Colour
and music are vibrations. From the point of view of physics they are related.
Juxtaposition
of music /painting -- a phenomenon of the beginning of the 20th century
The colour of
music,
the music of
colour:
from synaesthesia
to multimedia
At noon on Tuesday [6
February 1996] in Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, Milan, a debate will take place entitled:
"Music in Painting and Images", under the patronage of the European Union and
with the approval and support of the rector Adriano de Maio. Its purpose: to examine how
technology applied to the various forms of multimedia can broaden our knowledge by
arousing our curiosity and acting on the memory. Music -- Salvatore Accardo (violin) will
play at intervals during the debate between the following: the moderator Gregorio Zappi,
the music representative of TGI, Giuseppe Caglioti, president of the cultural Commission
of the Polytechnic, Vittorio Piccinini, a painter of musicians, known for his talented
pictorial rendering of the music he hears, who is a prominent artist as well as the
Director of the Programme "Youth Project 2000", and the photographers Silvia
Lelli and Roberto Masotti of La Scala who both have a valuable experience vis-à-vis the
relationship between music/painting, through images, and researcher Daniela Bruni, music
consultant of the RAI.
Herewith we are publishing
the whole text of Daniela Bruni's intervention.
Sound and line, form,
visual or audio structures, rhythm, frequencies, space: all of these concepts are
interchangeable in the perspective of the history of the arts in music and painting,
culture, dance, cinema and television, this latter is par excellence the epitome of
the multimedia. Starting in the 20th century, with the advent of the artistic avant-garde
movements, music has had a remarkable influence on the artists' imaginative output:
becoming itself not only a pictorial subject through the depiction of musical instruments,
of performers, or of the places where rehearsals or performances were given (as was
customary in previous centuries) but was of decisive importance in the birth of abstract
art.
Modern Art's attempts to
visualise musical structures, rules of composition, rhythmic movements, sound patterns in
an effort to establish visual equivalents through the creation of an autonomous language,
led -- from 1910 onwards -- to the the unhinging of naturalistic representation in favour
of a representation stripped of objective or concrete points of reference.
Among the most important
art movements of our century we cite: the Munich group of "Der Blaue Reiter"
(the Blue Rider), Orphism, Symbolism, Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, the Dutch "De
Stjil", the
Bauhaus school, the
Synchromism of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, non-representation art, all of which were
expressions of this mutation.
As early as 1911, one of
the pioneers of abstract art linked closely to musical developments, the Russian Wassily
Kandinsky, in a letter addressed to the great composer Arnold Schoenberg, father of atonal
music, had praised the potential of musical composition in syntony with the immaterial
sphere and therefore supremely independent of the visible world and the laws governing
naturalistic depiction on which, on the contrary, the visual arts depended at that time.
"Schoenberg's
music" Kandinsky wrote, "introduces us into a new realm, where musical
experience is not auricular but purely physical: the music of the future begins here"
(A. Schoenberg, W. Kandinsky). That same year, spurred on by the enlightening example of
his musician friend, Kandinsky took the decisive step towards non-objective painting,
freeing it from its imitative role and contemporaneously providing with his essay
"Concerning the Spiritual in Art" a sort of elementary manual on harmony for
this new concept of painting in which the "interior sound" of colour and form
has absolute value. Thus the attempt to establish a relationahip between the invisible and
the visible began, whereby the artist would filter music, the immaterial part, through the
technical means at his disposal thanks to his knowledge of the language and expression of
the world of sound. Music
would be taken as the structural model of reference and become an important source of
innovation in the visual field.
Music would not only play
the role of "god-mother" at the birth of abstract art, but its influence would
run like a fine continuous thread from the beginning of the century to today, always in
touch with the decisive changes in the development of modern art, and at each stage
artists would focus attention on the different aspects of sound, consider certain laws and
parametres of music, in a relentless race in search of an ever closer analogy.
This would lead to a new
blossoming of in-depth tracts on the correspondences between sound and colour (see
Johannes Itten of the Bauhaus), the perception of a "timbric quality" of sound
and a return to the principle of "synaesthesia", a focussing of attention on the
associations and intersections between different types of concomitant sensation: "to
see" sound, "to hear" colour.
Literature, almost a
century earlier, in the work of E.T. Hoffmann, had succeeded in concisely expressing this
fundamental possibility of "simultaneous perceptions" (syn aistànestai)
and its aesthetic and expressive implications: "Not so much in dreams as in that
state of delirium that preceeds sleep, and especially when I have listened to a lot of
music, I find a combination between colour, sound and scent. It seems to me that all are
produced, in the same mysterious way, by a ray of light and that they must blend in a
marvellous concert. The perfume of dark red carnations works with extraordinary magic
power on me: involuntarily I sink into a state of reverie and then in the far distance
hear the notes of a clarinet mounting in rapid crescendo which then gradually fade away
(...).
Music!.... You are
nature's Sanskrit expressed in sound!.... It is not an empty image, nor an allegory when a
musician says that to him colours, scents, rays appear to be like sounds and that he
perceives in their intertwining a marvellous concert. As, according to the pronouncement
of a great physicist, to hear is but to see from within, so for the musician sight becomes
hearing from within, that is, it is transformed in his interior awareness of the music
which, vibrating in unison with his spirit, resounds from all that his eyes see.
So Hoffmann wrote in
"Kreisleriana", a series of tales with a musical threme, published in 1814.
Years later D'Annunzio
would also treat the "music" of nature, evoking a synesthetic procedure, in the
poem "La pioggia nel pineto" ("Rain in the Pinewoods"); the wood is
like a musical instrument from which the rain draws a concert of sounds, each plant is
stirred to more intense life, assumes human sensibility and, at the same time, the man
hidden by and entangled in the intertwined vegetation, bewildered by the song of the
animals, turns into a plant and becomes so close to nature as to identity with it:
"Be quiet ... I hear newer words yet spoken by rain-drops and distant leaves. Listen.
The song of the cicadas corresponds to weeping ... And the pine has a sound, and the
myrtle another, and the juniper another yet, different instruments played by innumerable
fingers".
In the same way F.T.
Marinetti experimented with synaesthesia techniques, but with greater veermence, in the
"Bombardment of Adrianopolis": in 1914 marinetti was present at the siege of the
Bulgarian city as a journalist; in his futuristic interpretation of the battle he drops
punctuation, breaks the most elementary rules of grammar, inventing a different usage and
setting the typographical characters in a different order; the real situation caused by
the bombing recedes in the author's attempt to create a vivid sonorous and visual effect
by the use of his "free words", deprived of a logical, syntactical sequence,
distorted and set down on the page in a bizzare and chaotic way.
Perception is accompanied
by the cultural knowledge of one's own world. Music, sound and colour are the basic
primitive archetypes of this physiological procedure. As in an algebra formula a musical
form describes its own area. Maths sheds light on the hidden mechanisms of the physical
world.
Music reveals the hidden
models of our "I". In the past colour represented the plane onto which the soul
projected its own unconscious images. Today, colour is the symbolic transfer with which
the psyche communicates its submerged world (M.P. Graziani), it is the echo of the
unconscious.
In colour, psychology has
identified the fundamental properties which relay the development process of the brain's
imaginative and emotional combinatory capacities. In fact, colour, although recognized
after shape, is one of the first elementary codes with which children learn to express
emotions and in the development of society colour is used to express the first elementary
sensations (ibidem).
In the very well-known and
internationaly recognized kindergartens in Reggio Emilia, one practical pedagogical
exercise is to "evoke the audible" (equate colour and sound), broadening one's
sensorial world through a training to hear visually or to listen looking; exercising
"the chromatic sense of hearing": a children's band seeks to produce chromatic
sounds with musical instruments which reflect the colours of autumn leaves spread on a
table. As different sounds emerge from the group the teacher tries to record them so as to
be able to hear them again all together. One gets a positive impression on coming into
contact with these children who seek to surmount a difficulty in a constructive manner by
applying a method linked to synaesthesia, and the consequent stimulation of the
imagination, in studying and working out practical and theoretical problems.
The greatest economic,
cultural, scientific and sociological game of the Year 2000 will be played on the
so-called "information hightways", or in other words, the wide-band optical
communication networks (A.A.V.V.).
The world's three
principal industries are converging on them: telecommunications, informatics and
television whose integration process has increased rapidly thanks to the spread of digital
technology, based on transcription in numerical form (bytes) of any kind of information
whatsoever.
Every type of content, all
the production techniques and the transmission of any kind of information, is based on
numbers. Every product, book, museum, library, monument will have its numerical symbol.
The spread of this common
alphabet, starting with the computer, has extensive networking systems, that it is causing
on TV such a technological breakthrough that each one of the sectors in question has begun
to invade the field of the others, opening up new types of work, competition and business
mergers hitherto unheard of. From the progressive unification of telecommunications,
informatics and television one of the most important sociological-business phenomena of
the 21st century will appear: multimedia.
This new form of
communication which, with the wide-band networks, will be available to any kind of user,
will give rise to an explosion of inter-related services from the linkage of the data
banks, the multimedia network for the exchange of information and messages at global level
(internet), the videophone, e-mail, motion pictures, direct access to libraries,
cinetechs, museums, work places/offices.
With the optical networks,
the potential of the actual digital soft wear such as CD-ROM and CD-I linked to a personal
computer, the multimedia possibilities of "video listening" and interaction will
multiply out of all proportion because the required information can be gathered directly
from where it is stored and exchanged in real time on a global scale.
Synaesthesia is in itself
a circuit of communication based on polydimensional and psycho-sensory synergy which marks
the definitive surmounting of the formal limits between the various fields of expression
with the greatest flexibility and a broad, interdisciplinary, free scope, which can grasp,
interpret and formulate the plural, complex language of yesterday and today.
If, initially,
synaesthesia was seen as an interconnection to link the diverse sensory centres and as
such an interior phenomenon that in the sphere of the arts sought an equivalent between
the different disciplines, strengthening the identity of art, stressing the weakness of
practical techniques and the non-specificity of the effective meaning it produced,
resolving everything in one and the same act of the creative spirit, with the advent of
the new technologies and of the multimedia era, with the birth of the true and proper
"synesthetic dispositives" (hologrammes, interface, technologies which transform
and reconvert in real time the movements or acoustical and visual signals, virtual
reality) synaesthesia has freed itself from the pure and simple intrapsychical evocation
of a sensorial preception induced by the stimulation of another and diverse sensoriality
(M. Costa) becoming the simultaneous stimulus of the different sense organs, each one of
which receives a stream of information coming from the corresponding instruments and which
are psychologically compatible, thus facilitating the transfer and growth of knowledge.
From the above, one can
better understand how many potential expressions synaesthesia holds, whose effect is
certainly exphasized, amplified and spread through the use of the new technologies and
interactive processes. It is a welcome and stimulating challenge to follow up to test the
validity of future artistic and aesthetic production and, at the same time it is an
opportunity to feel active and creative as regards one's relationship with planetary
space, building one's own individual trajectory of exploration and exchange.
____
THE
CULTURAL ACTIVITES OF THE MILAN POLYTECHNIC
"In January
1990" -- the President of the Polytechnic Giuseppe Caglioti explains -- "the
commission for Cultural Activities was constituted on an elective basis. Its purpose is to
introduce a humanistic component in the mental space of those who work in the Polytechnic;
lack of interest in this stated objective would have negative repercussions on the
members' professional and personal life".
The programme has
developed along two lines:-
-- conventions and
lectures by highly qualified people. Of these, the most noteworthy was the inaugural
address given by Rita Levi Montalcini, Nobel Prize winner for medicine, on the theme:
"From a molecule with one function, to many functions for one molecule".
-- musical performances
given by students of the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory and the Civic School of Milan.
In 1993 the Commission
started the Milan Polytechnic Choir. The choir's performances at home and abroad have met
with success.
Outstanding among the
events the Commission has organized was the celebration of the centenary of Carlo Emilio
Gadda's birth. The proceedings of the convention and the catalogue of the retrospective
exhibition of the writer-engineer were published in a small prestigious volume: "Per
Gadda il politecnico di Milano", Libri Scheiwiller, Milan, 1994.
The meeting-debate of
Tuesday, 6 February, on "Music in Painting and Images" follows on the
convention-debate on "Knowledge through Images", held some months ago, whose
proceedings-catologue are being prepared for publication by Prometheus, Franco Angeli
Editore, Milan, 1996. The central theme of both debates was the multimedia.
The amount of things to be
learned grows at an alarming rate. The time that can be devoted to study on the other hand
remains almost unchanged. The multimedia is in fact one of the instruments technology
offers to handle this disproportion: it is believed that the emotional impact of
synesthetic effects originating in the combination music-painting-image, acting on the
memory and stimulating curiosity is at the base of the mechanisms, still little known,
able to relay knowledge.
The positive experience to
date, and the often enthusiastic response of the staff and the students involved encourage
the Commission to pursue the above-stated aims.
________
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