecture as “frozen music” could extend to other forms of creativity: the music of gestures, the music of lines, of color, and so on. Familiar? But no, I’m not speaking of expressive rendering but of the musical basis of art’s actual content, the core, the axis that beads creativity. An artist’s forms, media, metaphorical contours and even convictions vary and fluctuate. Yet art’s essence remains changeless.

“We bear all passing things without a murmur, if only the eternal remains present for us at every instant….” (Goethe)

 

In proposing music as not one of art’s forms but, on the contrary, including them all, I rely not only on my own observations. In fact, this news is rather old. Just check the original meanings in the Latin: “Musica,” says a dictionary, “is the art of the Muses, that is, art in the word’s broadest sense.” The word “music” concerns all the arts, incorporates all nine, the tally of the Muses — among whom, by the way, is Knowledge (returning to the issue of research). And most remarkably, the nine arts, Music’s nine parts, also include the art of music itself. Music emerges as different from the art of music. Music is something much more. At least nine times more.

 

In aiming for a clearer definition of audible music’s nature, I tend to turn to a basic characteristic: music is never a fully formed substance. This is a known fact. Music is a process. Not fictional, not conditionally stated, but actually occurring. It transpires outside the context of developing situations and scenes meant to provoke a certain reaction or attitude, like what happens on a theater stage. The musical process, discernable in a crafted work or even a separate musical phrase, is itself already that attitude, is a reaction. Namely that makes it exceptional. The musical process demonstrates a developing and active attitude as such in a crafted state, by itself, totally outside any thematic conditions (although the author’s initial impulse probably had its cause). The art closest to this subject-transcending principle is poetry, but it too deals with specific metaphors, with references to definite contextual material. Even the most abstract poetry somehow must make its way to the emotions through imagination, which it guides with causal logic, engaging the awareness with imagery from the material world.

Music draws not on reality’s circumstances but directly and wholly on an intrinsic attitude toward this reality. It does not show a world of phenomena, but iterates a process of their interaction, distilling this into a well-kept order a work expresses — an order enduringly fair, unconditionally and under any conditions, however applied and scaled.

 

I might define music’s essence, for myself, as a formula for attitudes of interdependency. Ernest Ansermet, the Swiss conductor and music scholar, suggests music’s logarithmic underpinnings: “…the logarithmic basis is not the octave as such, but the octave’s inner ratio between ascending fifth and descending fourth.” In his opinion, this corresponds to the rhythmic structure of the work of the human heart.

Here is Thomas Mann’s more poetic statement: “…music has always seemed to me personally a magic marriage between theology and the so diverting mathematic. Item, she has much of the laboratory and the insistent activity of the alchemists…”

And Igor Stravinsky’s voice adds, “The phenomenon of music was given to us solely to establish an order in everything that exists….”

In one of ancient China’s earliest known texts, we find this assertion: “The governing of a kingdom is like music.”

Music truly can govern, and it can govern not only a kingdom. Much like a family’s diminutive copy of a unit of state, a state itself is simply a single model of infinite concentric cosmic spheres where the actors are no longer humans or terrestrial nations but planets, constellations, whole galaxies. The ancient Chinese canonical sources attest to music controlling the movement of planets, each planet correlating with a certain note (and tonality). Music’s cosmic influence emanates in principles of earthly life. These principles are supposed proper to know and follow: “music opens the way for winds from mountains and rivers”; the system of measures of length and weight accords with laws of music; musical harmony’s disposition in nature determines timings for agricultural labor. In political prognostication, musicians ranked alongside astrologers in wielding preeminent authority. (Compare this with the words of Matheson, a contemporary of Handel: “Once musicians were poets and prophets.”)

(The Pythagoreans held a “theory that the heavenly bodies’ movement produces a harmony, because they make sounds that combine in consonant intervals,” as Aristotle reports in “On the Heavens.” Ansermet’s account of a logarithmic musical principle aligns with the Pythagorean view: “Starting from…the observation that the stars’ speeds, as measured by their distances, are in the same ratios as musical concordances,” Aristotle continues, “they assert that the sound produced by stars’ circular movement forms a harmony.”)

In Ancient China, here is how life was ordered on music’s basis: “Divine musicians of antiquity explored the middle sound and measured it to develop a system of music. Based on the middle sound, they set the length of the pitch pipes for the remaining notes, and determined the size of the pipe to produce the middle sound. All officials have taken this as an example in matters of government.“

Also, the size of the same musical pipes formed the basis of China’s system of measures.

 

So just what is music? Posing that question, I propose this answer: music is a manifest, universal principle of the process of living.

 

Another musical phenomenon to mention is the perception of music — unlike other things (unlike all other things) — occurring not as a dialog, with information synthesized before a reaction forms, but as a monolog merging subject and object in unity. Listening to music always means living it from within, inside, from the flow of your own individual feelings: not as a reflection of your personal destiny, not as a description, not as a semblance — but as living through your own segment of life. Music is the voice of my own heart, the heart of its listener. If all art as a whole may symbolically resemble an icon, which gives an image through which contact with the Absolute occurs, then music itself is an appeal; with music itself we turn to address the highest. It becomes a personal, individual path to transcendent spheres, becomes one’s own word born in the soul. This is one of music’s most striking properties, and I think seeking analogies leads nowhere. Music comes from without, yet is lived as one’s own experience.

In describing a musical impression, a person speaks exclusively of his own sensations: of love, anguish, triumph, danger… Yet in fact these feelings had no cause other than music.

“I had a feeling as if eternal harmony were conversing with itself, as might have happened in God’s bosom shortly before the creation of the world.” (Goethe).

 

Could it be that namely in this aspect, of being experienced as an event internal to the soul, lies the secret of the baffling power of music? It becomes part of a person’s biography, a step in the development of spirit.

“The musical impression becomes real,” it is “like experiencing truth.” (E. Ansermet).

 

Some maintain that neither art nor music can be divided into light and serious works: art is either good or bad. What does “bad art” mean? Bad, but still art? Or, if bad, maybe it isn’t art at all?

An American composer in New York took me to a museum known for its large collection of pop art. As we roamed the spacious, deserted halls, he remarked, “I never could understand why things get called ‘art’ that have nothing to do with it.”

 

Etymologically, the word “art” indicates foremost an element of outstanding mastery, perfected craftsmanship. The “art of the Muses” presupposes creative mastery, that is, a high degree of professionalism in embodied creative tasks. Activity moved by spiritual need and based on finely honed craft.

Whatever might be called art in our day (and usually now everything is, and rejecting anything seems awkward), everyone still knows the difference between a skillfully prepared lunch (an example of “culinary art”; incidentally, P.I. Tchaikovsky grouped certain compositional productions in this category, calling their authors “musical cooks”) and a great masterpiece by a spirited genius. The former is for the body, the latter for the soul. The former could be said to serve the latter (or ought to do so). Aesthetics act as a layer for their mediation, conveying the subject the most perceptually optimal “design.” Namely this borderline “aesthetic” territory sees shifting and swirling notions of what is art, what is craft, what is self-expression, what is self-infatuation and what is infatuation with truth. Age-old boundaries — not only between genres, but between ends and intentions — seem stripped of their outlines and tramped down into a smooth surface where bewildered concepts scurry, totally losing their dignity and opting to seek happiness as each others’ guests, with other masters, in another country.

In this kind of mixing of levels, the overall result declines markedly — a predictable pattern in any such situation. Although what we call “high art” made assorted gains with equality achieved, this only came about at the extremely steep price of opening its territories to huge numbers of foreigners. That then drastically affected its own standard of living and creativity, while leaving the newcomers’ issues unsolved.

This results in our obtaining the blatantly average: mass culture. Democratic accessibility is synonymous with democratic prowess, which seizes hold of ever-greater expanses formerly viewed as the property of spiritual and intellectual refinement. Non-participation in this shift of power is roundly condemned and dismissed — what use does free modern society have for old-regime egoistic elitism?

Such a situation might well seem justified, almost ideal: art looks accessible to everyone, creativity no longer exists as a realm for the elect. We conscientiously learn to esteem expressiveness and exquisite originality in things absolutely not meant to contain them. This might not only seem but could also be ideal, if the middle, the general level where creative (both “creativity” and creativeness) activity has its maximum intensity, were calibrated right. By the way, the law of the golden mean situates the optical midpoint between upper and lower parts, the point of their equilibrium, slightly higher than the geometric center. And not only in our perception. To avoid downward gravity, the average should surpass the democratic middle.

Becoming democratic, art mounts a marketplace foundation. Judging creativity by monetary units is a kind of human trafficking. Speedily enslaved by consumer ideology, art formulates all its pros and cons according to, influenced by, the character of demand. “To each according to his labor” is developed society’s law of economic relations. Perfect! Especially if you have criteria for gauging effectiveness of an artist’s labor. Why is he needed at all, what can he offer that anyone would lack without him, that people can’t provide for themselves, given access to high-tech industrial infrastructure? And so the artist submissively obeys, reborn as a manufacturer: art also becomes an industry, an industrial sector, yet one powerless to make something not already made by other industries, something of exceptional merit and value — after all, art has fully paid for its modernization: the cost was its self-respect, was respect for creativity. Art now has nothing left but mere lackeydom, answering the whims of a taskmaster in no mood, for his own money, to probe souls’ moral subtleties — even as a decorative element this figures as a distraction, a kind of archaism, much like that once-esteemed mark of true artists, their “honest and so rare seriousness” (Goethe).

 

An episode comes to mind, a nice caricature symbolic of shaping an artistic psyche as a standard-setting tool for creative mediocrity.

As luck would have it, in San Francisco, in one of the Institute of Arts painting studios, I observed a young student in the throes of work. Setting up, then facing, a sizable canvas, the youth passionately plastered it with gaudy splotches, flinging paint upon it from a palette — another stretched canvas, just as big, lying horizontally. When a professor and I approached, the student proudly displayed his achievement: his ingenuity had doubled the efficiency factor, and the result raised no doubts. Instead of a single masterpiece, he now had two at once. The student’s shrewdness proved much to the professor’s liking. The progressive method’s author glowed with infantile-imbecile pleasure. It was easy to picture him as a baby with a bowl of oatmeal, finger-smearing around the edges — maybe the first display of his creative ability!

It’s hard to shake off a feeling of busily playing ourselves for fools. The whole thing smacks of pricey psychiatric clinics for capricious patients.

Society shows a penchant for rewarding artistic originality and desires as many extremes from it as possible. After all, it has too little of that, and expects that from an artist, who lends variety to life’s routine background, injecting bright, invigorating hues, offbeat and unique, with his presence, in complementary contrast to the tactical drabness of workaday (or non-workaday), monotonous, ordinary life. The more acutely and flagrantly original, the better — in fact, that yields a necessary tonic effect, which the consumer counts on. Syrup or acid — that matters little, if only the dose stuns the senses. Success peaks at a dangerous brink of tyranny and pathology. And it makes no difference what serves as the vehicle of expression, what means the artist uses to subsidize his inventiveness: the main thing is an undwindling flow of stimulating production. The social stratum still keeps tabs on the artist’s standards: he prefabricates society’s manners, he plies the extraordinary: preferably based on his own appearance, lifestyle and proclaimed slogans. Through this, plain persons more easily believe in their own expert authority and learn artsiness, with the artist left to leverage new extremes.

 

Herein, too, a cause might well be sought for a catastrophic fall in popularity of the arts’ performance portion.[1] If something’s performed, it should at least be completely unpredictable, rendered unpredictably: otherwise, where to beget originality? Music schools’ performance faculties are rapidly losing prestige. Instrumentalists prefer to “go to the composers,” an easier path to “self-expression.” Composition departments have gotten overbooked. The situation sometimes grows absurd. The aforementioned composer from New York lamented that far from all of his department’s aspiring students were capable of independently playing even half-baked versions of their own compositions. On the other hand, he said, the same university — one of the country’s most prestigious for music disciplines — was down to no more than two cellists, for instance, across all its courses. The rest had retrained as composers and conductors. “Who will play what these young people write?” he exclaimed. “Before long there won’t be musicians left to play even the classics!”

I prefer to keep believing in the classics’ timeless relevance. Including for their performers — for musicians, who have stayed quite numerous enough, in spite of it all. But this discussion extends far beyond the mere fact of a sudden epidemic reluctance to accept the rigors of honest performance — realization — at minimum, of someone else’s music. Much more important is a lack of understanding that creativity as a whole, as a principle, is nothing else but a form of performance!

We somehow like to see the degree of the differentiation, the exclusivity of humanity’s subject, its unit, as creativity’s main measure. Self placing self as the center of interest and giving namely itself expression. (Preferably overwrought, and best when agreeing least with habit.)

If this stance is accepted as a given, then the level of creativity, the degree of its expressiveness and perfection, of course, must depend entirely on individual qualities of an author’s personality. So that’s why developing creative abilities presumes foremost developing self-awareness, personality — depth, insight, receptivity — by cultivating moral capacities. Creating a quality foundation for the personality constitutes the predominant, the most significant part of the whole creative endeavor. This lets the author’s individuality evolve, preserving its core stability, which ensures its personally distinctive emergence — so personally, in this case, that no influences or changes can reduce the value of its idiosyncrasy and matchless originality.

Yet cultivating the soul takes serious, often strenuous work. Recognition, reward for artistic bravery can be earned by a much faster and safer route: not by improving the personality but, on the contrary, by nurturing its weaknesses (and even more preferably, its flaws), inflating them to a scale of distinction, sometimes plausibly pathological. (Tolstoy described this as a kind of insanity, considering it a “final stage of egoism”).

So we find ourselves at the very point that sets a “middle level” falling short of the golden section.

 

And in this, of course, the public plays the role of a major accomplice, expecting art to provide entertainment, pleasure, domestic decor, exercise for mental agility, relaxation, flavoring for the commonplace — but not art itself, that truth engendering creative comprehension, art’s golden grain, its motor: truth, for whose road art raises the crossbar. More often the notion of truth in and related to art is displaced by craft-backed pseudo-truth, by a generic equivalent of a meal kit — a ready-made recipe, so to speak, to answer an eternal question. Yet art is not an answer to a question, but only a “door leading into the ‘other world'” (G. Mahler).

As Igor Stravinsky writes, “Most people like music because it gives them certain emotions, such as joy, grief, sadness, an image of nature, a subject for daydreams, or — still better — oblivion from ‘everyday life.’ They want a drug — ‘dope.'”

“Music would be not be worth much if it were reduced to such an end,” he then exclaims.

Elsewhere he says the “reveries induced by the lullaby of sounds… [are] what they prefer to the music itself.”

 

Yet even if not everyone rushes to enter the doors art opens, that hardly means these doors need barring. Sooner or later, someone in need will cross the threshold.

“Open this door where I’m knocking in tears.” Apollinaire, to whom those words belong, is not alone in his call, its tones clearly born of something other than aiming for pleasure or, moreover, entertainment. They pertain to longing for life — the sharpest vital need, the main requirement of a soul. Filling this hunger takes something more than the quirks of anyone’s art as “self-expression.”

“The purpose and ultimate goal of the General-Bass, like any other music, can be nothing else but honoring the Lord and satisfying the soul.” (J.S. Bach).

 

Following the Leipzig cantor’s example, we can utilize his formula’s universals to assert that, just as art is neither high nor low, it is also neither good nor bad; there is simply art, that is, what meets art’s purpose, and then there is whatever does not meet this purpose and therefore is not art. To restate the obvious: art’s task amounts to “satisfying the soul” and not to irritating primary instincts. All that we call emotions, passion, mood, can accompany art, enhance its impact, heighten its expressiveness, but should not displace its goals. Remember: “Music would be not be worth much if it were reduced to such an end.”

Yet there are endless varieties of styles and genres, limitless ranges of character and means of expression: they enable addressing the same truth at different levels, and in each case in an individual language.

“A song can be as much a work of art as a grand opera finale, if the song has genuine inspiration.” (G. Verdi).

 

At a gathering which happened to bring together a group of all ages, from high-schoolers to retirees, in the course of conversation a dispute arose: what should be considered virtues or vices in art? What does each person find good or bad, what does each person need or not find needed? And really, how to know? The older people attacked rock music: the younger ones fiercely bristled in its defense. On the other hand, when someone praised the artist Shishkin, the younger people sniffed disdainfully and declared his paintings no better than blown-up photographs.

I think it bears remembering that art is a search for truth, an “artistically embodied truth of things” (P. Florensky). The degree of this search’s success is the sole criterion that determines belonging to art. Truth, like water, is always one. Each person may decide whether to drink it from a glass, or a puddle, a stream or from a teapot after thorough boiling. “There are no paintings that do not serve to correct morals,” asserted sixth-century Chinese painter Xie He.

The renowned pianist Arthur Schnabel relates, “I can enjoy walking along Fifth Avenue and looking at the window displays. I may be perfectly happy. I can also be perfectly happy after climbing for hours to arrive at the peak of a mountain. Only those who have derived happiness from both, the climbing and that strolling, know that they are incommensurable and will, asked to choose, certainly decide for the mountain.”

 

Not all works of art are equally perfect, not all are impeccable. Their distinctions span not only genre and style, not only eras’ attributes and technical elements, but also the author’s personal inclinations, the traits of his individuality. The scope of the creatively possible is prescribed by the bounds of his own development. “Only a person who improves his awareness and will can express sublime moral principles and purity of spirit,” says another Chinese classic.

“If you would create something, you must be something.” (Goethe).

 

Everything said here leads up to the theme of music’s religiosity. In this case, I do not mean adherence to any religious dogma (a separate area of consideration). In reality and art, the eternal essence emerges in endlessly plural expressions. Tradition, images from life environs, personal experience, historical events are all materials elevated by the artist’s creative objectivity to a general degree of evidence. An artist is namely an artist in that he always speaks of himself and of eternity. Professed atheist Dmitry Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 12, “The Year 1917,” dedicated to V.I. Lenin, is no less religious than church hymns. In its own language it tells me exactly the same thing as David’s psalms or Bach’s Mass in B-Minor. Thomas Mann writes of music as divine worship with no ceremony.

 

“The beauty of the body is the soul.” This observation belongs to Leo Tolstoy, but the thought it contains is not his personal hypothesis — its basic axiom has found reflection many times over the course of human history. I recall Chuang Tzu’s description — heard in turn from Confucius — of an occurrence in Ancient China. In the provinces as an ambassador, Confucius witnessed a rustic scene: several piglets gathered around their dead mother and trying to suck her milk. Realizing she was dead, the piglets left her side and ran away. “What they loved in their mother,” Confucius explains, “was not her body, but what made her body alive.”

 

The beauty of art, its meaning, its content, the cause and justification for its existence is the soul. However perfect art’s body may be — however mathematically irreproachable or sophisticated — if devoid of life, it is at best a corpse. What I would call art’s soul is an authenticity of faith active within it. This is the quality that often makes crudely wrought primitive art so deeply compelling.

However, the popular idea of return to childlike naivety, ignorance, simple-minded purity, by no means settles the issue of saving the soul of an artist. Unartificed, unaffected innocence can be an enticing, charming asset, and yet it presumes itself free of responsibility — and that is the very condition that defines a professional. Primitivism’s appeal stems largely from lack of responsibility, which absolves the viewer of responsibility as well: we too have childlike innocence, though we grew up long ago. Yet mature human awareness necessitates, like it or not, a highly developed sense of duty.

 

Not accidentally, the word most often associated with making art and living in art is “service,” implying abnegation, relinquishing self-interest, as the self in this case acts only as a servant — a servant of a goal superior to itself, a servant of its higher nature, of a higher principle: to this go the artist’s best energies, labor and perfected mastery. Art’s service and religion’s service derive from the same nature. They have the same object of worship, varying only in range of means and methods. Practitioners from vastly different eras and peoples voice a strikingly unanimous attitude toward creativity as service and self-renunciation.

“…an artist is the apostle of some Truth, the organ of the Almighty, who makes use of him.” (Balzac).

“… I am but a pen so as somehow to write four notes.” (G. Verdi).

“You are a serf to the Lyre.” (M. Tsvetaeva).

“…man…appears to himself like an inspired mouthpiece…” (T. Mann).

“… through our hearts the gods speak…” (Goethe).

 

Salvation — for an artist and art — lies not in return to the sinless state of childhood, but in ascent to a new stage of awareness — service — “to deliverance: that is, not back again behind morality and culture into a child’s paradise but over and beyond these into the ability to live by the strength of one’s faith” (H. Hesse). Only the responsibility arising after a followed path of knowledge opens the chance of gaining a “new, higher form of irresponsibility or, to put it briefly, faith” (Hesse).

And only this gives rise to art’s miracle and magic, its inexplicable power. Born of faith, becoming faith by means of a conversion.

 

March 1991

 

 

Selected Bibliography

Except as noted, quotations not from English have been newly translated from the source language.

 

Herman Hesse. “Joseph Knecht to Carlo Ferromonte.” “A Bit of Theology.” (trans. Denver Lindley in My Belief: Essays on Life and Art. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974.)

J.W. Goethe. Letters. Iphigenia in Tauris.

Ernest Ansermet. Conversations about Music (Entretiens sur la musique, éd. J.-C. Piguet. First French edition Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1963). Writings about Music. (Écrits sur la musique, éd. J.-C. Piguet. First French edition Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1971).

Thomas Mann. Doctor Faustus. (trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter. First English edition New York: Knopf, 1948.)

Igor Stravinsky. An Autobiography (Chronicle of My Life). New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936.

Guoyu (Discourses of the States).

Aristotle. On the Heavens.

Piotr Tchaikowsky. Letters.

Leo Tolstoy. Letters.

Gustav Mahler. Letters.

Guillaume Apollonaire. “The Voyager.”

J.S. Bach. Rules and Principles for the four-part playing of the General-Bass for his musical scholars.

Giuseppe Verdi. Letters.

Pavel Florensky. Ikonostasis.

Zhang Yanyuan. Notes on Famous Paintings of Past Dynasties.

Xie He. Record of the Classification of Old Painters.

Artur Schnabel. My Life and Music. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1963

Сhuang Tzu. The Inner Chapters.

Honore de Balzac. “Artists.”

Marina Tsvetaeva. Letters.

 

 

[1] A view of the state of affairs as of early 1990.

Correspondent: In your opinion, how difficult is the lack of a story in modern dance for an unprepared audience? Is it necessary to provide a detailed translation from the language of dance into human language, or is understanding possible without words, without preparation?

D. Vishneva: The spectator, of course, needs help. We work very hard, executing each turn of the head to try and make everything clear to him. And the more work, values, information, invested feelings, the more talented the dancer, the more he can enrich the dance with his experience and emotional resources, and so the more the spectator understands. Very much can be told even to a completely unprepared person. …

At the same time, a person himself must be open, must want to understand — without this it is impossible. The more open he is, the less needs to be explained. The more a person looks, the more he can understand — through himself, through his experience, his life, his emotional world.

 

Diana Vishneva: The artist must be in opposition to his time (in Russian)

 

 

 

I really love Kandinsky; he is one of my favorite artists. I love his paintings, he has many works that cause feelings of pleasure which I want to return to. But just feeling emotional satisfaction is not enough for me. Someone from the greats said that emotion should switch on the mind. Why do I like this picture and not like the other? What is the hidden reason? What is the principle behind this thought? Simple and natural, but very fundamental questions…

You often hear that art is not a science, analysis is unusual for it, and its perception is limited only to sensual and emotional content.

And if you ask yourself the question — where is the boundary between sensory perception and analysis? Can it be drawn? Let’s say, I listen to music and identify a certain melody, then I recognize it in repetition, hear how it is transposed, how it shifts, and then changes in some other way. Is this an analysis? Yes, but at the same time, I emotionally evaluate the result.

If I listen to Bach’s five-voice fugue and distinguish at least three of these voices, do I carry out an analysis? Yes, definitely. But the process of perception does not stop there! Hearing these voices, presenting them in my mind, I already hear this music differently. I see a musical ensemble from a new point of view, and now, after the stage of analysis, a stage of a new, more conscious, emotionally colored, and holistic representation of the image of the work arises. Maybe the next time I listen to this fugue, at the stage of that very first analysis, I will recognize its five voices and my emotional perception of the performance as a whole will become more adequate, fuller, brighter, emotionally colored?

There can be further steps to approaching content. For instance, in a concert with a performance of music you have known for a long time, when suddenly you discover some fragments that you have never noticed, but which always were there, only you listened to them but didn’t hear. They did not take their place in your internal, holistic image of the work.

But in addition to such a conscious process, perception can occur completely without analysis. Like getting immersed in the noise of a waterfall, or the rustle of leaves under a faint summer breeze, which both cause a very positive, purely emotional reaction. Is it possible to perceive a work of art in this way? No doubt, yes. Say, for me personally, the many works of D.P. da Palestrina create a feeling of complete immersion, in a kind of structureless space filled with a self-luminous transparent medium, a kind of luminous ether. An unusually comfortable, positive feeling… On the one hand, I understand that this feeling is produced by a complex, masterfully constructed polyphony, but, on the other hand, such a strong emotional reaction paralyzes any attempts of its analysis…

The perception of a picture, like a piece of music, goes through the same stages. At the first moment – it is a wholesome interaction, purely emotional. But in the next instant you begin to see the details, the individual components, whose ensemble, relationships, composition, graphics, colors, build the content of the picture. Where does emotion end and analysis begin? Is there a border between them? Or do they mingle and intertwine to create an undivided, holistic understanding of a work of art? Such a process is very individual, not only at the first stage of invoking personal associations, but also at the moment when moving from the first, purely emotional injection, to the stage of a holistic, conscious vision of a work of art.

Interestingly, Kandinsky a hundred years ago responded to the question of analyzing a work of art:

“Understanding develops the viewer to the point of view of the artist” (V. Kandinsky, “On the spiritual in art”).

“An analysis of artistic elements, in addition to the scientific value associated with an accurate assessment of the individual elements, builds a bridge to the inner pulsation of the work. To this day, the assertion that ‘decomposing’ art is dangerous, since this ‘decomposition’ will inevitably lead to the death of art, occurs out of ignorance that underestimates the value of liberated elements and their original strength.” (Kandinsky V.V. “Point and Line on the Plane”).

Kandinsky pleasantly surprised me with his discovery of abstract art. Indeed, a discovery, although he was probably not the first to use non-figurative objects in his works. It is interesting that Kandinsky nonetheless reacted indirectly to this possibility: “The danger of ornamentation was clear to me; the deceitful life of stylized forms was disgusting to me”. But his idea of detaching from figurativeness is, indeed, a new word in art. Why do I say that, why am I convinced of this?

In my encounters with artists, as a rule, when they’re asked: “What does this picture mean? This element, that character in it?” one often hears the author answer: “I already said what I wanted to say in my picture. Figure it out for yourself! “

With Kandinsky the situation is different. In addition to creating wonderful paintings, he wrote a number of books in which he described in great detail how one should view and understand the painting’s components. The main principles are set forth in his already mentioned book, “Point and Line on the Plane.”

The book is not very popular, although the information in it is so fundamental that it should be studied in school, from an elementary level. He teaches in such great detail, explaining with numerous illustrations what needs to be seen in the picture and how its basic elements work. He also explains how the artist uses these components in order to change their size, shape, and relative positions and interactions. This achieves completely different and diverse effects, and through them it builds and conveys the content of the picture. Moreover, this description is not given in the language of formal, scientific analysis, but using a poetic and intuitively transparent, figurative language.

I understood even before that every element, point, and line does not exist in the space its own, but they are all related and connected together in a complex ensemble. I understood, and tried to the greatest extent possible to hear the music of this ensemble. Their interaction with each other can be very complex, with reflections, refractions, vibrations; rhythms, graphics, colors, and the variations between them. Kandinsky names these interactions with the musical term “counterpoint principle.” Therefore, the process of contemplation at the initial stage should lead to an understanding of this principle, what the artist wanted to convey with his creation, his message to the viewer. If you do not shy away from your mental work, but you penetrate the content of the picture, both the pictorial and the substantial, you will understand the “counterpoint principle”.

An extremely important factor for the visual arts in general is described and illustrated in detail in “Point and Line on the Plane”. This factor concerns the inner life of all the elements of the picture, how the “principle of counterpoint” is realized in the picture. Kandinsky takes the most elementary element, a pictorial atom — a point on the surface of the canvas — and begins to analyze it. It can have different sizes or can grow to be a spot of color, but also can have different locations relative to other elements of the picture. And he shows how by changing the point’s location, it is possible to express different feelings, moods, attitudes. Additionally, one can realize either stable or unstable local compositions, fixed or dynamic. From elementary letters Kandinsky designs pictorial syllables. Furthermore, in order to perceive, feel, see all this, it is absolutely not necessary to imagine irrelevant, far-fetched associations. Everything is much simpler, and the basic elements are plainly visible to everyone quite easily. All that matters is to see, understand and catch them…

This information, this science of understanding, is not an explanation of what and how to see exactly in Kandinsky’s paintings. It is universal and applicable to almost all objects of fine arts, from the Russian icon to abstract art and even cinema. This is the fundamental alphabet of how to look at and read a picture — a picture namely as an artwork that deviates from its figurative plot. After all, it is a painting that determines the artistic level of the work. This is very clearly seen in iconography. The number of their possible stories is limited and they are canonized. How many “Crucifixes,” “Trinities” and “Entombments” are known? All the storylines are determined, but how different are their pictorial incarnations, from immortal masterpieces to handicraft imitations! What’s the difference? Here, despite the presence of historically steady figures, it is in the skill and mastery of the non-figurative, in their “abstract” content!

This is how the inner life of a work of art arises: abstract and non-figurative, since these elements cannot be directly connected to any real objects. And they already live and interact, and this interaction can be very complex, very rich, and this is exactly what is so attractive in such a work.

Another point of internal content is the interaction of the discussed pictorial content, and in the case of a non-abstract, realistic picture, the figurative plot. Both of these components, pictorial and figurative, also very actively coexist.  They mutually reinforce each other or interact with each other in a more complex way.

Another observation that Kandinsky wrote in his autobiographical book “Steps” is about time in a painting or time in a picture. On one hand, it does not seem to exist; the picture seems complete, holistic and finished in every moment of its existence. It is not music; it does not change over time (we are not talking about the natural aging of dyes). However, when the spectator stands in front of the painting, in his perception there is a time of their life together, himself and the image. Their contact, which lasts several seconds, maybe minutes, hours or even more, when the image of the picture is imprinted in memory and the viewer envisions it, even if the picture itself is not anymore in front of him.

I say “spectator,” although, in fact, to be a spectator is a process. It begins with a person first becoming a simple viewer of a picture, looking at it, and gradually, if he thinks, works, then penetrates it, he becomes the beholder. He, if his work is creative and successful, will see what the artist put in the picture, what the artist wanted to convey. And for this, five seconds of time is completely insufficient. Sometimes an hour is not enough… In other words, the focus of the eyes, and with it the internal focus of the viewer’s attention, travels through the space of the picture.  He realizes and identifies its elements and reconstructs, trying to understand their interaction with each other.

A point, which is the result of a spot compressed to its limit, “is the shortest temporary form” according to Kandinsky’s definition.  A point can be transformed into a line; and a line can act as a trail of a moving point — another factor that introduces the category of time into the space of a picture! In turn, the lines live, interacting with each other and with points. The interaction can be very diverse, forming harmonious chords or, conversely, dissonances.

The picture can be presented as a complex two-dimensional, or even three-dimensional novel, in which many picturesque lines develop simultaneously in different directions. This is like a book in which pages can be turned both from left to right, and from right to left, and from top to bottom, and from bottom to top, as well as from and towards yourself, in a direction perpendicular to its plane. It’s me, the spectator, the reader of this book; I choose where I should move, in which direction I should “read”. When you return to this picture and your path begins again through its space, it almost always turns out to be novel, and the gaze and inner focus do not repeat from the previous route. It turns out that although the picture has not changed, you see in it something else, the constructed image turns out to be changed, different, and therefore it is interesting to come back and over and over again, opening up new facets of its content. And only after reading this multilayered, diverse, multidimensional book, repeatedly traveling in many possible directions, can we understand what the author wrote. Or, you may open two random pages, not understand, and say that all this is garbage…

More about the spectator’s time, the time that passes when I look at such a picture. The first impression is an integral and holistic one, with the picture as a living organism with its coloristic, compositional and graphic content. The next step: I see some centers of conflict, local tension, and musical leitmotifs become distinguishable in the overall sound of the picture (remember, Kandinsky greatly loved Wagner?). What, and who, creates these keynotes? And how do they interact with each other? Do they appear once or several times? How do they change, how do they evolve? Have I seen them before, maybe in other paintings? What are chamber and maybe even symphonic ensembles do they form with other elements of the picture?

There is a fundamental difference between a musical performance and a pictorial work: time flows in music, but it is determined by the process of performance; although its duration may vary from performance to performance, the variability is quite limited.

And when looking at the picture, the duration of this process, my trajectory, is not limited by anything, only by my desire, well, and also the time when the museum is open or a reproduction is available. The ways of moving my focus are limited only by my ability to recognize picturesque “melodies” and build meaningful ensembles from them, penetrate their content, and try to interpret them. And the focus can repeat trajectories many times, each time finding new content.

An amazingly fascinating process, during which you can perceive a lot, and understand what the artist wanted to express and convey to you!

W. Kandinsky. Composition VIII. Oil on canvas. 1923.

 

How can all of the above be illustrated in a specific Kandinsky painting? Take, for example, “Composition VIII,” painted in 1923 in the Bauhaus. At first glance — a chaotic set of geometric elements sketched without a visible order or organization. Despite all of this randomness and visible disorder, the composition of his work is deeply thought out. This is evidenced by a significant number of preparatory sketches and their evolution. There is no chaos here.

In the central part of the canvas there is a very rhythmic motif, a melody of four semicircles, which are stably resting on a horizontal base-line, as if on the horizon. This is like a presentation of the melody. But this is only its first appearance, look, the same four semicircles, shifted from one straight line, could not resist, collapsing without the support of the horizon line. But this is not all, the same structure, melody, in the upper part of the canvas is carried away into the distance, melting away.

And in the upper left part of the canvas is one of the favorite elements of Kandinsky’s pictorial alphabet: a straight line around which a wavy line curls, intersecting it — you can imagine that it arose from a combination of reflections and stretches of the same melody of four semicircles. This melody disappears under the powerful blow of a heavy arc-like element above it. And this is all just one of the “fugues” of this wonderful work.

Here’s another melody: three almost parallel lines, whose introduction twice intersects two appearances of four semicircles. Here they lie very tightly, like a trill. But a little further, higher and to the right, a complex variation has arisen from them: these lines have turned into sharp peaks and merged with their perpendicular reflection. Their intersections were dramatically filled with color in order to calm the balanced rectangular structure on the right side of the canvas.

An acute angle is introduced in this fragment, and a variation of structures based on it repeatedly appears in this masterpiece, in different ensembles. You can see many interactions and novels, if you will, as well as relationships in the triangular and circular structures.

But all these are not dry geometric structures. Kandinsky characterizes them emotionally: the horizontal sounds “cold and minor”; verticals — “warm and high”; sharp corners — “warm, sharp, active and yellow”; straight lines — “cold, restrained and red.”

A completely separate topic to consider and enjoy is the art of composition, graphic composition. Kandinsky is always exquisite with it, and this is the reason why even black and white reproductions of his works are also very interesting and immersize. Here, notice how elegant the small brown square is with double short punch lines in the lower right corner. How wonderful it is here, how confidently it keeps the overall composition of the picture, opposing the heavy red-black-violet circle in the upper left corner!

Let’s pay attention to the composition of the circular elements. Of course, the most powerful and heavy of them is this red-black-violet circle in the upper left corner. But it is not just heavy and black — in the center of it is a smaller purple circle, which lightens it, adds both “air” and content: it corresponds and interacts with a circle of a similar color but a smaller size from the group in the lower right corner. By the way, reproducing this purple circle within the black one is a very difficult task in printing a reproduction of this picture; it can often just disappear… But back to the black circle at the top left — for additional relief it is surrounded by a pink-red halo, and partially supported by an orange-red circle with a yellow halo that it overlaps. Completing the balance of the composition of this area is a light yellow circle with a blue glow, located on the left, almost at the bottom of the picture.

This group of circular elements on the left, in turn, is perfectly balanced with a similar group on the right, resembling the constellation of Orion: a subgroup of four circles at the top right, a blue circle below it and two circles at the bottom right, purple and green, combined with a yellow triangle and a brown square. One can even see the displaced Orion belt of three complex circular elements in the center of the right side.

Another elegant element of the composition: the lower right violet circle is intersected by an upward sloping line, which uniquely connects it to the rightmost semicircle from the group of four semicircles which I mentioned above. The intersecting horizontal line again responds with a decaying trill, by repeating it below, also strung on this ascending line. These two horizontal lines are reflected, like in a mirror, in the vertical line located not along the geometric, but the compositional center of the picture, and the two lines are noticeably closer. What does this mean? This could happen if this construction does not lie in a two-dimensional plane, if all these elements are located in three-dimensional space, in volume, i.e. this pair of lines is simply farther, deeper than their partner to the right of the mirror line.

Here I also wanted to note that the colors of the elements I write about may not exactly match the colors of the original of “Composition VIII”.  I don’t have it right in front of me, I designate them based on the colors of its reproductions, but they are inaccurate and obviously differ from case to case.

What I wrote about can be expanded on; many complex relationships between different, heterogeneous, or similar elements can be recognized. “The principle of counterpoint” allows you to see and realize a lot of connections and interactions. There are many of things here…

Besides the graphic composition, its color schemes are also form an object of musical enjoyment on their own.

Although everyone sees the picture in their own way, it internally manifests differently for everyone, based on their experiences, preferences, and knowledge, as well as their emotional and hormonal prints of their history and experience. What I wrote is because it is visible to everyone, there is not a single invented element. By the way, the situation with music is quite similar: in concert halls everyone hears the same sounds, but then how they understand, analyze and interpret what they hear is already the internal work of each listener or spectator.

W. Kandinsky. Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II). Oil on canvas. 1912.

 

Is the analogy mentioned above between the perception of Kandinsky’s paintings and music accidental? Here’s something that once happened to me. I’m stand in front of a picture of Kandinsky “Improvisation 27” (“Garden of Love II,” 1912) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The work is remarkably complex and very informative. I enjoy traveling through its structures. Here comes a group of spectators led by a female guide who begins to talk about this picture. And in the course of her narrative she asks:

    — With which composer’s music would you compare this picture? Bach?
The audience is silent.

    — Haydn?

The audience is again in obvious confusion, silent, and the guide is disappointed with such passivity. I can’t stand it and say:

   — Mahler!

The guide’s face lights up!

   — Yes, yes, look, it really is!

Here’s the paradox: I have never seen this woman in my life, I didn’t know her before and will never see her again, and she won’t see me again, but the association, the “decryption” completely coincided for us!

Kandinsky’s masterpieces, and especially his abstract works, are extremely musical. What do I mean? When we listen to music, it very rarely realistically reproduces the familiar sounds of everyday life, the cries of animals, birdsong, or the creaking of a door. Music is rarely “figurative” in the pictorial sense; its main part is analogous to “abstract” painting. And, like abstract painting, the elements that combine into structures – such as notes combining into chords and musical content, the musical thoughts perceived by the listener are fundamentally individual. However, there are abundant — we won’t say “objective” but instead “shared by many” — evaluations of both composers and performers. Paradoxical, but a fact!

And nevertheless, the music is very rich, complex, and meaningful from the interaction of its constituent tones, chords, their organization in ensembles, and the temporary development and evolution of these structures.

Kandinsky throughout his life associated himself with music, playing the cello and harmonium. G. Münter painted his portrait at the latter. In the book “Steps” he writes about his vivid musical impressions, and in the book “Point and Line on the Plane”, he gives a fragment of notes from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. This fragment illustrates the similarities between the melody and the line, between the point and the sound. His works also often mention Wagner, Debussy, Mussorgsky.

Kandinsky writes that the picture must first be examined closely, and then the eyes should relax and allow the sight to penetrate into the part of the mind that responds to music.

Kandinsky was very interested in the synergy of music and light in A.N. Scriabin’s symphonic poem “Prometheus.” The score’s well-known “Luce” line describes the part of light accompanying musical performance.

Kandinsky was personally familiar and intensively communicated with A. Schoenberg, actively corresponding for many years. Schoenberg was also interested in the connection between music and painting. In addition to composing music, he also painted. The counterpoint of visual and audio perception was discussed in Kandinsky’s correspondence with P. Klee and M.K. Čiurlionis. Interest in their synergy was the reason for Kandinsky’s communication with another pioneer in this field — V.D. Baranov-Rossine, who invented and constructed the light-musical instrument the optophone.*

What do I associate with the name Kandinsky? First of all, the invention of abstract painting. In his works, he realized the complexity, the development of communication, and ultimately a break, between figurativeness and picturesqueness in art. He clearly demonstrated the intrinsic value of the purely pictorial, abstract component of the picture.

His second most important contribution to world culture was the development of a theory on how to view a painting. This theory includes a description of its alphabet, mechanisms, various interactions, and harmonies and dissonances of the basic elements of the picture.

Kandinsky, being very sensitive to the perception of music, demonstrated the close connection, interpenetration and mutual influence of painting and music. It is interesting that he based this connection not on physiological, personalized relation, but on a higher, more substantial level of synergy, on the “principle of counterpoint” of musical and pictorial content. Moreover, his “Yellow Sound” is an illustration of the “counterpoint principle” of music and theatrical performance.

Kandinsky is a wonderful artist and musician …

 

The author is indebted to Deanna Martynenko for her valuable help in the translation of this text.

 

* Kandinsky realized his idea about the musical perception of color in the play “The Yellow Sound” (Der Gelbe Klang), with music composed by his friend T. Hartman. Here is a version of its staging.

To start with, I will name three planets, each with its own period of revolution around the world’s axis. Three intersecting spheres for this discussion.

First. Andrei Tarkovsky. In 2017, humanity celebrated his jubilee, eighty-five years from the date of his birth.

Second. Ryuichi Sakamoto, async. In 2017, the Japanese musician released an album with that title. His first album after an eight-year hiatus. He described the album as a “soundtrack to a nonexistent film by Andrei Tarkovsky.”

Third. Exoplanets. In 2017, twenty-five years had passed since the moment when people became aware of the discovery of the first planetary system belonging to another star.

These three factors and facts are interconnected, and, as phenomena on a global scale, are intertwined in space and time. The connections are not always obvious.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s name needs no explanation, and we will turn to his personality and work a little later. The other two phenomena require details.

Ryuichi Sakamoto, one of Japan’s most prominent and most famous composers, belongs, like Andrei Tarkovsky, to the whole world. He is open to mankind’s diversity of cultures and traditions in musical art and in other areas of human creativity. In his new album, the musician, who has worked with many filmmakers, gives the world music inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinematic language and attitude.

A brief curriculum vitae.

Ryuichi Sakamoto (01/17/1952, Tokyo, Japan) is a musician, composer, producer, co-founder of the cult group Yellow Magic Orchestra, a pioneer in electronic computer music in the late 70s and early 80s. Having received an academic European musical education at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music with a degree in composition, he began to study the theory of classical, electronic and ethnic music. Nicknamed “Professor,” he is characterized by self-irony. He works in a variety of genres, including neoclassical, pop, electronic, ambient, experimental music and academic avant-garde. He wrote music for the opening of the Olympic Games in Barcelona. He is the author of soundtracks for many films by the most famous directors of our time, including Bernardo Bertolucci and Alejandro Inarritu. He’s an Oscar winner, and has also received multiple Golden Globe, Grammy and BAFTA awards, as well as many other honors. Since 1990, he has lived in New York.

In 2014, his vigorous activity was suddenly interrupted by a terrible diagnosis of throat cancer. However, after a year of treatment, he returned to his career with a triumphant soundtrack for the Oscar-winning film “The Revenant” by Alejandro González Iñárritu. async was the first album after the illness and Japan’s devastating 2011 earthquake, experienced by the composer in Tokyo. For Sakamoto, this experience opened a door to a new dimension of knowledge of being.

Now let’s move to another orbit and talk about exoplanets. These are planets that revolve around other stars besides the Sun. Until recently, scientists did not possess sufficiently sensitive observational means to perceive such planets. Our solar system was the only one we knew about reliably. Fiction writers and dreamers, looking into the sky, of course, always imagined multiple worlds, including those inhabited by living and intelligent creatures. Sometimes even the planets themselves could have a mind, like the “Solaris” of Stanislav Lem and Andrei Tarkovsky. But we did not have any observational data confirming the presence of even one planet for even one other star.

The means of observation improved, and in 1992 a work was published on the reliable detection of the first exoplanets in a pulsar — the remnant of a star after a supernova explosion. In 1995, the first planet belonging to a “normal” star was reliably confirmed.

At the moment (as of the end of 2017) about four thousand exoplanets have been definitely discovered, and there are several thousand more good candidates. Even the closest star to us, Proxima Centauri, has a planet. In rare cases, these planets can be recorded in an optical range using telescopes, but, as a rule, exoplanets are detected by various indirect methods, for example, by observing a decrease in the brightness of a star when a planet passes through its disk, or by measuring a star’s movement under the gravitational influence of its massive satellites.

It turns out that other planetary systems can be very different from ours. For example, our gas giants — Jupiter and Saturn — are quite far from the Sun, while in other systems so-called Hot Jupiters have been discovered — gas giants located so close to their stars that their upper layers heat up to several thousand degrees, and a year for such a planet lasts only some dozens of hours.

Why is it important to study other planetary systems? Not only for the sake of pure science, but also in order to understand our own solar system, to understand the Earth, its past and future. We see the solar system in its current state. Looking at other systems, we see them at the most different stages of formation, evolution and death. Until now, we had a single object for research, which is too few for an observational science like astronomy. Now, we have at least several thousand objects and can collect statistical data and determine patterns. And exoplanetary astronomy is now at the very beginning of its rapid development.

Having noted these three areas, let’s consider connections and resonances among them.

Andrey
Tarkovsky.

Nikolai Boldyrev in the introduction to his book “The Sacrifice of Andrei Tarkovsky” writes: “There are many stories about random spying on how mature master Tarkovsky would play, for a long time, like a child, in streams, ponds, dams, watercourse, lakes, would build stone gardens or in general play games no one could understand, on the fringes of forests or in the shallows at bends in rivers. He would manipulate twigs, leaves, grasses, pebbles, rough and smooth, warm and cold, moist and dry, the strange vibrations emanating from unapproachable essences, sounds and messages, rare and always unique shades of luminescence, angles never heard of and beyond meaning… He would retreat into long observation of the stains on some old, ancient wall, or of wrinkles in trees, or of the play of shadows, or would passionately watch the “inner life” of a beetle crawling from one anonymity to another… That was also the way he listened…”

This close scrutiny, listening, attentiveness to the present moment — a mindfulness inherent in Tarkovsky — is capable of broadening the human consciousness to the depths of space and the breadth of time. Such mindfulness unchains consciousness from the habit of sliding without noticing, and yet judging, while present only discretely, from time to time. And such mindfulness allows a person to hear, in himself, that inner silence which is the source of everything and in which only the voices of stars and herbs are audible. Living life, not ideas about life. Truly being present in your own life. Then distant connections are revealed — connections that don’t lie on the surface but flow out of the deep, essential unity of all that exists. And this is more than pretty words — it’s real.

Thus the winter landscape on Bruegel’s canvas in “Solaris” has a resonance with a picture of Chris’s childhood memory of his mother. The two landscapes, it would seem, have nothing to do with what is happening on Solaris, and yet these scenes penetrate each other, shine through each other, because they are one. This is how the artist sees, awakened to a luminous unity that lies in the depths of the apparently separate. The same unity is emphasized by Eduard Artemyev’s soundtrack, with the same music used for both of these episodes. This is the music that Ryuichi Sakamoto responds to in async. But more on that later.

Let’s recall a scene from the film “Sacrifice”: a boy is sleeping in his room, and light from a window and a curtain sway in time with his breath. The human, inner, intimate space is one with outer, cosmic space. Substances, objects, creatures in Tarkovsky’s films have a cosmic, primordial essence. Life’s fullness emerges as a manifestation of cosmic consciousness. In such an awareness, the smallest speck of airborne dust, illuminated by the sun, is found important, vibrant, close, like a galaxy at a distance of millions of light-years, because everything that consciousness can embrace is you yourself.

And Tarkovsky’s exoplanet Solaris, which may be the main character of the film of the same name, penetrates the subconscious of people in the space station, first extracting their most awful hosts of phantoms. But in the finale — which is not in Lem’s book, and for which Lem criticized Tarkovsky, because film’s main idea is the opposite of the novel’s — Solaris becomes Chris Kelvin’s most valuable and true reality. We find it emotionally shocking that an alien mind created the world toward which the hero’s soul passionately strove — returning home, to himself, restoring integrity. In this, Tarkovsky’s cosmism, in my opinion, is superior to Lem’s, in that Tarkovsky postulates the unity of a human consciousness, from the Earth, with an entire distant planet.

I think this may be what Sakamoto is saying in the async track “solari.” Timbrally and in the dynamics of the sonic canvas, it echoes J.S. Bach’s Choral Prelude in F minor, arranged by Eduard Artemyev for “Listening to Bach (Earth)” in the movie soundtrack.

Ryuichi
Sakamoto.

He is Japanese by birth, Buddhist and Shinto in spirit, which means that silence between notes and emptiness between forms is not an abstract idea for him. It was in his music that I first discovered the endless spaces between notes in barely noticeable pauses and sudden irregularities in rhythm. “As soon as you make a piano sound, it begins to vanish, vanishing into noise. You can’t tell when it becomes noise, when it’s gone. That’s the area I’m interested in,” says Sakamoto.

When we observe such transient processes, we can go beyond the limits of the human mind, which thinks in discrete categories, dividing and defining. We can go out to where boundaries blur, to where the indefinable reigns — out to Being, as it is. In Buddhism, emptiness is not nothing, but one of its possible definitions is the absence of concepts. So the vacuum is not an absolute void. It holds spontaneous fluctuations of fields. At the beginning of the Universe, before the Big Bang, the vacuum underwent an inflationary expansion, after which substance appeared, arising from the vacuum, pregnant with matter and energy. The most intimate things, comprehended in the depths of self-contemplation, merge with the all-encompassing and cosmic.

Artists are guided by the knowledge of indissoluble unity as the basic principle of the universe.

At live concerts by Ryuichi Sakamoto, a miracle happens. I recall my own experience at his performance in Hamburg in 2011. The huge black empty space of the hall. A note falls. And lasts, and shines. And, in fading, enhances the radiance of emptiness. Sound passes into light. Light passes into sound. Endless silence and black emptiness tower above this, nourish this, from their clearly present density give rise to mutually flowing sound and light. Emptiness and blackness shine, shaded by luminous sound, sounding light. The fading of sound makes this radiance completely distinct. This experience of being present at the quivering moments of the creation of being is inexpressible. Amazing. Magical.

Sakamoto masterfully enhances our ability take pleasure in contemplating the Absolute = Vacuum = Darkness = Mother, which gives birth to the manifested world before our very eyes.

So the cosmic appears not only in space as such, but nearby, close. And where does the cosmos begin, if not in our heart, uniting in kinship all that exists, crystallized from its emptiness. Such an understanding leads Sakamoto to trust nature, space, all that is. “I went to see one of those pianos drowned tsunami water near Fukushima, and recorded it,” he says. “Of course, it was totally out of tune, but I thought it was beautiful. I thought: ‘Nature tuned it.’”

This is an intimate relationship with being, with the Universe, which an adult tends to forget, but which is the essence of a child’s life. Ryuichi Sakamoto demonstrated this with renewed vigor after a terrible illness. Death is a teacher, and the musician said of this experience that for the first time he felt the breath of death on his face. And his first work after his illness was the soundtrack for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film The Revenant. The main musical theme, according to Sakamoto, is the beating of his own heart on the border between life and death. And this music recalls the scene with the sleeping boy from The Sacrifice, which I spoke about, despite the subjects being emotionally opposite.

Sakamoto says he has watched the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, his favorite director, many times over his life. “I have watched them again and again throughout my life, but recently I like his films more than before, maybe because of age, maybe the disease…related to the concepts of his films — life and death and memories,” says Sakamoto in an interview. The async album is really the soundtrack to a nonexistent film by Tarkovsky, with both artists sharing an ability to look and listen attentively to being, to see the universe in a speck of dust, and to be one with their own life. “My first desire when making this album was just to listen to, and enjoy, the sounds of everyday objects. I had returned to a point in life where I wanted to simply hear the sounds of objects, and that included thinking of musical instruments as everyday objects,” says Sakamoto. Listening to sound as such, examining the transitions of tones and frequencies, the changing durations, the fading and appearance of sounds — that is the best way to listen to Ryuichi Sakamoto’s async album.

Traveling from track to track, the listener follows the path of evolution from a single source through disintegration, decay and dying, through asynchronism and chaos to a new attainment of integrity and unification with the self on a cosmic level.

His first track, “andata,” majestically abides in unity, step one. The second track, “disintegration” — step two — is separation. The experience of the global in the simple, the experience of unity, also implies the wisdom of perceiving the whole’s division into parts, which doesn’t destroy the whole. The whole is divided into parts in harmonic resonance — the resonance of harmonics, of vibration frequencies related to each other as integers.

Artists are guided by an awareness of indissoluble unity as the main principle of the universe. An awakened consciousness of both inspires us to discover deep connections. On that note, I’d like to share an amazing perspective provided by representatives of adherence to a different paradigm — the scientific.

Forty light-years from the Sun is an ancient solar system with a red dwarf as its central star. The system, Trappist-1, has seven planets similar in size to the Earth. Three of them are in the habitable zone — that is, their surface may have conditions suitable for the existence of liquid water. The planets are located so close to their sun and to each other that there is a danger of their collision and destruction.

Yet the system is stable. What keeps it from falling apart? Resonance. The planets’ orbital form an amazingly precise progression. Their frequencies correlate as 2:3:4:6:9:15:24. That is, as the farthest planet makes two orbits, the next makes three, and so on.

And resonance is what makes music and rhythm.

Scientists have created a simulation1] that makes the planets’ orbital frequencies audible for the human ear by multiplying the frequencies by 212 million times. A note sounds every time each planet passes in front of the system’s star. The scientists also added a percussion sound each time a planet overtakes its neighbor. At the end comes a sound based on the Trappist-1 star’s brightness, sped up many times.

It’s like a supergroup where all seven members play synchronously and harmoniously.

Listen to Sakamoto’s “disintegration,” with its space refinedly marked by notes that lag but resonate with each other, united in a single system of harmonious resonance, and you’ll hear how this music written for a nonexistent film by Andrei Tarkovsky — music suffused with the director’s sense of the universe — establishes a perfect consonance with the exoplanets’ music. In essence, these are the same composition. The first is written by an earthly composer, and the second is created by the cosmos. And both are the soundtrack to a film by Tarkovsky, with whom Ryuichi Sakamoto didn’t get to collaborate on the plane of earthly existence.

[1] The authors of the computer simulation are Daniel Tamayo, a postdoctoral researcher at University of Toronto Scarborough, and Matt Russo, an astrophysicist who is also a musician.

The music of Trappist-1’s exoplanets:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS5UxLHbUKc

Ryuichi Sakamoto’s album async:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pygwK0sBUdM&list=PLlxVAExh_bYbnN6c4q1EJxcv559obwOBt

The middle ages’ aesthetic legacy has never known such careful scrutiny as in our days.

Opening new perspectives for approaching the enigmatic era, a rare event merits embracing its declared nighttime scheduling. Members of world-renowned medieval music ensemble Sequentia, currently based in Paris, present a program of ancient songs that even for these performers, veteran rescuers of music from oblivion, stands out as extraordinary. The lyrics come from Boethius, the leading philosopher, Christian theologian and statesman of late antiquity. His final opus, the Consolation of Philosophy (De consolatione philosophiae) includes a cycle of thirty-nine metra poems. Evidence from the early middle ages, when the Consolation exercised an especially profound influence, indicates a widespread practice of singing from this cycle. Yet only quite recently did surviving notations reveal how performances may have sounded. Sequentia worked on the sung verses’ revival for two years, collaborating with Cambridge scholar Sam Barrett, who had spent the prior decade compiling and studying manuscripts with cryptic musical markings.

Leaf of Boethius’ poems from the “Cambridge Songs” manuscript, 11th century. (Cambridge University Library.)

The North American premiere of a core set of restorations takes place on June 7, 2018, as part of the Berkeley Early Music Festival, near the university campus; in two weeks, recordings of recovered material are due for release on an album titled, like the concert program, Songs of Consolation. About a millennium and a half has passed since Boethius composed Consolation of Philosophy during a year of imprisonment followed by the author’s execution. About a thousand years have passed since these melodies’ active life in European musical culture. And now, toward 10 o’clock, unusually late for the start of a classical concert, an intrigued audience gathers at a venue familiar to many musicians and music-lovers, congenial St. Mark’s Church. Almost as if for a vigil.

Three musicians face the audience. Benjamin Bagby, who founded Sequentia more than forty years ago, sings and plays harps. Additional harping and a female voice are provided by Swiss musician and scholar Hanna Marti. The third performer is Norbert Rodenkirchen, a German specialist in medieval flutes. Bagby leads the program. In between songs from the “prison letter,” he also reads Consolation fragments, further illuminating the work’s metaphysical development. In the song performances, Bagby voices Boethius, who engages in dialog with Philosophy’s classical feminine incarnation, a visitor amid his ordeal. Songs from Philosophy’s point of view are presented by Marti. Flutes and harps lend nuanced commentary to lyrics and voices.

Right to left: Benjamin Bagby, Hanna Marti, Norbert Rodenkirchen. (Photo: Johannes Ritter.)

Right to left: Benjamin Bagby, Hanna Marti, Norbert Rodenkirchen. (Photo: Johannes Ritter.)

The program’s depth and emphatic seriousness make a tremendous impression. The monotonal music unfolds in ancient modes. While tuneful, it bears kinship with the melodics of chants, with odes and epic narrative form, and strikes the modern ear as unusual. Each song plunges the listener into deeper pensiveness. Through Philosophy’s counsels, Boethius’ mournful despair gradually gives way to tranquility and courage. The work’s subject proves enthralling not only by virtue of the philosopher’s great mental tension in extremity, seeking an exit by discerning misfortune’s meaning; the music itself effectively expands the emotions in the poetic content, absorbing the listener in the captive’s lonely futility, in his groping for a single form of comfort through labors of spirit and reason.

The astonishing music escapes categorical definition. It differs from later, more popular song forms in its dignified restraint, sublimating all to the orderly integrity of the moral person. At some intuited apex, the Songs of Consolation align with certain Shostakovich vocal works, such as the Suite on Verses by Michelangelo, where everything depends on a fundamental understanding of interactions with life’s great mystery. In both cases, the hearing slowly but surely attunes to the atypical, starts to perceive the true contours of the music’s map of the invisible, to experience a need namely for this transcendence of both song and melody, for impassive, sober statements, for disengagement from emotional strata. In the harp and flute timbres — devoid of sentimentality, of superficial prettiness — harmony and atonality, softness and harshness,  transparency and density uncannily coexist.

Sequentia. Boethius: Songs of Consolation. Metra from 11th-century Canterbury. Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, Glossa, 2018.

Sequentia. Boethius: Songs of Consolation. Metra from 11th-century Canterbury. Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, Glossa, 2018.

This music implies consolation through sharp focus on questions of fate, through baring their essence. Glimmers of daylight finally return, and the philosopher renews his connection with the expansive earth, the unshakeable cosmos and the eternal image of man, who ties together all creation.

So greatly do the performers merge with the work that when a text refers to Orpheus, Bagby resembles that bard’s living incarnation. Orders of ancient musicians, fallen silent, seem invoked in turn.

Yet is such silence truly inevitable? Is there no relearning to read, to hear and follow melodies whose very nature might mark them for permanence?

Sequentia’s example inspires hope.

BENJAMIN BAGBY answers questions from AB:

Is Sequentia pleased with the North American premiere of Songs of Consolation?

It was a pleasure for us to perform for the audience in Berkeley — certainly one of the world’s unique experiences as well as one of the few places (aside from Cambridge) where one could dare to present such a thing. [AB: The world premiere of Songs of Consolation took place in April 2016 at Pembroke College, Cambridge University.]

What do you feel when performing the work?

One thing is the feeling while performing an individual song as an isolated event, even with its own particular message relating to the story. But quite another feeling comes from performing the song in the context of the story as I narrated it (in vastly reduced dimensions) in Berkeley. In that case, the singer begins to feel more reactive, and this can sometimes give new energy or impulse to the performance. Of course, much of the conscious brain is involved with the many technical difficulties of this music: the text, the phrasing, the dynamics, the tuning, and the interaction with an accompanying instrument. It is supreme multitasking, but that is why we rehearse so much.

What did you sense as advantages or challenges in the Berkeley performance?

The Berkeley concert was the first time we had the use of projected video titles with the translations of the sung texts, as well as the English narration which sets the songs into the context of the Consolatio narrative. The advantages were clear, and the challenges were in keeping the focus on the narrative.

Were there points at which you felt transformations in the overall concert atmosphere?

I felt some kind of transformation at certain points when the text makes clear that universal truths are being spoken which could be pertinent to our own situation today, in politics and in the general discussion about good versus evil, and especially why bad things happen to good people. Humans don’t seem to have evolved much since the early 6th century.

Leaf from a 12th-century copy of Boethius' De institutione musica

Leaf from a 12th-century copy of Boethius’ De institutione musica, with depictions of Boethius, Pythagorus, Plato and Nicomachus. Upper left: Boethius experiments with a monochord (canon). Upper right: Pythagorus experiments with vibrations. Left and right: Plato and Nichomacus. (Cambridge University Library.)

Did you use printed notes and lyrics? Or were you singing from memory?

We were singing from memory or from texts. At this point in the working process, musical notation is superfluous. In a few cases, above the text there might be a few medieval-style musical markings, called neumes, which indicate a certain musical motion of two or more notes, but otherwise notation is not needed.

To what extent were you improvising?

Through a long working process we have evolved ways of accompanying some of the songs, but these accompaniments are not written, nor are they strictly “improvised.” There is an extemporaneous element at all times, and there is much room for change from one performance to another. We try to surprise each other, but in subtle ways. The voices do not improvise except in the manner of phrasing or lengths of certain notes, since the notation in the medieval manuscripts really sets the course of the melody.

Were specific modes established for each song, whether in the original manuscript or in Sequentia’s interpretation?

There is no evidence of specific modes being associated with certain songs. In any case, the manuscripts do not give modes and we have to discern them according to certain gestures found in the neumes, which are typical of particular modes.

Are all the Boethian texts with musical markings held at Cambridge?

The Cambridge manuscript is only one of the more than thirty extant manuscripts containing neumes for Boethian metra. There are also many continental sources, mostly from France and Italy. This is all described in great detail in Dr. Sam Barrett’s monumental book on the Boethian metra. [AB: With reference to The Melodic Tradition of Boethius’ ‘De consolatione philosophiae’ in the Middle Ages. Monumenta Monodica Subsidia Series VII, 2 vols. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2013.]

Apart from the album release, are there plans for any other publishing projects connected with the Songs of Consolation lyrics and music? Ways to give listeners and readers a means of deeper engagement with the material?

At the moment, nothing has been published or made available online, but I think Sam Barrett is planning on a project to bring this music more into contact with the world. The original manuscript in Cambridge University Library is in the public domain and can be consulted online. The texts of the Consolatio are also available online or in editions such as the Loeb Classics Boethius. And of course there are hundreds of translations of this seminal work, hopefully also into Russian. [AB: Indeed; Russian versions include translations by Filofilakt Rusanova (St. Petersburg, 1794) and by V.I. Ukolova and M.N. Tseitlin (Moscow: Nauka, 1990.]

What relationship does Sequentia have with musical culture in Russia?

All three of the members of Sequentia heard in Berkeley have performed in Moscow at one time or another (although never as an ensemble), under the auspices of our colleague Danil Ryabchikov, an instrumentalist and passionate medievalist who directs several Russian ensembles for medieval music, including the ensemble Labyrinthus. Danil is certainly the most important voice for European medieval music performance in Russia today. He has been a tireless organizer of concerts and recordings, and a most generous host during our visits to Moscow.

My two colleagues may be going to Moscow again in the coming year.

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