I’ve been listening to American Mavericks on Sunday mornings (CBC radio), an award winning program hosted by Suzanne Vega, the singer/writer with interviews with composers by Michael Tilson Thomas, the artistic director and conductor of the San Francisco Orchestra.
This morning the focus was on the relationships between art and music. The show was called If Jackson Pollack Wrote Music, and was subtitled Music’s Abstract Expressionists. The website describes the topic:
Contact with the abstract expressionist painters after World War II inspired many American Composers to look for a new American language in chaos, complexity and freedom.
Music from composers such as Cage, Brown, Feldman, Wolff were played (and can be heard on their website). The emphasis was on “freedom, chance, improvisation” for some, and “structure and scientific models” for others. Jackson Pollack’s paintings are referred to as a model for the music.
Considering that people will line up and wait for hours in line to see an exhibit of Robert Rauchenburg’s latest work but it is hard to fill an audience for a “new music” concert, the conclusion was drawn that music is more personal. I’m not sure about this. In fact, Rauchenburg is now a main stream contemporary artist and John Cage is a household name (well, in most households where the arts are of importance) equal in stature to Rauchenburg and Merce Cunningham, I think perhaps this is an over-generalization. We hear often of great painters “discovered” after they die poor and unappreciated. Painting too is very personal. When something is new, be it music or art, people too often think they have to “understand” something to enjoy it. It is true that the eyes are a major vehicle of communication and we “see” art more often and often more readily, whereas contemporary music does take a different kind of “understanding” and is not as “available” either in the everyday listening or in concert. It needs to be sought out.
When it comes to making art or music, the process is stated well by Jerome Kitze, a composer for 32 years, quoted on the website as saying:
I think you find your audience by not thinking about that very much. You’re doing your job and doing your work and not worrying about, let’s say, being rejected or accepted.Posted by leya at August 8, 2004 05:25 PM