Music and Art Connect

Music and Art Connect

How Music and Art Connect:

Communication, Connection and Participation

Music-making and art-making go back to our earliest cave-dwelling days. Music and visual art have functioned as a means of expression and, perhaps even more important, as occasions for communication with others and connection with something significant to us as humans (be it spirit, power, protection, etc.).

Communication and connection presume the participation of others. It is easier to recognize the participatory function in music than in art. Much music-making is performed for or with an audience who accompany it spontaneously or by prompting. The participatory nature of visual art is less evident. Art-making, in contrast to music-making, is not typically a performance. Nevertheless, significant artworks elicits participation from viewers who see and feel it as meaningful or valuable, who return to view it for whatever significance it has for them, or who are inspired by it in some way.

Music hits us directly whereas visual art is more mediated. The more immediate sensory and visceral impact of music is due partly to differences in the neural circuitry of our auditory and visual systems. Because music occurs over time, we also can more easily become entrained. Visual art typically is static, so we actively must approach it and look. Experiencing art's impact is thought to be mediated by imagination and cognitive engagement .But, just as with listening to music, when we really look at a painting, the work gets to filter through us, affecting our sensations, feelings and experiences, with these adding to its meaning, impact, or story.

In our contemporary culture, music is readily available with hardly any effort needed to hear it. In contrast, visual art, with the exception of street art and graffiti, is put in in museums, galleries, and the like, making it seem as if visual art lives separated from us.

Art and Participation

It doesn't have to be like that, and it isn't so in other cultures such as Bali or regions in Mexico, for example, where visual art is part of one's daily life, available to everyone as you walk in village plazas and along dusty streets. I recall exploring Bali with a local resident whose house I shared near Ubud. She greeted each morning with with a flower offering. As we walked to the outdoor market, I saw freshly arranged flowers adorning statues and temple posts as people on outdoor patios designing batiks, painting scenes, and carving figurines and intricate wooden plaques. All this creative activity was happening while a local gamelan orchestra performed for hours in the square. Occasionally, local interpretive-dancers might join in. The only audience present were the inhabitants who drifted in and out as they attended to chores. I thought I was in a dream.

Like you, I'm aware of recognized artists whose life work is devoted to visual or musical art, and whose artistic product is acknowledged as special. But there are countless others with notable artistic sensibilities who creatively weave art-making and music into their experience and appreciation of daily life. What a way to live!

Classical Roots and Modern Links

The links between music and visual art in Western culture are strong.So much so, I've written a follow-up post on modern music and art . In Classical Greece, they both manifested underlying world structures. Pythagoras (recall your geometry lessons) put visual art and music on a level with mathematics and science. He also studied and created paintings and sculpture.

In modern times, the links between music and visual art were explicit for painters like Vasily Kandinsky, who formulated an visual art theory likened to a musical score and used colours to evoke. Interesting that Kandinsky and the musician, Arnold Schoenberg (who also painted) were friends. They even exchanged paintings. Kandinsky may have been unusually acute in relating music and visual art, given his likely synaesthesia, a neurological condition in which vision and sound perceptions are experienced jointly. Lady Gaga has publicized having a similar sound-colour synaesthesia and sees specific colours when hearing sounds.

Kandinsky, Composition 8

Usually it has been abstract painters who have made explicit formal links between art and music. But the general influence of their works and theories has influenced many other painters, such as Paul Klee ( and Georgia O'Keefe, who similarly thought that music could be visually translated. Piet Mondrian was a strong advocate. His famous "grids," like "Broadway Boogie Woogie (below), use primary colours to represent musical notes, and their relative size and spacing along horizontal and vertical lines are intended to create beats, rhythm, and dynamics. Mondrian loved Jazz and often attended live performances by Thelonious Monk, who (more connections) compared his musical approach to Mondrian's paintings. Way ahead of his time, in the 1920s Mondrian proposed a concert space in which abstract, electrical colour projections (called "sound-colours") combined with music to create an immersive experience.

Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1943

When You Can't Put it into Words

It's rare to have either synaesthesia or a formal theory about music or art. For many of us, the connection between music and visual art is likely based upon personal associations or memories. . Both visual art and music go beyond words into realms of direct sensation, feeling and subjective mood associations. Yet both are talked and written about using similar words..

Musicians apply terms used also in visual art: tonal variation, colour, shape, harmony, pattern, direction, flourishes, and texture. Visual art and music have numerous parallels because they share these elements as well as sharing the profound effect of engaging our emotions and experience. Whistler, inspired by music, worked on paintings he called harmonies, nocturnes, and symphonies. Chagall's early career was spent with with musicians and performers for the Ballets Russes, and he subsequently designed for operas in NYC and Paris. HIs love of music appears as content in his paintings.

Musician-Painters

A number of famous contemporary musicians o have also been visual artists. Both Joni Mitchell and John Lennon went to visual art school and continued to paint during their music careers. In fact, many of Joni Mitchell's album covers were from her own self-portraits and paintings. Other renowned musicians painted as well: like Miles Davis, Tony Bennett, David Bowie, and Bob Dylan  (see next post).

Being famous in one realm helps to get your work touted in another realm -- a double-edged gift and sword. During recent travels in Europe, I was surprised to see Bob Dylan's paintings at a wonderful setting that featured a wealth of paintings and sculptures  (Chateau La Coste in Provence). Dylan's paintings were OK, in my view, but not near as original and remarkable as his music and lyrics. Yet, it's impressive how creativity in music and visual art tend to cross-fertilize one another.

Getting It Together

Visual art has inspired musicians and artists often play music for inspiration and mood while painting. Andy Warhol was keen on the pop band The Velvet Underground,, providing artwork for their album covers and having his art films play during their concerts.  Projecting artwork while performing music concerts is a direct way to fuse visual art and music From to Erykah Badu to Iggy Pop, musicians have a long tradition of sharing the stage with artwork created by visual artists they respect.

Recent computer-assisted generative music can visibly link sound and vision. And music visualisation is a feature found in electronic media player software that generates animated abstract imagery on a screen in real time, synchronized with the music played. This is not necessarily art (for me it recalls watching a lava lamp while listening to the Moody Blues), but the advances in music-visual links in our time are remarkable. May they contribute to our appreciation of how one artform generates another, and potentially enriches our lives.