Arts – Page 7 – An Echo That's Reversing

Printed public domain sheet music

Twice recently I’ve ordered sheet music for scores that are in the public domain. One for Bach’s Musical Offering and one (well, two) for the Sibelius Symphony No. 5, the full orchestral score and the piano reduction.

The Bach work is one I often listen to, passively but with inevitable moments of actively, and it’s also a notable work of creative notation. I wanted to look at the structure of the Ricercar a 6 which is a six-voice fugue performed (most of the time?) on keyboard–ouch!–but each piece in the set has its own interesting characteristics. I listened to the Kuijken/Kohnen/Leonhardt recording from 1975 growing up and so is the “official” one to my ear.

I’ve wanted to study the Sibelius symphony–considered one of the greatest symphonies ever written, ymmv–ever since I started working with orchestral composition. Public domain rules are byzantine and generally I think a score needs to be around 70 years old before it becomes available. Older scores I’ve looked at are notoriously badly edited (with questionable phrase markings or capricious choices of accidentals or just misprints, though not seeing more curated versions I may be wrong), so to mitigate any weirdness in the orchestral score I also got the piano reduction.

Suite for Orchestra, “Figures in a Landscape”–Working with limited resources

I’ve just started the 5th movement, Fire, in which our heroes are trapped in a conflagration in the field of local villagers. (In my research notes, I have it covering pages 94-115 of the 2020 Penguin/Vintage edition I use as reference.) At this point I am struggling with the idea of program music in contrast with soundtracks. A few months back I had an abbreviated, stumbling Twitter conversation with an individual Much Better Informed but we ended up having the same opinions of soundtracks-as-pure-music. That is: a low one. In these days of a renaissance of quality composers, it’s admittedly a bit unpopular to get all academically scoffy about music written for movies.

Michael Heizer’s “City” and land art

Back in August I had read about a recently-completed land art work in Nevada created by Michael Heizer called, simply, City (found in the Artnet article After More Than 50 Years, Reclusive Artist Michael Heizer Is Finally Ready to Unveil ‘City,’ His Life’s Work. Here’s What It Looks Like). It is a sprawling, 1-1/2 mile by 1/2 mile area in the desert consisting of several large-scale and widely-spaced concrete abstractions, precisely sculpted mounds, and wide paths. I immediately reacted to images of it with an ineffable and religious awe. I imagine walking through it would be like being transported to a city 10,000 years in the future. The structures and intents would be beyond understanding but still intimate a hidden meaning. That feeling hasn’t gone away.

A section of *City*, taken from the Artnet article

DALL-E and the re-creation of the artist

Updated 31 Aug 2024

It’s an almost mundane trope now that DALL-E will obviate the need for visual artists and illustrators.

The most relevant counter to this is to look back at the advent of photography and its positive affect on artists, acting as a force compelling countless new approaches to visual expression. The effortless realism of photography changed the game–even if it was, at the beginning, crude realism. Artists came up with responses such as “vision”-base styles (Impressionism, Pointillism), psychologically-influenced styles (Symbolism, Expressionism, Fauvism), and then progressively further away from realism throughout the 1900s. Realistic and photorealistic works were still being created (Chuck Close’s work, certain periods of Gerhard Richter), but realism was now a choice. Influenced by the level playing field that photography provided, most anyone could afford their own portrait.

Driven by or co-incident with photography, “manual” visual artists also moved to more pedestrian subjects. Subjects such as boxing matches, picnics, and street scenes were added to the more rarified choices of portraits of the wealthy, scenes from mythology or religion, and the royal exploits such as hunting and whatnot. There were similar influences of subject matter prior to photography, but making realism almost effortless accelerated the direction of creativity in these areas. Rather than destroying the visual arts, photography prompted a Cambrian explosion of creativity.

Three new paintings that I’ve purchased from an English artist

I became interested in the genre of New Complexity in modern music, then became familiar with the Major Names of that genre in both composition and performance along with those I appreciated the most, then–this being the world that it is–found that some of those Major Names are online, then I “kept informed” on social media of those that are active on social media. (Side note: I often contemplate with the gravity of history the fact that as a boy of five or nine I could have met Stravinsky or Shostakovich, respectively, despite my oblivious and underserving status at the time and their importance to me today.)

Ian Pace is a pianist and composer (see A week of “The History of Photography in Sound”) who is one of the above artists who are active online and who has at several times referenced the artist and composer Jim Aitchison. Mr. Pace had commissioned several works from Aitchison and posted photos and, though I can’t find those posts right now, they resonated strongly.