Visual Music Masters Adriano Abbado Visual Music Masters Abstract Explorations: History and Contemporary Research Contents Cover The author wishes to thank: 7 Introduction Bret Battey Luciana Abbado Pestalozza and Clonal Colonies, detail, Paolo Martelli for their invaluable I. History 2011 support; Costanza Tessarolo and Marcello Abbado for their 10 1 The Beginnings Design suggestions; Melinda Mele for 18 2 Music and Early Twentieth-Century Painting Marcello Francone her review of the original Italian 28 3 Luminous Instruments Copy Editor text; Emmanuel Gallina, 42 4 Abstract Films Maria Conconi Elisabetta Minonne, Rembert 66 5 Music and Abstract Art Layout Noppe, the Prometheus Centre, Anna Cattaneo Andreas Seegatz and Dagmar 76 6 Electronic Art Trinks for their help regarding Iconographic Research Paola Lamanna foreign language issues. II. Contemporary Developments Thank you also to the publisher Translation 90 7 Animations and Videos Skira and to all the artists and Melinda Mele 106 8 Installations organizations that have kindly contributed to the making of this 124 9 Performances book. 136 10 Language All rights reserved under international copyright Appendix conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized 142 Synesthesia in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, References including photocopying, 150 Bibliography recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, 156 Websites without permission in writing 168 Index of Names from the publisher. 175 Photo credits © Giacomo Balla, Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné, Hans Richter, Leopold Survage, Jean Tinguely, by SIAE 2017 © Antonella Vigliani Bragaglia, by SIAE 2017 © Succession Marcel Duchamp, by SIAE 2017 © Man Ray Trust, by SIAE 2017 © 2017 Skira editore, Milano First published in Italy in 2017 by Skira Editore S.p.A. Palazzo Casati Stampa via Torino 61 20123 Milano Italy www.skira.net Introduction The association between images and the visual and aural world, and sometimes music has a long history. It aroused the curiosity through free associations. of many artists and thinkers of the past, Thirdly, visual music can also be seen as an stimulated artistic creativity in the twentieth abstract expression that is not accompanied by century, and continues to be a topic of great sounds of any type, but set in relation to interest today. This book aims to take stock of musical concepts. the situation, now that abstract audiovisual art, The chapters that follow reflect the different having reached maturity, is enjoying a new techniques of realization and presentation of season of renewed vitality. the works, retracing the thought of the Analog and especially digital electronic protagonists and the results of their artistic technology has in fact favored the growth of research. this form of art by providing access to a wide Visual Music Masters is subdivided in two variety of new solutions, including flat screens, sections: History and Contemporary projections of colossal dimensions, Developments. The first part illustrates the stereoscopic images, spatialized sounds, real- evolution of visual music, from the early time interactivity, and much more. experiments of past centuries to the electronic There are different notions of what artworks of the 1970s. The second part offers a constitutes visual music. According to one comprehensive view of the recent expressions view, it is exclusively the simultaneous creation of audiovisual art, and ends with a chapter of abstract images and music from a common dedicated to the various aspects inherent to its source. language. According to a second view, either the There is also a scientific perspective on the music or the images are crafted first, and the link between images and music: synesthesia. other art form is created later, sometimes on This bizarre and multiform neurological the basis of specific correspondences between phenomenon is discussed in the Appendix. 7 I. History 8 9 1 The Beginnings musical notes and their symbolic black and that reflected the relations of the trumpet. Kircher had already concluded that correspondence to the animal forms found Pythagorean scale [Fig. 1.1]. if there was an analogy between sound The relationship between sound and light in the Romanesque cloisters of Sant Cugat Arcimboldo then derived a series of colors: and light, one could theorize an analogy can probably be traced back to ancient del Vallès, Girona and Ripoll, in Catalonia, from white to yellow, to green, blue, gray between notes and colors, and cosmologies and world creation myths. as observed by musicologist Marius Schneider and brown, which represented the cantus also between their respective disciplines. The idea that sound and light are the in one of his works. firmus, the intermediate voices and the higher Moreover, Kircher argued that there existed primordial elements is found in many Generally, numerous audiovisual voices. Sixteenth-century western music a harmony of colors, which in his view was traditions, as are their representations in time correspondences are found in esoteric was mostly made up by four, five or six parts much less developed than music harmony and space. symbolism, as for instance the relationships that intertwined in various ways, by on a theoretical level. In Western culture, the first associations between colors, sounds and chakras seen overlapping, imitation and changes in tempo In addition to Kircher, Castel was also between music and the visual arts arguably in Indian culture and in various Asian traditions, or rhythmic pattern, thus creating a particularly influenced by Newton’s theory of light, date back to the sixth century B.C. and to or those in the Wu Xing of Chinese culture. rich musical texture that matched with which incidentally he scarcely agreed with. Pythagoras’ studies of proportion, which were The scientific world too was influenced Arcimboldo’s chromatic conception. In his text Opticks (1730), Newton proposed actually part of a larger body of research by Pythagoras: in his text Harmonices mundi The Jesuit monk Louis-Bertrand Castel the subdivision of the spectrum into seven on the numerological unity observed in Nature (1619), Johannes Kepler proposed the idea conceived the first ocular harpsichord in 1725. colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and in various cultural expressions. that planetary orbits were elliptical in order Father Castel is a somewhat legendary figure, indigo and violet. Newton, who was not only The first thorough exposition of these to reflect the Greek master’s idea of who paved the way for the subsequent a scientist but also an alchemist, measured relationships and their application in the proportion. This concept was represented development of numerous instruments by the relative space occupied by each color creation of the world appears in Plato’s by the musical octave in the ratio 2:1, other artists [Fig. 1.2]. in the spectrum, claiming that it was Timaeus. Aristotle then mentioned the and Kepler imagined a music of the spheres Castel’s idea emerged from his proportional to the length of a vibrating string. correspondences between musical and color based on the harmony of planetary motion. observation of a similarity between sound Newton was convinced that it was necessary harmonies in De sensu et sensibilibus The Milanese painter Giuseppe and light, both of which had, according to create a color scale similar to a musical (On Sense and the Sensible), while the Arcimboldo, noted for his unusual portraits, to the beliefs of his time, a vibratory nature. scale, establishing violet as the fundamental Pythagorean parameters later re-emerged is regarded as the first to have contemplated In reality he also drew upon the ideas color, an association that was also later in Vitruvius’ De architectura (On Architecture). a relationship between sounds and brightness of Athanasius Kircher, also a Jesuit and the adopted by Castel. Newton, however, Spread in the Western world by Boethius’ in artistic terms. In fact, more than a century inventor of the magic lantern and the ear rejected a physical analogy between sound De institutione musica in the sixth century A.D., before Isaac Newton, Arcimboldo created and light. Pythagoras’ proportions represented the a precise scale of colors based on the Castel, who coined the term musica muta, divine harmony of creation present in all proportions of musical intervals. Arcimboldo’s was nonetheless conscious of the analogy’s things, and were later applied to the study of idea, documented in Figino, overo, del fine limitations, particularly regarding what music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. della pittura (Figino, or, on the Purpose concerned temporal development: he noted Vincent of Beauvais, in his Speculum maius of Painting), written by Gregorio Comanini in fact that a sound fades out, while a color (The Great Mirror, thirteenth century), which in 1608, was simple: he introduced a scale of endures over time; moreover, two or more is considered the greatest encyclopedia brightness – not of colors as others did – and sounds create a chord, while the colors in of the Middle Ages, took up the concepts subdivided it in the same way as a musical a painting usually remain distinct. In his view, of musical and color harmonies. Also from the scale. In this way he arrived at a double octave however, these incongruences could be Medieval age is the relationship between that contained the entire range from white to resolved, as a color could be made to disappear in time and two or more colors could be fused into one. Therefore the Fig. 1.2 - Louis-Bertrand Castel, front cover of the treatise Fig. 1.1 - Arcimboldo, the scale of brightness L’optique des couleurs, 1740 10 11 advantage of an ocular harpsichord was blue and yellow were definitely part of As a result, the ocular harpsichord was Krüger observed that while analogies between to create ephemeral colors, unlike those in the scale, in order to create a chromatic scale supposed to have 144 keys. sound and light could exist, and the pleasure a painting, which typically remain static.