I Got the Music in Me

Over the weekend I made it to Rose Hall at the Time Warner Center, home of the Wynton Marsalis fiefdom known as Jazz at Lincoln Center, in search of an answer to the musical question -- what's the connection, if any, between art and music?  The occasion was the premiere of Portrait in Seven Shades, a jazz composition by Ted Nash that was based on his responses to seven modern artists: Monet, Dali, Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh, Chagall and Pollock.  All through the performance examples of their work were projected, mostly in close up details, on three giant screens behind the musicians.  

People are always trying to find musical equivalents for the forms of art. (The philosopher Susan Langer devoted a good part of her career to the problem.) It tends to breed confusion. Debussy hated it when people called his music Impressionist. But the impulse to do it is just about impossible to resist.  

So what happened at the concert I went to Saturday? The music was great, but it took the safe way out. Instead of trying to draw parallels between musical structure and the forms of art, Nash was mostly satisfied to produce superior mood music -- sometimes very superior -- or to take his cues from the artist's life story. So for Dali, something kooky/spooky, with a fade out of synchronized hand clapping that was both flamenco-flavored and a bit eerie.  Pollock?  Easy one -- hectic be-bop.  Van Gogh got a bluesy segment to correlate with his depression and the deep blue of his Irises and Starry Night.  Given the ocassionally manic side of Van Gogh's mental state, and the cyclones of yellow and white in that same Starry Night, he could just as easily have been represented by something more jagged and anxious, but maybe it's just nicer to think of him being more like Laura Nyro than Iggy Pop.

With Chagall Nash also went biographical, with shtetl-flavored strings, accordion and klezmerish clarinet.  A wonderful piece, but more like the soundtrack music for a Chagall biopic then an attempt to come to grips with what made Chagall's work formally interesting. Then again, what exactly would be the musical equivalent of Chagall's adapted softening of cubist space?  For that matter, what would be the musical equivalent of cubism? Abrupt changes in time signature?  Nash tried a bit of that with Picasso, but in the end his piece had no more to do with Picasso than the wonderful Coleman Hawkin's sax improvisation, also called Picasso, that he played to open the program. 

Maybe the thing to do would have been for Nash to choose more artists who were abstractionists. At least some of them provide a clear statement of their formal underpinnings in their work, which could be matched to the formal progression of the music. With that in mind, I found myself playing a mix and match game in my head all weekend. What would be a musical equivalent for Mark Rothko? How about those grand ascending triads in Henryk Gorecki's Third Symphony? For the vibrating woof and warp of Agnes Martin? Steve Reich'sMusic for 18 Musicians, for the way it creates the impression of constant, thrumming movement within a realm of absolute stillness and order. And for Ellsworth Kelly's monochromatic color field paintings? I nominate Neil Young's heroic one note guitar solo at the end of Cinnamon Girl.

Also because it's the only guitar solo I was ever able to play.