P5 Context

Contextualization

This project is related both consciously/intentionally and unconsciously/non-intentionally to other artists' interdisciplinary work within and between different art fields. As a composer and performer, I have, for the past 30 years, had a practice where I have unconsciously drawn on all the expressions and experiences of the artistic subcultures I am a part of. In addition, I have consciously made specific choices to draw on selected artists, ideas, expressions, and artistic standpoints. My project is, therefore, indebted to numerous contributors.

      Finally, during the project period, I have conducted and studied several interviews and peer conversations with musicians, visual artists, and art historians on the transfer of meaning, and I have researched a field of music based on images and, to some extent, other similar transfers of meaning. Overall, therefore, I see my context as complex and both intentional and non-intentional relations in the process of creation, which I will attempt to show in this section. 

In this respect, I am influenced by Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence (Bloom 1997), Vladimir Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art and From Point to Plane (Kandinsky 1977, 1979), Paul Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook (Klee 1983), Josef Albers Interaction of Color (Albers 2013), Bjørn Kruse's Thinking Art (Kruse 2016), Morton Feldman’s Give My Regards to Eighth Street (Feldman 2004), Hilma af Klint Paintings For The Future (Klint 2018) Bente Scavenius’ Reading Pictures (Scavenius 1990), Dorthe Aagesen & Ann Tempkin’s Mattise The Red Studio (SMK 2022). Furthermore, I have followed Ayanna Dozier’s public lectures at the Whitney Museum, Subjecthood in Painting Today (Whitney Museum 2022).

These resources have served as a mapping of the artistic field that has enabled me to position my project in the field, both as a contribution to existing practice, knowledge, and exploration, as well as a rethinking and expansion of the field. Both my works and the theoretical and methodological contributions this project offers are thus informed by and speak into this field.  

Inspiration from classical and contemporary music 

There are a number of examples from classical and contemporary music, such as

·        Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures of An Exhibition

·        Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre

·        Sergei Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead

·        Iannis Xenakis’ Architectural vision of music and connection with architecture

·        Donald Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces, Opus 11, inspired by Vladimir  Kandinsky

·        Alexander Scriabin’s Color Organ

·        Claude Debussy’s symbolist La Mer, based on Stéphane Mallarmé's poem, often connected with Hokusai's print The Great Wave off Kanagawa, 

·        Else Marie Pade’s watercolors Über Das Meer, and a connection with Earle     Brown and Christian Wolff and graphic scores

·        Morton Feldman’s close connection to painting, which has been a source of inspiration in this project and is mentioned in the section Method 

Additional sources of inspiration

Siglind Bruhn has created the concept and theory of Musical Ekphrasis, which is related to program music, with a direct representation of a work from another artistic domain Bruhn 2001). Both program music and Ekphrasis fall into my category 2 - Element analytical and 3 - Concrete systematic but do not deal with interpretation and changing reflections to the same extent as transformative reflections. 

In addition to the examples mentioned earlier in this exposition, I will refer to the following, which I have particularly drawn inspiration from and found connections to. I have interviewed musicians/composers who have made similar translations from paintings; here are a few brief points: 

·        Bill Frisell, who works in the intuitive category on the studio album Richter 585, with very few descriptions of the processes, except that they happen and that there is a substantial transfer of meaning and inspiration. (Frisell 2018)

·        Jason Moran, who I see very much as working in the idea analytic category and with a dialogue perspective, with considerations about spaces and places where the paintings are presented. Moran’s reflection on Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie might also belong to a mix of the idea analytical and the element analytic category, with Moran’s explanation about reading the painting as a piano roll. (Moran 2018)

·        Kris Davis told me in a conversation in connection with our preparations for the concert at MoMA how she takes inspiration from the artwork she is working with into her universe. In the case of Matisse, she has both what corresponds to category 1 - intuitive and category 4 - idea analytic descriptions of her processes, including Feldman-inspired sound universes.

·        Dan Tepfer works with fractals and tonal systems, as well as translating sounds into geometric figures and sculptures. Tepfer works with concrete and systematic methodology but also uses his experience as an improvising and creative musician to intuitively navigate his artistic and aesthetic possibilities in, for example, his fractal systems, where he finds shapes and contours with his artistic instinct. (Tepfer 2018) I can see a relation in this to Duchamp's found objects.

·        Ted Nash, one of my first interviewees, is the creator of several projects inspired by other fields, including one focusing on modern painting, like Transformative Reflections also does. Nash has specialized in what corresponds to the element analytic category, describing connections between elements in painting and music. (Nash 2018)

·        Anna Clyne talks about writing for monochromatic paintings in our interview and how she recalls the state and mood of the painting and then writes the music from there. In addition, she also talks about processes where she explores reading the work concretely as a musical score and with the same hermeneutic close to and further from perspective, as I mention in the element analytical method category. In this context, she touches on the sensory and the atmospheric as vital inspirational elements in the transfer from painting to music. She thus points to the critical part of the methodology in the intuitive category that deals with this. (Clyne 2021). 

·        Carsten Bo Eriksen, in my interview, recognized his compositional processes in parts of my method, identical to element analytical and perhaps especially idea analytical, although he expressed he did not have a method. He has used an approach that deals with themes in painting, which he translates into elements in music, for example, death and ascension, which he translates into slow, minimalist movements and lines in his music. (Eriksen 2022).

Anxiety of Influence Misprision

Especially category 5 connects with Harold Bloom’s theory in The Anxiety of Influence, where his six revisionary ratios for influence from - in his case, earlier authors/poets: 1. Clinamen - Poetic Misprision, 2. Tessera - Completion and Antithesis, 3. Kenosis - Repetition and Discontinuity, 4. Daemonization - The Counter-Sublime, 5. Askesis - Purgation and Solipsism, and 6. Apophrades - The Return of the Dead. 

In my understanding, a central part of Anxiety of Influence is about first wanting to imitate the original work – in my case, imitating it in a different domain, namely music – and then ultimately changing the view on and experience of it. I have used this understanding in building the revisionary ratio of the Artwork dialogue category.

What Anxiety of Influence describes as one big poem that all authors through time are writing on is in the dialogue perspective spread out to one big artistic interdisciplinary piece of work, a gesamtkunstwerk, we all are creating and contributing to. Even though I may not wholly agree with the author's position and canonic point of view, I find the theory in Anxiety of Influence as relevant information and influence for this, and I thank Professor Darla Crispin for pointing this out at my presentation at the Artistic Research Forum in Bergen 2018.

Here are three favorite quotes from the text, which are also included in the piece Anxiety Of Influence Misprision. The first exemplifies the reflecting back and forth between the artworks and who reads who:

   "A Shakespearean reading of Freud, which I favor over a Freudian reading of Shakespeare or anyone else, reveals that Freud suffered from a Hamlet complex (the true name of the Oedipus Complex) or an anxiety of influence in regard to Shakespeare."

   "Influence is a metaphor, one that implicates a matrix of relationships - imagistic, temporal, spiritual, psychological - all of them ultimately defensive in their nature. What matters most (and it is the central point of this book) is that the anxiety of influence comes out of a complex act of strong misreading, a creative interpretation that I call 'poetic misprision.' What writers may experience as anxiety, and what their works are compelled to manifest, are the consequence of poetic misprision, rather than the cause of it."

   "To sing is - simply and even etymologically - to foretell. Poetic thought is proleptic, and the Muse invoked under the name of Memory is being implored to help the poet remember the future. Shamans return to primordial chaos..., in their total initiations, in order to make fresh creation possible." (Bloom 1997)

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