Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

It is idle though not really odious to compare the arts, and people are always doing it. But they usually generalize on likeness, not disparity, lumping together all arts whose practitioners supposedly represent that portion of society which best enjoys ‘the gift of self-realization’. No two expressions are more opposed than music and painting. Their function, the manner of their making, the characters of the workmen themselves are as dissimilar as the needs of their respective publics.

     In childhood I believed that a given artist could have developed into any other kind — that he had only to choose between, say, prose or sculpture. Certainly all children are all things, close to natural truth and the origins of philosophy. Maturity’s manners later stunt the imagination which had held a fantastic door ajar; to the more calloused this door closes forever. Composers and painters, in retaining initial fancies, stay children. That seems their sole point in common, as though mutual receptivity had been smothered in adolescence. A fair percentage of plastic artists appear all but tone-deaf and some line musicians are totally non-visual.

     Picasso, for example, is scarcely reactive to sound; his ears prefer the Iberian nostalgia of bullfight trumpets to more sophisticated music. But his eyes are black diamond bullets which never miss their mark nor ever find repose.

     Many a musician is blind to the world around him, though he knows the pitch of an auto horn, a robin’s cry, a faucet dripping blocks away.

     Those examples concern just eyes and ears because the Fine Arts are devoted to sight and hearing. Some permit alternate use of these two senses, but exclusivity is reserved for painting and music which present polar extremes of the seven arts. (1)

     I frequently hear cries that music has forsaken melody and grown abstract. It was always abstract. The complaint is really lodged against a lack of familiar tunes in new pieces. Familiar tunes, being music, are also abstract even when using words. Words help recall tunes thus making them familiar, but it is the verbal associations only which lend literal sense to sound.

     Essentially music is abstract and painting is representational despite what we hear to the contrary. Music has no intellectual significance, no meaning outside itself. This is not less true of so-called programmatic than of absolute music wherein subjective connotations are not intended.

     I believe that painting does have meaning outside itself. When abstract painters profess a striving to eliminate representation their very effort implies camouflage. A musician feels no compunction to disguise ‘subject matter’ and might even attempt to reveal it, safely assured that logicians will never decipher and expose his secret thoughts. No inquisition can intelligibly reproach a composer as it can a Goya for subversive or obscene notions.

     Richard Strauss once declared himself capable of breaking a fork on a table through sound alone. Certainly his tone poems evoke realistic windmills, bleating sheep, human chatter and such like. Any competent orchestrator can simulate worldly noises without much trouble, just as a talented mimic can bark like a dog. (Charlie Chaplin, they say, once performed an aria, and quite beautifully, to everyone’s amazement. ‘I can’t really sing at all,’ he explained later. ‘I was just doing my Caruso number!’) The closer these copies approach reality the farther they retreat from creation. Wilde’s paradox ‘Nature imitates Art’, is not really a paradox at all.

     If we were not informed of Strauss’s fork or sheep we’d either invent our own associations or listen as if to ‘pure’ music. If told that these sounds meant knives or seagulls we’d leave it at that. In music an image is no more than approximate.

     Each century gives conventional symbols to general moods. In recent western music the minor key means sad, though it had no such suggestion three hundred years ago; who, for example, is saddened today by the carol God Rest You Merry Gentlemen? The mode of C-major is supposed to be happy, but the Spartans considered it lascivious (which is not always the same thing). We don’t disagree on what is termed joyous, tragic or ecstatic, except when we read into the style of one musical period that which refers to another. In pictures, however, a wedding or funeral always mean just that, no matter when or where they were made.

     Music is probably the least international of languages. During two years in Morocco I never encountered a native who could fathom our formal music any more than our Christian values. Only in the past century, and to us of the west, do Strauss’s sheep or Ravel’s sad birds, Respighi’s trees or Honegger’s engine, signify themselves in sound through habit and suggestion. And yet, when he knows what it represents, who hearing Britten’s ‘Sick Rose’, for instance, can restrain a spinal chill when that worm-like horn bores into the flower’s heart? An arab would not see this as we do — through the ears. We also, were we not told beforehand of the intended association, would miss our guess nine times out of ten even with such broad themes as love and war, festivity and madness. Scientific experiments have proved it. Gone are the days when Carl Maria von Weber’s diminished-seventh tremolos will scare anyone.

     Music’s inherent abstraction is what renders it so malleable in collaborative fields. A choreographer may mould a narrative around absolute music, or effectively revise the story line of a programmatic work. Robbins’s ballet on ‘The Afternoon of a Faun’ is as plausible as Nijinsky’s. And Nijinsky’s version of ‘The Rite of Spring’ was no more catastrophic than Disney’s. Stravinsky’s masterpiece which suffocated both ballet and film survives uniquely in concert halls. Music can make or break a ballet because sound is necessary to the dance. And although audiences will take a good deal more of the ‘unfamiliar’ in spectacles which mix the arts than in music alone, when sound dominates the visual they revolt — as in the famous case of ‘The Rite, of Spring’.

     Music is less integral to the film medium so even greater risks can be run. A musically untutored movie audience accepts without flinching a score whose audacity, if heard in concert, would send the elite yelling for mercy. The public is, and should be, mostly unconscious of movie music; a background fails when it distracts from central business. But such is music’s strength that it may sugar a tasteless film or poison one of quality. A recent drama of capital punishment, ‘I Want to Live’, excited extra tension through its soundtrack of progressive jazz. ‘On the Beach’ whose subject was more timely still (being about terrestial death through radioactivity) was devitalized by a second-rate score with old-fashioned associations.

     Nearly any music may persuasively accompany any image or story while inevitably dictating the tone of the joint effort. Music’s power lies in an absence of human significance and this power dominates all mediums in contacts. When Auric composed the score for Jean Cocteau’s film ‘The Blood of a Poet’ he produced what is commonly known as love music for love scenes, game music for game scenes, funeral music for funeral scenes. Cocteau had the bright idea of replacing the love music with the funeral, game music with the love, funeral with game. And it worked because the music itself was good, adding more novelty to an already strange ambiance. Nor did Cocteau commission a composer for his ballet of a modern young painter who hangs himself on stage; he used a passacaglia of Bach whose clash with the present ignited the eternal.

     To convey through music a non-musical idea three formulas are available: the tone picture, the tone poem, and the incidental background for plays.

     Tone pictures are puns which never need explanation to be enjoyed. The majority refer to aspects of nature, usually water or birds, or vistas including both, in specified attitudes at specified times of day. They may use the same title without necessarily sounding alike. How many pieces are called The Fountain! More rare are resemblant musics with diverse significance. The opening bars of Debussy’s Clouds, of Moussorgsky’s Four Walls, and of Stravinsky’s Nightingale are too similar for coincidence yet their literary intentions are unrelated. Different means are tried for the same subject and the same means for different subjects, but the musician won’t name a work Abstraction — he doesn’t have to. Nevertheless he can’t truly expect us to see sounds any more than we hear paint. The well-wrought sonorous landscape by any other name would sound as sweet.

     Tone poems tell stories. As a rule they involve direct emotions indirectly transported on wings of wordless song through fire, jealousy and death. Like good tone pictures they possess abstract coherence without a programme.

     The third division, the incidental background for plays, in turn serves three purposes, all very general. The first is for indicating weather conditions and originates from the tone picture. The second is for love scenes and derives from the tone poem. The third is for quieting the audience or getting actors on and off stage, and stems from the military fanfare. These functions can be understood as placid mornings or storms, tender or quarrelling passion, nostalgia or foreboding, and the passage of various periods of time. Music is never more explicit.

     Actual paintings sometimes inspire music. The most famous example is Pictures at an Exhibition. And recent new works by Diamond and Schuller used paintings of Paul Klee as ‘theme’. Klee himself once said: ‘Art does not render the visible, but renders visible.’ He was speaking, I imagine, only of plastic art. It remains doubtful that his painting is rendered more visible as interpreted through an unrelated medium. Hindemith maintains that ‘the reactions music evokes are not feelings, but . . . memories of feelings’. If a composer enjoins us to recall emotions about a picture he distracts attention from his piece, since concentration is not wholly directed to more than one thing at a time.

     Dallapiccola arranges notes on a staff to look like the Cross of Christ. Of course we don’t hear a cross any more than we see tomorrow. If impatience leads us to conclude that certain music, like children, should be seen and not heard, Dallapiccola’s device is not for that disqualified. Do the typographical designs of Cummings’s poetry disturb it when read aloud? or does the holy ‘3’ of liturgical chant oblige us to feel the Trinity rather than a metrical pulse? Tricks are valid when used as cause and not effect. We judge by expressive results. . . . Virgil Thomson has posed people for musical portraits. This too is a means to an end like re-evaluating pictures by sound. The tonal image provides impetus to build an ultimate abstraction.

     In like manner a painter on a dull day may ‘get himself going’ by drawing geometric forms which eventually become representational. To Mondrian or Albers the geometric presents an end in itself. Dare I say this end is also representational? (The sceptic maintains such painting is merely unfinished while the Freudian finds in it heaven knows how many symbols.) Of course it is representational: nature abounds in geometry as she abounds in vibrations from which music is fashioned; yet psychoanalysts are shy of chords and scales. (2)

     Artists, like children, resist alienation from nature. None seek to copy so much as to join nature by opening a glass door to which they alone hold the key, but through which others can look. Painting’s connection with nature (whether geometric or photographic) is more apparent than music’s. The latter, like architecture, proceeds in indirect simulation by subduing inspiration to calculation. Its ‘unnatural’ components are what render it the abstractest art, for one musical sound has meaning only in ordered relation to another, while in nature sound has unordered meaning in itself.

     The truest relation between artists is not as thinkers but as doers obsessed with organized self-discovery. Composer and painter alike feel toward the tools of their expression as interpreters toward their instrument. The dishevelled neatness atop the piano, the easel and chisel, pencil and paper, the assemblage of colours and staves and inks and rulers are as tenderly disinterested and aggravating as twins to these men. Both of them while working inhabit a strenuous cocoon removed from time and space, the better to deal objectively with space and time — for both share the immediate while in the act of making. The logic of hindsight alone demonstrates their dissimilar intentions.

     I have wished to dispel a fallacy by showing art as an active matter not to be judged by stodgy standards. My premise has been that music and painting are less resemblant than generally supposed. Any theory which questions bromides is valid. Perhaps sometime I’ll try proving that music is never abstract, painting always is. Such an approach merged with the present one might allow that pictures and pieces are really the same. A discouraging assumption. After all, if the arts could express each other we wouldn’t need more than one.