I am unsure how I will pick which pieces to create from. I could change my opinion as I explore it further but it doesn’t have an emotional connection for me which I feel essential to any discussion or appreciation of music. I intend to do research into Kandinsky and his approach, however I have to confess to not liking his work very much. I am very aware of Kandinsky and how he used music to inspire his own art and further it towards abstraction. I want to listen to music for the purpose of creating art because I think it will inform my listening, my appreciation of music as much as it will affect my art work. Listening to music has been painful, it is getting easier. For a musician this hurts - physically hurts in our being. This pandemic has silenced the concert halls and I have not played in an orchestra for ten months. I think I am enticed by this challenge is a desire to connect to music again. No one is holding me to this except myself. So why on earth do it? This is after all a self inflicted challenge. How do I do justice to the medium of sound that I love so much, that connects so directly with my emotions. I was, am, daunted by this challenge: create a piece of artwork reflecting a piece of music each day for one hundred days. It is painful, harrowing and yet also beautiful: how we can see beauty in pain. He also commented that this piece portrays a voyage of the soul from departure and fall from grace to absence where the soul is annihilated to finally return and redemption.īlack Angels are of course fallen angels and nightmarish in their story and in this music they haunt and disturb in equal measure. Crumb based it on the Vietnam war that was happening at the time and “electric insects” can be heard representing the US weapon of choice - the helicopter. This is a striking, emotional work that is both harrowing and beautiful. The quartet instruments are instructed to be amplified and Crumb asks that the volume be turned up to the “threshold of pain” The players are expected to use lots of “extended” techniques where they play, hit, pluck, slide, scratch as well as sing, shout, speak text in different languages and also play some percussion instruments. It is subtitled “Thirteen Images from the Dark Land”. It is an astounding piece and I urge you to listen to it.Ĭrumb wrote this piece for string quartet in 1971. I have chosen ‘Black Angels’ by George Crumb for my first piece. So if you were hoping for a pleasant picture of a Debussy nocturne or a Mozart minuet, I am sorry that I have to disappoint. There were terrifying things in the air… they found their way into Black Angels.” Music and Art have prevailed and will continue to do so. There is no such thing as silence in music … or absence in art. Music did not and will never, fall silent. But again it wasn’t silent … all those people were listening and applauding in their own way behind the silence. This painting represents that agonising silence at the end of all those recorded concerts where applause should have been. It was a whiteout of silence. All that was left was white noise. The forced silencing of concerts, of music, of performers playing with each other is there in every white brushstroke. It also symbolises, for me, what has happened to the music profession in the Covid Pandemic.
Underneath all the white is all the colour, all the paint, all the music that went into the 99 paintings that proceeded it. This painting of 4’33” shows that there is no silence. We cannot escape the sound of our breathing, our bodies, our heartbeat.
White is what painting begins from and so I return it to its origin.īut there is no such thing as silence as John Cage himself discovered when going into a special sound vacuum chamber. It is what music begins from and echoes into.