P2 Method
I developed this method by first creating the framework for initially four, then five method categories, and then developing these through my iterative processes of improvising, composing, analyzing, and reflecting, at times with what could be called methodology in action as a development perspective.
The ideas and the music have emerged and been constructed in back-and-forth processes between experiencing and analyzing the painting, improvising and composing music, creating concepts and ideas, and working with the development of methods and methodology.
Besides visiting art exhibitions and reading the accompanying texts to the artworks with deepened interest, I have drawn on theory and analysis from Bjørn Kruse’s Thinking Art (Kruse 2016), Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook (1983), Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1997), Wassily Kandinsky's From Point and Line to Plane (1979) and Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1977), and Ann Temkin & Dorthe Aagesens Mattise The Red Studio (2022).
I have also incorporated thoughts and ideas from interviews and peer talks with Bill Frisell, Anna Clyne, Dan Tepfer, Jesper Christiansen, Dorthe Aagesen, Anders Jormin, Bjørn Kruse, and Nduduzo Makhathini.
This has influenced concepts and ideas for the composition processes, and informed my methodological considerations, especially Harold Bloom's ideas about The Anxiety of Influence (Bloom 1997).
More about these and my further reading, interviews, and learning resources are on the Reflections and Context pages.
I will outline the method both as a description of which processes and tools I have developed and worked with and as an overview for others who might want to use and further develop the method.
For a detailed description of method elements, see P3 Music and Media where you find analyses and detailed descriptions of the individual sections of the music for Henri Matisse’s The Red Studio.
Five categories
The method consists of five categories for composing and improvising music based on a painting, as well as reflecting back on or communicating with the painting.
These method categories are interrelated and overlap, and I move between them, sometimes within the same composition and improvisation, using them in various combinations inclusively and separately, behind or next to/above/under one another in different formations, and playing freely into each other.
The five method categories are:
1. Intuitive
2. Element analytical
3. Concrete systematic
4. Idea analysis
5. Artwork dialogue
Categories 1-4 are readings, experiences, reactions, translations, and interpretations in different ways, from the painting to the music.
Category 5 is transactional and transformative and reflects back from the music to the painting as well as reflecting it. It aims to be in dialogue with the painting and seeks to interpret it further and especially influence and change the experience of it. While the new music work itself is also being changed by that process.
In language, translation is not a mechanistic reproduction, but as Maibritt Borgen states in her peer review it can be seen as "a deliberate act of situating, adjusting and interpreting". It could be said that there are different categories of methods for translating language, and there is a plethora of contemporary translation theories, which according to one paradigm gives us six different theories of how to translate between languages: sociolinguistic, communicative, hermeneutic, linguistic, literary, and semiotic (Cultures Connection 2023). This plays into the "translating part of Transformative Reflections, serving as a general perspective in the method development.
Category 1) INTUITIVE
This category revolves around sensing and experiencing a painting, aiming to be in the state, atmosphere, mood, and feeling of it, and creating music from that perspective.
The emphasis is on listening inward for sounds, melodies, textures, harmonies, rhythms, and other musical elements that might appear by themselves. It is not consciously analytical, but an immersive approach to the reflected work. I experience this as creating from experiencing the painting, springing from connecting with it, imaginatively inhabiting “the state of mind” of the painting while letting the music unfold.
The method and sensing I use partially resemble my experiences of playing music with other music creators when in the optimal version, my mind is fully present and focused on the music and the totality of the sound, while also being able to “zoom in” and isolate focus on some specific part(s) of the music, while maintaining uncontrived open reactions.
This category relates to Jacob Anderskov’s KUV project Action vs. Reaction quoting Airto quoting Miles Davis, "you listen, then you play" (Anderskov 2020). I associate jazz improvisers and composers Lee Konitz, Paul Bley, and Carla Bley with the concept "listen and play what you hear" or "listen and play only what you hear". This philosophy is not reserved for them only, but something I have discussed with my music colleagues, and that I have experienced as an existing value and virtue in the jazz community. In Paul Bley’s case, in a conversation we had after a concert of his in Copenhagen in 1987, he was also talking about listening to the musical situation you are in while waiting for an impulse or idea to play, but to wait for the 3rd, 4th or 5th idea in order to attain more original and deeper ideas. I will add what pianist/composer Nduduzo Makhathini talked about in one of our conversations about his artistic philosophy, originating from Zulu music traditions: "playing as a result of listening rather than listening as a result of playing", and "songs as a way of listening", which I deeply relate to in my own practice.
Another relevant comparison is Pauline Oliveros’ sonic meditations and the concept of deep listening (Oliveros 2022), which relates to an art experience phenomenon in the art world, described as slow looking (Tishman 2017). Both ideas have a strong element of letting the music or visual experience happen by itself while employing patience and presence to the listening and looking.
I created a version of this, where I look at a painting and listen and improvise/compose with the objective to act only on what emerges spontaneously and unforced in my mind, which I use to cue my personal practice of slow looking and deep listening.
Bjørn Kruse states in my interview with him that "Your mind is interdisciplinary", which I find corresponds with a "free daydreaming with sound and visuals", not just the one or the other (Kruse 2022).
In my interview with bassist, composer, and professor Anders Jormin, he describes intuition as "an uncontrolled mix and use of all one’s knowledge and analysis", this corresponds with the general idea of intuition in this category although there might be a stronger emphasis on sensing and feeling than that statement might suggest (Jormin 2022).
Category 2) ELEMENT ANALYTICAL
This category is based on freely selected elements in the painting and translating them into elements in the music. It emphasizes freely chosen interpretation, analysis, and use of elements and a freely chosen balance between the elements.
Elements in the painting are translated into musical elements and worked with in the composition and improvisation processes. These elements could be symbols, colors, selected figures, subjects, objects, patterns, repetitions, variations, motifs, actions, rhythms, lines, angles, shapes, planes, density, brushstrokes, mark-making, surfaces, perspectives, distances, dimensions, perceived meanings, connotations, movements, relationships between objects and subjects, meanings, placements, foreground, middle and background, form, dramaturgy, etcetera.
The category explores selected elements and details rather than interpreting overarching ideas.
Reflections in the category include working with overtone series and negative harmony in the music domain.
It works with continuums of hues, tints, tones, shades; figurative-abstract; simplicity-complexity; density-sparsity; many-few motives; movement-stillness; dark-light; poly-mono chromatism, rhythm; direct-indirect; ornamentation.
And with feelings, moods, personality traits - also that of objects - narrative, development, and with transforming colors to tones.
The representations of the elements in the work can also be drawn from my own and others' descriptions and observations of the work, from concrete, mood-oriented, feeling-related, story-line-related or space and place-related perspectives as starting points.
Image analysis can be used as the foundation and the category can work with iconography and symbolism. For example, represented as chord progressions and/or rhythmic/thematic elements with similar connotations.
This category also comprises the perspective of viewing the painting from different perspectives; close up and further away, for example, 3 cm - 3 meters, observing the painting’s different elements, and applying a hermeneutic perspective of going back and forth between different positions.
In this category, I have worked with representations of the painting like a print on paper, with my added written notes and drawings, where various elements in the painting can translate into music elements like simplistic lines, dense sounds, roots, certain intervals.
Category 3) CONCRETE SYSTEMATIC
In this category, a translation system is invented and strictly adhered to. ‘Unlike method ii) analysis of elements, the composer/improviser’s only active role in the concrete systematic category is in the system's invention, with the effect of partially removing the composer/improviser from the aesthetic choices. It can use systems like algorithms, systematically automatically generated material, random correlations, relations, amount of information, objects/lines/points placements to pitches, reading the painting like sheet music, or intervals. Colors can be translated to notes like Scriabin, Newton, Rimsky-Korsakov’s perceptions.
One example might be mapping a pixel of the painting and translating that into a midi-sound picture (whether directly or altered through composition software like Pixelsynth, Metasynth, Photosounder, etc.). Or as I did with Matisse's Red Studio, translating the rhythmic placement of the clock dial in the painting from color interval to tone interval.
Other possible systems include transposition of light frequency (sound to light - Hz x 1012) to sound frequency and pulse frequency, color wheel to tone wheel/circle of fifths. Or using contours and patterns, aspect ratio, transpositions, and modulations. Or descriptions/mappings of a painting with general nonpainting-specific words, and then creating music from the resulting text, forming a "sound recipe" or "sound code".
Category 4) IDEA ANALYTICAL
This category works with the ideas or processes of the artmaking, together with the appearance of the artwork itself. It explores underlying processes or methods, the ideas or context of the work, the artist, the currents, or the art scenes surrounding them, and the artist’s philosophies, ideals, or concepts as represented in the work. It is closer to the artwork dialogue category than the preceding categories, on account of its interpretative and contextualizing nature, but the artwork dialogue category goes further into the idea of reflecting back on the original work than the Idea analytical category.
This category can also work with the idea of what lies outside the painting, what is extrinsic to the painting, or what happens in the painting, which is not apparent. Herein lies the possibility of imagined sound, in and outside the painting, an interpreted storyline, movement, and theme(s) in the painting, and a syn-aesthetic or inter-aesthetic perspective, where the music is based on observations of aesthetic principles in the painting. Here category 4 is getting close to category 5.
The category addresses the elements behind or around the painting. Some points include: What are the themes of the painting, and what questions does it pose? What other perspectives are there on the subject or motif of the painting? What can be interpreted from the stylistic concepts and concepts of work processes? What is the time period of the painting? What are the art historical, musical historical, or cultural assumptions implicit in the artwork?
Through interviews with the artists and/or experts in the field, research, books, and other resources, the composer/improviser can grasp what cannot necessarily be seen in the work and generate more possibilities for which directions to take. Analysis from outsiders or historical considerations may also be starting points for reflections.
Category 5) ARTWORK DIALOGUE
The first four categories are representational. Initially, the aspiration was to be able to somehow “represent” the painting in the music. I observed that while my early attempts, using the first four categories of the method, proved relatively successful – for example with instances of an audience managing to describe the translated painting by only listening to the music – I found that the results did not have enough independent artistic weight.
So, I find it important to let the music have its own strong development track, in connection with the painting, in an effort to create a dialogue with the painting it reflects, so it at the same time reflects and reflects back on the painting - with the purpose of expanding the experience of transformative reflections.
At times, the music can begin to create its own universe based on the translation/reflection and hereby create a track that is both dependent on and independent of the original work it translates. This might be termed a semi-conditional reading, where the core of the composition and improvisation connects to the painting, but also develops its own independent track, where the connection to the original can be balanced differently.
So, the composition is based on the painting with the use of categories 1-4, and then develops on its own, in its own gestalt, and then reflects back and possibly changes the perception of the artwork it was reflecting.
This connects to part of the Anxiety of Influence in the sense of first wanting to imitate the original, and then with the revisionary ratio of Apophrades, changing the perception of the original with the new work, this however being based on an undeniable connection to the original (Bloom 1997).
It also draws on thoughts from Professor Anders Jormin, who in my interview with him states his position as music and paintings being their own individual complete languages (Jormin 2022). I can agree with this perspective and partly use it when developing the individual music piece, which then reflects back on the original, more strongly. At the same time, I find that this project shows that this position co-exists with the experience of the enhanced experience of the two domains in transformatively reflected combinations.
The artwork dialogue furthermore works with interpretation, imagination outside the painting, and imagined elements not apparent in the painting, for example, what if I close my eyes and enter the painting? As well as threads to past, present, and future. It contains the ideas of situationism, detournement, and looking at what the painting says in – and perhaps about – the present.
Dorthe Aagesen says in my interview with her: ” We are also searching for what we can make of Matisse’s The Red Studio painting today” (Aagesen 2021).
This connects to category 4, but still with the major difference that this is transactional in the dialogue and reflecting back on the painting, whereas category 4 is still primarily reactive.
The artwork dialogue introduces an awareness, experience, and detection of connections between the domains.
This category has the possibility of experiencing and dramatizing painting as a time-based medium, reflecting temporality into it.
While music inherently brings temporality to the hybrid experience space of painting and music, this can also be employed by translating movement, process, and a possible story in the painting and highlighting or altering this in the music. This might then reflect back on the painting and create a new experience of it.
Vice versa, the possibility of experiencing a painting as static can reflect into music by making it more of a spatial experience rather than temporal. Here, I have drawn on Kruse's Thinking Art (Kruse 2016, 22), where he talks about spatiality vs. temporality in music and art.
In addition, the artwork dialogue category has a track that includes the audience as co-creators, in a way. In the case of the MoMA concert with Matisse’s The Red Studio, the objective for a certain part of the concert was to draw the experience as much as possible into the present situation, with the audience listening to the music while experiencing the painting.. and with the intention that the two composers/improvisers/performers would strongly sense the complete situation of everybody in the room in the here and now and invite this into the performance and improvisation process. I find that this could be related to a situation-specific version of jazz pianist Bill Evans's description of a universal musical mind (Evans 1966). I also connect this to another of Makhathini’s description of Zulu music traditions, talking about "gathering as a way to composing the sounds that are hanging", where the presence of the listeners affect the music, and everybody present becomes co-creators.
As a very important part of Matisse's and The Red Studio's process and artistic philosophy, I perceive a strong urge and courage to follow artistic instinct, impulse, and sensibility, without knowing the outcome beforehand. I translate this by setting up part of the concert situation with two composing and improvising performers first listening to each other’s interpretations and translations of the painting and then engaging in completely unrehearsed, open, and free improvisation together.
This part of the performance can be heard on P3 Music and Media
The artwork dialogue category is connected to the first four categories. It has a similarity to reflective listening (Arnold 2014). First, the other categories read the painting and represent it, then the artwork dialogue reflects new perspectives back on the original.
This category can work with the questions: What does the work say to society, sociologically, culturally, politically, art philosophically? How can the experience be changed? Can it be seen as a phenomenological perspective? Constructivistic? How can the audience be included as co-creators in a performance?
On improvisation and composition in the method
The improvisation has some of the same elements as the composition working with Transformative Reflections, but it lets the translation unfold in its own universe, to a greater degree. At times, with an intention to have a clear connection to some of the elements in the painting that have been improvisationally chosen in the moment. At other times, it is closer to a classic jazz-based improvisation over a melody, chords, and structure, which aim to carry out the original idea of the composition, while it can simultaneously build its own universe in the improvisation. And then reflect back with a different perspective on the painting – while still keeping the closeness and connectedness with the painting somewhat intact. Here, drawing on the Apophrades from Anxiety of Influence again, pointing to the artwork dialogue. (Bloom 1997, 139)
Or referring to Makhathini again, where he talks about the journey from knowing to not knowing to new knowing", which applies here as well
The improvisations in the compositions at times follow the structure of the painting. By doing so, they become form-conscious, with a different angle than my usual improvisation practice.
The improvisation and composition represent two parts of the same matter and the essence of the composition can be the basis in the improvisation as well. At times the improvisation reflects back on the painting with a new perspective and transports the composition into the artwork dialogue.
There is another element of the improvisational part, about freely choosing what to focus on from and in the painting, in the moment. And interpret it according to what the present moment invites to but based on the previous analysis and sensing of the painting. Here, I see a link to a mix of free improvisation and classic optimal interpretation of well-known material, where the room, possibly the audience, the state of the world, and the sensitivity of the performing artists in the moment, combine with and renew the artistic material already in existence.
Description of the Transformative Reflections Method used for and developed through working on music based on the Matisse painting The Red Studio, ‘L'Atelier Rouge’. Reflections on creative processes, connections, and interpretations:
The music can be experienced through live video performances from the Museum of Modern Art (solo piano from two artists’ perspectives and piano duo) and from the SMK – The Danish National Gallery (a solo piano concert and artist talk, and a trio concert and artist talk).
The music is also available as a studio recording that was part of the exhibition The Red Studio at SMK, as a headphone listening installation in front of the painting The Red Studio. And as an album release called Transformative Reflections Red Studio Suite.
This selection comprises the Red Studio Suite, eight musical perspectives on "The Red Studio", as composed pieces with improvised parts, ranging from two to eight minutes each.
These music pieces are reflections from painting to music, created using the method described earlier in this text.
Working with The Red Studio and The Red Studio Suite was an integral part of developing and expanding the method in an iterative "methodology in action" process, inventing, exploring, and further developing the method during the improvisation, composition, analysis, and reflection processes.
The musical perspectives on The Red Studio were based on several inductively chosen angles:
- Specific areas: Focusing on four rectangular parts with different atmospheres and attributes; the artworks in the artwork and the overall Venetian red.
- Circular movement and iterations: Exploring the circular movement and representations of figures and elements.
- Color relations: The relationships between the present colors and between the underlying colors.
- Figure/ground inversion: Two- versus three-dimensionality and visual illusions.
- Underlying ideas: Exploring the artistic intuition and philosophy behind the painting, its influence on future visual art and music, a feeling of suspension of space and time, and a balance between the figurative and the abstract. It also considers artistic movement and musical currents of the painting's era.
- Changing the focus and exploring artwork dialogue and the audience as co-creators: Exploring how the music – built from a strong fundament in the painting – can reflect back on the painting and possibly change the perception by way of its own development in the present moment, in the presence of the audience.
You can see The Red Studio at https://www.wikiart.org/en/henri-matisse/red-studio-1911
An account of my creative process described through the 9 pieces in The Red Studio Suite:
Basis:
First, I created a short musical phrase or element representing each of the eleven artworks depicted in The Red Studio resulting in the piece Intro. In this piece, there is an underlying representation of the Venetian red. Next, Colors Shapes Time Space, a piece with the original underlying three main colors in the painting represented by three underlying tonal centers, resolving in a fourth, representing the Venetian red color.
Clock Durée, an abstraction of measured time and experienced time was the introduction to the the piece Clockwise Concrete, a systematic trip around the grandfather clock in the middle, translating the colors from the objects in The Red Studio to intervals in the music using the color circle and the circle of fifths. The rhythmic placement in the music is based on the spatial placement in relation to the clock face.
First transformation
I transitioned the basis into the piece Morton's Field, with the figure/ground inversion in the painting translated into musical reflection. This I accompanied by an abstraction of the monochromaticism of the Venetian red color represented by an explicit harmonic connection to American composer Morton Feldman's composition Rothkos Chapel. Feldman made music tributing the American painter Mark Rothko's ground-breaking monochromatic paintings displayed in the non-denominational chapel and exhibition space Rothko Chapel in Texas, and Rothko's paintings here relate strongly to Matisse’s The Red Studio, with Rothko's inspiration from this painting (Clearwater 2007).
This was followed by the piece Objects, a quiet contemplation on the whole painting put into a sheet music system and read as such. This leads to RedS, a piece in four small sections that reflect the moods of the four different rectangles in the painting, starting from the bottom left. RedS is further expanded in the finale with two grand pianos. Before this, I shifted the focus to the small but significant landscape painting, which both the light blue pens on the table and the imagined gaze from the empty chair point towards. I represented this with a reworking and sketch-like version of an older five-note-based composition African Trees, which contemplates the earthiness of the Venetian red and the sophisticated fundamentality of nature and folklore as inspiration for art and music.
Second transformation
The final piece Heard, is an intuitive composition based on my state of mind after an early in the work process slow looking - deep listening experience with The Red Studio, with the principle of looking contemplatively and waiting for the music to emerge by itself in the mind.
In the concert version, after the solo performances by myself and then Kris Davis, with our individual, different perspectives, I created a space for artistic instinct and intuition as also mentioned in the description of the artwork dialogue category earlier on this page. To me, this seems very present in Matisses’ apparently sudden change in the painting, at the end of the creation process, where he painted it Venetian red, possibly without knowing why he did it. I reflected this drastic move (Temkin & Aagensen 2022, 75) by planning a space for a completely unplanned free improvisation in the music on the two grand pianos – with the only plan to follow the music in the moment, after listening to each other’s compositions and improvisations, based on the painting. The journey ended in a double grand piano version with improvisation on the piece RedS with both a simplistic compositional stretchable frame and a built-in space for free in-the-moment improvisation with continued reflections on the whole experience.
Changing and zooming perspectives:
During the process, I kept going back and forth between, on the one hand, creating music with a strong connection to the current method category I was working from, from a relatively rational perspective (except in the intuitive category) to on the other hand, zooming out and experiencing the music with the painting, and how the music and the painting communicate, asking:
Does the music represent the painting?
Does it add another perspective?
Does it change the perception?
Does it feel like the painting?
Does it counterpoint the painting?
Does it enhance the painting?
And, to some degree asking the same questions the other way around, from the painting to the music.
This process of sensing, feeling, and interpreting alternating with analyzing and working with the elements, structures, and details, seemed to be a key factor in moving the connections between the domains to a deeper level than I had done before.
Why Matisse The Red Studio?
The choice of Matisse was based on a fascination with Matisse's works, and the sensing of something extraordinarily uplifting and at the same time deep and soulful and very musically inspiring in them. I felt that his colors were something I could learn from in my music. If I should have chosen between Picasso and Matisse from more or less the same time period, before working with The Red Studio, I could have also related to the figures and lines in Picasso’s works as a basis for transformative reflections. With Matisse, however, his forms and lines feel like the perfect balance to me and give me a certain undecipherable uplifting feeling with his choices and balancing of colors.
I relate to what Morton Feldman writes in "Give My Regards To 8th Street" (1975): "We had no Matisse. We don't know what color is. I think music is open to color." (Feldman 2004, 192)
In addition to this, by working with The Red Studio, I had the opportunity to have special access and collaborations - in the form of in-depth conversations with leading international art experts, directors, and chief and senior curators at MoMA and SMK; visiting the MoMA lab and learning about the technical facets of the painting. And not least, project dissemination opportunities in the form of Transformative Reflections talks and hybrid performances at MoMA and SMK, The Met, and The Getty, with the discussions, feedback, and further possibilities this created for the project.
Introduction - Method - Music and media - Reflections - Context - Events - Appendices - References
