t.w.o.d.

dailymeh:

Inky links to a reddit thread on famous music that nobody knows the name of. That thread, in turn, links to Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. All this reminds me of one of the few things I can recall from an art history lecture: synesthestic art. This is kind of neat, I think.

Viktor Hartmann was a Russian architect and painter. Above is his Plan for a City Gate in Kiev. One of Hartmann’s friends was the composer Modest Mussorgsky. When Hartmann died young, Mussorgsky helped arrange a huge exhibition of Hartmann’s stuff. This exhibition inspired Mussorgsky to write a suite of music, Pictures at an Exhibition. One of the movements in that suite is called the Great Gate of Kiev.

This all happeed in the 1870s. Then the new century rolls around, heralding new forms of art, including abstract art. The painter Wassily Kandinsky has been credited as the first abstract painter. Kandinsky was big on synesthesia, discussing in detail the colors of the sounds of various musical instruments, and he created a series of stage sets to be used for performances of Mussorgsky’s suite. These pieces were essentially Kandinsky painting the music, as he saw it. The above picture is the Great Gate of Kiev (1928).

So: Hartmann made a picture, Mussorgsky made the picture into music, and then Kandinsky made the music into a picture, in a sort of multi-sensory game of telephone.

I have a hard time appreciating both classical music and abstract painting, so I’m not really a fan of these works per se, but I think the connection between them is fascinating.