The Influence of Visual Art on Composers – Guest Post by Kaitlin White

Many of my mentors and peers know that I love visual art and that I grew up drawing and painting in addition to playing piano. I almost always knew that I wanted to pursue music and become a composer, hence my decision to not go to art school, but since I started my BMus degree I have had fewer opportunities to create or immerse myself in visual art than was previously the case, and when I reached my third year I was beginning to realize how much I missed it. Since then, I started looking for pieces of art that were new to me while researching the ones I knew already to develop my understanding of them, which eventually got me thinking of how I might be able to incorporate my love of art into my compositional practices. As a result, I have changed how I write, listen and think about music.

Initially, I started looking at visual art differently; in addition to marvelling at a given work, I wondered what sounds would enhance the experience of looking at a particular piece of art. I then started researching composers who have have done something similar. I did not find very much information on composers writing music based on artwork and how they went about it, but I did learn that Debussy’s “La Mer” was based on Hokusai’s “The Great Wave of Kanagawa” and how he translated some of the elements in Hokusai’s work to music (more cool information on that here:

One of my favourite pieces is Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Poem, “Isle of the Dead, which was based on Brocklin’s work of the same name. The single-movement piece functions similarly to how I feel my work progresses, meaning it seems that Rachmaninoff saw the painting like it was a single shot in a movie and told the rest of the story he interpreted the painting to tell through his music. When Rachmaninoff saw this work for the first time, it was in black and white and was disappointed to find that the original was in colour. He later stated that had he seen the original first, he would not have written the piece.

   

Other Classical pieces that were inspired by art include “Danse Macabre” by Camille Saint-Saens, “Boticelli Tryptych” by Ottorino Respighi, and “Pictures at an Exhibition” by Modest Mussorgsky.

I think the idea of basing a compositional work on art extends beyond writing music inspired by pre-existing works. Shapes and colour are the two most basic elements in any piece of visual art and coming up with a conceptual arrangement of shapes and colours is equally valid as writing music based on a physical piece of art. Some composers experienced seeing shapes and colour while hearing music to various degrees including but not limited to Scriabin and Messiaen. They would frequently let their synesthetic sensations guide them in their compositional process; what keys they wrote in, what chords they used, etc. Most people don’t have synesthesia, but I think entertaining a frame of mind like that can be valuable to performers performing graphic scores. Here is another source that goes more in-depth about Messiaen’s experience with shape and colour.

 
I highly recommend exploring this topic more and maybe incorporating other art forms somehow into your work and see how it influences what you create. If you haven’t listened to these works yet, I encourage you to listen while looking at the artwork each piece is based on to see if you agree with how the composer interpreted each work and ask yourself if you would have done something differently and how.