Transformative Reflections

nikolaj hess

This project investigates how Transformative Reflections can be developed as a range of methods and processes and how it can be used to create music based on and inspired by paintings. The project has worked with developing a method for translating from painting to composition and improvisation, and making inspiration from another artistic domain tangible. It also seeks to get closer to the artistic material and inspiration that to me seems to lie before the art expresses itself as a work, with an idea of what could be called a pre-art. Methodologically the project explores through four different method categories and an artwork dialogue perspective, both how to get closer to the intrinsic material and values in the reflected work, and to how the extrinsic expressions might translate to meaningful artworks in another domain, in this case music. Furthermore, it investigates the potential of new artistic hybrid art experiences based on the findings and examines the processes and considerations of these. The artistic purpose is through transformative reflections of painting to new works in improvisational and compositional contemporary music (jazz), to create a multidimensional, multisensory art experience space, where the individual work can be experienced both independently and in close communication with a work from another artistic domain.

Introduction - Method - Music and media - Reflections - Context - Events - Appendices - References

P1 Introduction

This exposition on Transformative Reflections as a method of translating and making inspiration tangible from painting to music is the result of the work I carried out during the period from October 2019 to May 2023 (the main project). The project was granted 7 months of full-time funding by the National Ministry of Culture's program for artistic research (KUV) and Rhythmic Music Conservatory and was preceded by a 3-month maturation project, and is part of my tenure as associate professor here. 

I have been working on these ideas since my teenage years. I have played piano since early childhood and have always been fascinated by the possible connections between the arts, particularly painting, and how they might affect one another. Throughout my career, working in Denmark and partly in the USA, and in ongoing conversations with my collaborators and friends along the way, I have found it fascinating, valuable, and inspiring to explore visual art as a spatial concrete expression, and the possible translations to compositional and improvisational music, as an ephemeral temporal expression.

My initial starting point for the project, which has evolved, deepened, and concretized throughout my project, was my curiosity concerning the mood I can get into and the music that can sometimes arise in me, strongly or more often very softly as in a misty sound image, when I experience a work of art from another domain. The as-yet unknown music that seems to be there, and the intuitive feeling of a connection from the artwork to music, between the lines, the colors, the depths, the movements, the emotions, the objects and subjects, the symbols, the thoughts, the soul, and core of inspiration lying underneath or prior to the expression as painting. It seems to me that especially painting and the familiarity of it from early childhood, my mother being a visual artist, and the mix of visual and tactile forms, lines, colors, connotations, and symbols, create sounds and improvisational and compositional musical ideas, even though they might be vague and undefined.

Other composers and improvisers have drawn inspiration from painting, and this approach has a tradition in the jazz community. However, as I researched the field, I found that there seemed to be a lack of descriptions and methodical approaches.

As a composer and player, I invited this research into my own creative and performative process, curious to see what happened when I allowed transformative reflections of paintings to infuse, expand, and illuminate my own practice. Thus, the project spans knowledge creation as an epistemological practice and artmaking as an ontic practice. (Heidegger 2008).

I wanted to analyze, expand, and cultivate my own creative process in order to develop a more systematic understanding of the possible approaches. That is how I came to develop the Transformative Reflections method for transformative reflecting from painting to music, meaning translating and making inspiration tangible from painting to jazz composition and improvisation, while also reflecting back from music to works of painting.

I also experimented with alternative concert formats, as a part of the dialogue between the art domains, hereby exploring how visual art and music can be integrated in hybrid performances and thereby expand the experiences of both domains.

Positioning Transformative Reflections:

I define Transformative Reflections as:

Translating, drawing inspiration from, mirroring, reflecting, reading, or reflecting into another domain, interpreting, connecting, and recomposing art from one domain to another - in this case specifically from painting to music.

In addition:

Different types of method-mirrors and perspectives used for these reflections. Swerving from the original artwork.

Furthermore:

Reflections back on and artistic dialogue with the original artwork.

I alternate between the concepts of translation, reflection, interpretation, and transformative reflection. But ultimately the concept of transformative reflection can include translation, reflection, interpretation, reading of, recomposing, transposing, reinterpretation, transfer of meaning, what could be called semi-conditional (or maybe semi-diffractive) juxtaposition, and what I here call artwork dialogue.

These were my stated research questions:

How can I, based on my artistic practice, develop a coherent art-methodological approach to transformative reflections, which develops, deepens and strengthens artistic expression in new directions and which is artistically productive for the creation of new music within improvisation and composition-based rhythmic contemporary music?

Which artistic and methodological choices should I make to have the reflections both challenge and land outside my usual ways of thinking?

and also

How can I best gather, describe, and share this in a coherent method and concept system of terminology that can bring new insights and developments to the artistic field of practice I am part of?

Inspiration and pre-art inspiration

Before I started the project, I had a fundamental sense that a kind of what I will call pre-art or pre-art inspirational core exists, which can unfold and express itself through music, visual arts, literature, dance, and for that matter also as ideas outside the world of art.

I contemplated the possibility of expanding the flow of inspiration by 1 – intuitively diving into it through other artworks on one hand, and 2 – transferring elements, structures, and ideas from other artworks into my own music creation. That led me to begin exploring the idea of transformative reflections.

This led to my perhaps more personal research question, regarding inspiration, specifically “pre-art inspiration”. This idea is more “out-there” or even controversial, in academia, but is included here. I value that this research environment is oriented towards inviting experiments and risk-taking, as laid out in SITRE (RMC 2019).

How the project developed:

Paintings and painters

During the course of my artistic research, I worked with various paintings and created music based on and inspired by them. My processes ranged from very sketch/idea-oriented ways to deeper and often iterative processes.

I have worked with paintings by Tal R, Mie Olise Kjærgård, Asger Jorn, Vibeke Tøjner, Jennifer Packer, Hilma af Klint, Piet Mondrian, Evren Tekinoktay, Marcel Duchamp, Wilhelm Hammershøi, LA Ring, Jackson Pollock, Channa Horwitz, Tepper Hougård, Knud Nielsen, Sivertsen, Chrichtlow – and towards the conclusion of this project – C.W. Eckersberg, J.C. Dahl, and Christen Købke.

After more broad consideration, I narrowed my focus to working most extensively and methodically with Henri Matisse’s painting The Red Studio, including in-depth research, analysis, method development, and composition as well as a solo piano and piano duo concert at the MoMA - Museum of Modern Art, which became an important turning point in the development of the project. The work with The Red Studio became the main prism through which to elaborate on the processes, methods, and reflections of my Transformative Reflections project.

The project’s key findings and outcomes:

a series of transformatively reflected compositions and improvisations based on works by Henri Matisse and six other painters, which are used for performances and sound installations. These became the primary focus of the project. These can be found in the next section, Music and Media.

two albums, "Transformative Reflections Red Studio", and "Transformative Reflections", have been recorded and released using the methods developed during the project, together with a number of additional sketches and ideas for possible later development.

a Transformative Reflections method, consisting of five method categories, which I write about in the fourth section, Method.

a series of eight audio-visual documented hybrid concert performances at MoMA - Museum of Modern Art, SMK - The Danish National Gallery, Bruce Museum, Scandinavia House, New Nordic Museum, Fuglsang Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Getty Museum, both with live solo piano and with piano-bass-drums trio, as well as online experiments with hybrid formats, presented with me talking about the project. These turned out to be essential counter-parts in the process, for decision-making and clarification, and for idea generation, development, and selection regarding music creation and method.

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