FMP Week 4

Week 4..................

23 March
Canterbury Cathedral, Pottery shop.  The Cathedral was not as beautiful as anticipated.  The crypt was nothing compared to St. Paul’s, despite what others may say.  It was very plain.  Perhaps that’s why some people like it so much.  We visited the city the day after the inauguration of the new Archbishop, meaning the cathedral was closed to visitors until the afternoon.  The weather was quite miserable (overcast and rainy), but I managed to get some decent photos of the building and grounds.

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25 March

RA's Manet portrait show.  Co-curated with my most local art museum, the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio.  It barely got a mention, sadly.  One room partway through contained a single painting, Music in the Touliers Garden, which I did not find all that exciting, even considering the title.  The entire exhibition, like the Man Ray (Man Ray...Manet...) was overcrowded.  This painting, in fact, was about 4 people deep.

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26 March

I started taking notes on Music in Painting for potential use in MA application essays, as well as to help with my FMP.  Not really a fan of Vergo's emphasis on Wagner, especially the bit which claims that Wagner was more influential on future generations than Beethoven.  Majorly disagree.

In Peter Vergo’s The Music of Painting, the author puts emphasises Richard Wagner’s influence on artists of all media in the decades during and well beyond his time, ending around the heyday of John Cage, whose ‘“art-work of the future”…“went out of his way to emphasize the musical significance of silence”’. (6)

‘…the Italian Futurists had already pointed to the link that unites art, music and noise, all of which are part of our experience of the everyday world’ (6)

‘French writer Mme de Staël…described music as an art “superior to all others”,’ and ‘both painting and music “superior to thought; their language is colour, forms or sounds.’  and Schopenhauer ‘in his treatise The World as Will and Idea (1818) again took up the notion of music’s “irrational” character when he compared the composer to a “galvanized sleepwalker, someone who draws conclusions as to things of which, waking, his reason has no notion’. (8)

Vergo describes the Romantics as using music to express ‘concepts [and] images capable of being easily grasped’, allowing audience members to associate personal meaning. (8)  Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art later ascribed definitions on the ‘language of forms and colours’. (9)

Pictures at an Exhibition began as paintings and drawings by Viktor Hartman before being expressed in Mussorgsky’s famous composition, eventually being recreated visually by Kandinsky as set designs in 1928. (9)  At some contemporary performances, a painter joins the orchestra onstage as they play, painting portraits of the players at work.  The pieces do not coincide with the programme, but capture the atmosphere, concentration and movement as the music happens.

‘Why should not I call my words “symphonies’, ‘arrangements’, ‘harmonies’ and ‘noctournes’? ….The picture should have its own merit, and not depend upon dramatic, or legendary, or local interest …Art should be independent of all clap-trap – should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like.  All these have no kind of concern with it; and that is why I insist on calling my works ‘arrangements’ and ‘harmonies’. (77)

In theatre, light patterns changed in accordance to music, representing a ‘relatively precise visual equivalent of a purely musical composition.’ (11)

Gesamtkunstwerk wrongly used by the Nazis to describe the state. (12) ‘…gave a name to something artists were doing anyway: not just bringing the various arts closer together or even combining them, but attempting to define affinities or resemblances between them in order to determine more precisely the ways in which the principles and practices of one art form might be applied to another’. (12)

Vergo gives Wagner credit for placing Beethoven at the fore and weightily titles Wagner  as the most influential musician in the art world to follow. (12)

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28 March

I went to the Freud Museum today to see the Rebecca Fortnum show.  I was expecting more focus on the exhibition.  Instead, one small gallery room had a few large paired portraits and some letterpress prints.  Anna Freud’s room had some small paired graphite portraits in it.  These were interesting, but I did not enjoy viewing them in this setting.  They were not in very good locations for viewing, as most of the visitors were more interested in the actual museum than the artwork.

Still, I was happy to get to see graphite portraits on display, as it is something I enjoy doing.  As they were paired, though each image was nearly exactly the same, it was relevant to my final project.  I understand why they were at the Freud Museum, as they had to do with dreams, but I would have rather viewed them in a traditional gallery setting.  There was a decent selection of UAL-published books on a table in the exhibition room, so I spent a while looking through them before leaving.  I will return to the museum for Fortnum’s talk on 24 

29 March

Submitted applications to Kingston University for MAs in Music Education, Creative Economy, and Fine Art.  Began application for MA in Music. [Update 16 April: I have been emailed to set up an interview for the Kingston Fine Art MA, and have been accepted for Music Education.]

30 March

LSO Discovery at St. Luke’s held its first “Not(e) Perfect Orchestra” event, bringing together an orchestra of musicians who have not played their instruments for up to 40 years.  Rehearsals and workshops began at 10 AM, culminating in a 30-minute concert at 5:30.  LSO musicians and London music conservatoire students assisted the group.  I played a solo in Bizet’s Carmen.