As you engage yourselves in the laborious process of learning the mechanics and structure of music, it is important that you ask yourself the following questions: For whom are you composing? To what end?
It's easy to get caught up in whatever the current style of music is being prompted by your teachers and your classmates. It's easy to begin writing music that will impress your peers and be approved by your teachers. A certain competitive element can creep in to your composition, emphasizing your desire to be known as "an original" composer. Your audience becomes very local, and as is the case with all music written for a local and limited audience, parochial. Music in such a setting becomes more of an intellectual exercise than a creative one. Music can become based on non-musical ideas, and as such is more self-congratulatory than satisfying. It may have been an exercise in originality but that is not enough to make it worthwhile or memorable music.
The second question follows from your honest answer to the first: What do you want to express in your composition? Clearly any event and any emotion can form the basis for a piece of music. Richard Strauss is quoted as stating he could set a laundry list to muic. But he didn't. Are all emotions worthy of expression? Why do you think people listen to "serious" music? Do they want to hear the chaos and wickedness and violence of our world brought into the concert hall or the living room?
Or is music ideally a reminder of a more beautiful and perfect world? Some of the best music, modern as well as 100 years old, is based on the following elements: melody, harmony, couterpoint, rhythm and to some degree repetition. We like to hold it in our heads and hearts as we travel through an imperfect and frightening world. It gives us a sense of order and beauty, words which many young composers don't seem to understand. To be beautiful, music does not have to be happy. It can express sorrow, grief, rage and a host of less pleasant emotions. But for those emotions to move us as an audience, they must have the basic elements. There must be a structure we can feel, not just understand intellectually.
Probably in modern times film and television musical scores are closer to the musical ideal. While they can be chaotic and without apparent structure, the visual images accompanying them provide a background against which they can be at least understood. Some of this music stays with us, and deservedly so. Some that is more purely expressive of the visual events (the "laundry list") disappears forever when the images are turned off. They served a purpose, of course, but not a musical one.
If I can't hear it in my head and heart it disappears into the chaos of everyday existence. It might as well never have been.
Showing posts with label Art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Art. Show all posts
Friday, July 15, 2016
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Photography contests
I just read a book on how to win photography contests. It's well written, with lots of examples, maybe 200. Of all those, only one or two pass the "wall test". This test simply asks "Would I put this picture in a frame over my mantle?"
The criteria for winning a contest have almost nothing to do with the creation of art. While some of the principles are good ones ("Take pictures of what you love to see"), most of them have only to do with how to get a judge to look favorably on your particular photograph.
It has to have immediate appeal. It has to be an unusual point of view. Of course it should be technically perfect, or at the least be interesting in its imperfection. It should have as subject matter something that will appeal to the judges, who have seen every postcard photograph ever sold. It has to be composed well.
The prize-winning pictures certainly met these specifications. But were they art? Absolutely not. They were great postcards or pretty scenery or unfamiliar countries or unusual landscapes. But they were not "wall-hangers". After you look at them for 3 or 4 seconds you've seen everything you need to see. There's nothing more to look at. There's no depth or mystery or deeper meaning implied.
Then I look at some of the art that's in museums and it nearly universally recognized as "beautiful". A lot of it is simply pretty. Some is great, and that's because a deeper and more universal meaning is hinted at or implied. In Michelangelo's "Pieta" the universal sense of sadness and loss by a mother for her son, even the son of God, is poignant and powerful. However, the Rembrandt "Night Watch" is not. It's just a picture of a bunch of men who wanted their membership in a particular group recognized. We treat it as "a masterpiece" because the books all say it is great art. However, when I observed the people who came to look at it, after only a few minutes they lost interest. It was interesting and old, and that was about it. Even if I had a wall big enough to put that picture on, I wouldn't. It simply doesn't hold my interest.
I would have to agree with you if you pointed out that I simply am too obtuse or too tasteless or too uneducated to appreciate the quality of such work. How would I know that I'm simply artistically inadequate? On the other hand, how many of the readers of this blog note have copies of such great works of art on the walls of their dining rooms?
Just catching the attention of the viewer with a pretty piece of eye candy is not enough to treat the eye candy as serious art. Being an interesting photograph is not enough, or photojournalism would hang in people's living rooms. Where I struggle is with the issue of what the standards for genuine art in photography are?
The criteria for winning a contest have almost nothing to do with the creation of art. While some of the principles are good ones ("Take pictures of what you love to see"), most of them have only to do with how to get a judge to look favorably on your particular photograph.
It has to have immediate appeal. It has to be an unusual point of view. Of course it should be technically perfect, or at the least be interesting in its imperfection. It should have as subject matter something that will appeal to the judges, who have seen every postcard photograph ever sold. It has to be composed well.
The prize-winning pictures certainly met these specifications. But were they art? Absolutely not. They were great postcards or pretty scenery or unfamiliar countries or unusual landscapes. But they were not "wall-hangers". After you look at them for 3 or 4 seconds you've seen everything you need to see. There's nothing more to look at. There's no depth or mystery or deeper meaning implied.
Then I look at some of the art that's in museums and it nearly universally recognized as "beautiful". A lot of it is simply pretty. Some is great, and that's because a deeper and more universal meaning is hinted at or implied. In Michelangelo's "Pieta" the universal sense of sadness and loss by a mother for her son, even the son of God, is poignant and powerful. However, the Rembrandt "Night Watch" is not. It's just a picture of a bunch of men who wanted their membership in a particular group recognized. We treat it as "a masterpiece" because the books all say it is great art. However, when I observed the people who came to look at it, after only a few minutes they lost interest. It was interesting and old, and that was about it. Even if I had a wall big enough to put that picture on, I wouldn't. It simply doesn't hold my interest.
I would have to agree with you if you pointed out that I simply am too obtuse or too tasteless or too uneducated to appreciate the quality of such work. How would I know that I'm simply artistically inadequate? On the other hand, how many of the readers of this blog note have copies of such great works of art on the walls of their dining rooms?
Just catching the attention of the viewer with a pretty piece of eye candy is not enough to treat the eye candy as serious art. Being an interesting photograph is not enough, or photojournalism would hang in people's living rooms. Where I struggle is with the issue of what the standards for genuine art in photography are?
Monday, October 18, 2010
A Critique of Modern Poetry
Poetry has been an interest of mine since high school, and while I have never lost interest, in recent years I have been occupied with other things. Lately, however, I found myself going back and re-reading poets who have kept my interest over the years. In the process, I have been reading some critical books in an attempt to increase my understanding of the poet and the poem.
I am beginning to look at poems in what is for me a new way. The most important thing is that I see that I have only understood poetry in the most superficial way. I have read poems for the beauty of the line, the vividness and economy of its images and its sound. Unless the meaning was obvious, I paid little attention to what the poem was "about". Archibald MacLeish once said "A poem should not mean but be", a thought which was not too far from my somewhat naive initial understanding. I now think that this approach is itself naive, in that it makes the assumption that a writer must make a choice between the "being" of a poem (its sound and images) and the "meaning" of a poem. Clearly a poem can and should have both elements.
However, this debate/argument has been going on for many years. In the early 20th century, the "Imagiste" movement focused only on the image in the poem. Poems in this category have their beauty but have not really achieved the first rank. Pound, for instance, wrote the following poem, tiled "In a Station of the Metro":
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Why this poem has not been "successful" is probably obvious. It's a simple image, clear and precise, with no meaning other than itself as an image. But there is no depth of meaning, no content to help us relate to it in a personal way, no poignancy. It fails (for me) to stir some more intense experience or emotion. Reading it is like looking at a photograph taken by someone else of a street scene on a rainy day. It might be mildly melancholy, but nothing more than that. It fails some quality of universality and communication beyond the image which should stir an idea or an emotion in me. (The article in Wikipedia on Imagism is excellent and need not be repeated here.)
Some poetry by T. S. Eliot fails me for the opposite reason. He has complex and multi-layered ideas which he attempts to express through his poetry. Some seems successful; some does not. He is also at times a master of the melodic and sonorous line. When the two come together, the poem is marvelous. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is an example of the good. "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service" is an example of the failure of the union of meaning and image. The "meaning" of a poem should not be a puzzle to solve, nor should it depend on complex intellectual associations that are so unique to the author that no-one outside his head can connect the dots. Poems are not essays on religion or philosophy.
Pound's Cantos are another example of the latter failure. In spite of that failure, however, there are lines and images that are beautiful and powerful. In his earlier Translations Pound was able to translate meaning AND image from another culture and language into English. Perhaps because he could not depend on intensely and uniquely personal associations and recollections, he was forced to make the language simpler, and ultimately incredibly successful.
What are we trying to do when we write poetry? Recently I briefly took part in an on-line web site devoted to unpublished poets showing their work. Most amateur and unskilled poetry is written in the form of blank or free verse. One may presume that this is so that nothing can get in the way of the expression of feeling. But that's mostly what the poems were. They were adolescent outbursts of emotion with no discipline and little skill, though no one could doubt the intensity of the emotion. Each poem was written as if the author had never seen another poem and did not understand that their feelings were non-unique to the point of being trite. The occasional image or beautiful phrase might make itself noticed, but the meaning of all the poems I read was the same: "I and I alone have this FEELING! And it's important because I am the one who has it!" There is no suggestion among them that it is the universality of their feelings that can make it resonate with the reader. They did not want critical comment; they wanted praise and approval for their hothouse plant. They do not understand that the writing of poetry is a highly skilled task, demanding the utmost mastery of the language.
I too still find myself reading poetry in a simple and naive way, for the beautiful phrase and memorable image. The emotions being expressed are merely the context in which the language is placed. However, such a style of reading misses much of the content and simplifies or ignores the meaning. Still, I would rather read in that manner than read a scientific text or a sermon. So while image and sound are necessary for poetry, they are not sufficient for a poem to rise to the highest level.
What kind of “meaning” is appropriate for poetry? Considering that poems are not aimed primarily at the intellect, can we say they are aimed at eliciting emotions only? When Eliot describes the “objective correlative”, he refers to the attempt to elicit in the reader’s mind the same thoughts and emotions that were present in the mind of the author. But which is more important, thought or emotion? While there seems to be no limit as to the kinds of emotions expressed, some kinds of thoughts are clearly inappropriate, in the sense they can’t be easily expressed in such a format because they are non-verbal or abstract or even mathematical. Eliot attempts to express religious concerns and conflicts, and in that he owes much to the metaphysical poets of the 17th and 18th century. Pound tries to focus our thoughts on economics and politics throughout the centuries. In my mind, neither are successful attempts. I would rather find other ways to learn ideas.
Reading such attempts as the amateur in the local Poetry Society as well as the unsuccessful attempts by the famous helps clarify for me what it is that poems should do. An example of a successful attempt to universalize a loss and make it poignant and beautiful at the same time is found in the "Lucy" poems by Wordsworth. It can be done. We should know it when we see it. Wordsworth is not howling at the moon like a love-lorn teen. He is attempting (successfully, in my opinion) to speak to all who have lost someone of the universality of that loss and what it means to us. "A slumber did my spirit seal" is a successful blend of the emotion of loss with economy of line and with images that speak to us as well. I can find many poems who meet this criterion and am interested in those the reader of this essay can bring to my attention.
I am beginning to look at poems in what is for me a new way. The most important thing is that I see that I have only understood poetry in the most superficial way. I have read poems for the beauty of the line, the vividness and economy of its images and its sound. Unless the meaning was obvious, I paid little attention to what the poem was "about". Archibald MacLeish once said "A poem should not mean but be", a thought which was not too far from my somewhat naive initial understanding. I now think that this approach is itself naive, in that it makes the assumption that a writer must make a choice between the "being" of a poem (its sound and images) and the "meaning" of a poem. Clearly a poem can and should have both elements.
However, this debate/argument has been going on for many years. In the early 20th century, the "Imagiste" movement focused only on the image in the poem. Poems in this category have their beauty but have not really achieved the first rank. Pound, for instance, wrote the following poem, tiled "In a Station of the Metro":
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Why this poem has not been "successful" is probably obvious. It's a simple image, clear and precise, with no meaning other than itself as an image. But there is no depth of meaning, no content to help us relate to it in a personal way, no poignancy. It fails (for me) to stir some more intense experience or emotion. Reading it is like looking at a photograph taken by someone else of a street scene on a rainy day. It might be mildly melancholy, but nothing more than that. It fails some quality of universality and communication beyond the image which should stir an idea or an emotion in me. (The article in Wikipedia on Imagism is excellent and need not be repeated here.)
Some poetry by T. S. Eliot fails me for the opposite reason. He has complex and multi-layered ideas which he attempts to express through his poetry. Some seems successful; some does not. He is also at times a master of the melodic and sonorous line. When the two come together, the poem is marvelous. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is an example of the good. "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service" is an example of the failure of the union of meaning and image. The "meaning" of a poem should not be a puzzle to solve, nor should it depend on complex intellectual associations that are so unique to the author that no-one outside his head can connect the dots. Poems are not essays on religion or philosophy.
Pound's Cantos are another example of the latter failure. In spite of that failure, however, there are lines and images that are beautiful and powerful. In his earlier Translations Pound was able to translate meaning AND image from another culture and language into English. Perhaps because he could not depend on intensely and uniquely personal associations and recollections, he was forced to make the language simpler, and ultimately incredibly successful.
What are we trying to do when we write poetry? Recently I briefly took part in an on-line web site devoted to unpublished poets showing their work. Most amateur and unskilled poetry is written in the form of blank or free verse. One may presume that this is so that nothing can get in the way of the expression of feeling. But that's mostly what the poems were. They were adolescent outbursts of emotion with no discipline and little skill, though no one could doubt the intensity of the emotion. Each poem was written as if the author had never seen another poem and did not understand that their feelings were non-unique to the point of being trite. The occasional image or beautiful phrase might make itself noticed, but the meaning of all the poems I read was the same: "I and I alone have this FEELING! And it's important because I am the one who has it!" There is no suggestion among them that it is the universality of their feelings that can make it resonate with the reader. They did not want critical comment; they wanted praise and approval for their hothouse plant. They do not understand that the writing of poetry is a highly skilled task, demanding the utmost mastery of the language.
I too still find myself reading poetry in a simple and naive way, for the beautiful phrase and memorable image. The emotions being expressed are merely the context in which the language is placed. However, such a style of reading misses much of the content and simplifies or ignores the meaning. Still, I would rather read in that manner than read a scientific text or a sermon. So while image and sound are necessary for poetry, they are not sufficient for a poem to rise to the highest level.
What kind of “meaning” is appropriate for poetry? Considering that poems are not aimed primarily at the intellect, can we say they are aimed at eliciting emotions only? When Eliot describes the “objective correlative”, he refers to the attempt to elicit in the reader’s mind the same thoughts and emotions that were present in the mind of the author. But which is more important, thought or emotion? While there seems to be no limit as to the kinds of emotions expressed, some kinds of thoughts are clearly inappropriate, in the sense they can’t be easily expressed in such a format because they are non-verbal or abstract or even mathematical. Eliot attempts to express religious concerns and conflicts, and in that he owes much to the metaphysical poets of the 17th and 18th century. Pound tries to focus our thoughts on economics and politics throughout the centuries. In my mind, neither are successful attempts. I would rather find other ways to learn ideas.
Reading such attempts as the amateur in the local Poetry Society as well as the unsuccessful attempts by the famous helps clarify for me what it is that poems should do. An example of a successful attempt to universalize a loss and make it poignant and beautiful at the same time is found in the "Lucy" poems by Wordsworth. It can be done. We should know it when we see it. Wordsworth is not howling at the moon like a love-lorn teen. He is attempting (successfully, in my opinion) to speak to all who have lost someone of the universality of that loss and what it means to us. "A slumber did my spirit seal" is a successful blend of the emotion of loss with economy of line and with images that speak to us as well. I can find many poems who meet this criterion and am interested in those the reader of this essay can bring to my attention.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Photographs as art
I've been reading a book about entering photos in contests. While it is useful for that topic, it has increased my awareness of the difference between pictures that can win contests and those that are "wall-hangers", genuinely artistically interesting. (For the moment I'm setting entirely aside the category of photos that are "newsworthy".)
Some years ago I was browsing through a very large rental/sale art gallery, considering art I might want to own. The manager of the gallery gave me a piece of advice that was excellent at the time, but over the years has come to carry a deeper meaning. He said that I should not buy a picture that I found immediately attractive or interesting; those pictures, he said, don't always "wear well". He strongly suggested that I rent a picture I was considering purchasing, hang it in a prominent place in my house, and keep it for one or more months. His final comment was that the most satisfactory pictures were not necessarily those that grabbed you, but those that somehow got your interest and increased it over time.
It has been said that an "art" photograph takes an everyday object or view and makes us see, as if for the first time, how interesting/beautiful it is. Changing the scale to a larger size, as in Georgia O'Keefe's paintings, is an effective way to accomplish this. Or a dozen other "darkroom tricks" such as changing the color, can have the same effect. I recently saw a painting of a pear, easily 4 feet tall, which was quite good. Every subtle gradation of color and shape were brought out. I stayed interested in that painting for several days, but it falls short of the ideal in that it failed to draw me into it more deeply over time.
That really sums up my thoughts about photos as genuine art. They have to be more than pretty, more than interest grabbers. Somehow they must pull you deeper into the image and sustain your interest. Now, however, we get into the question of what it is that constitutes real art. Of course, there's no answer to that other than the cliche about knowing what we like. We want to make people like our photos, but more than that, we want their interest to continue and deepen. Just being able to win a contest isn't even in the ball park.
I would welcome any comments on this topic.
Some years ago I was browsing through a very large rental/sale art gallery, considering art I might want to own. The manager of the gallery gave me a piece of advice that was excellent at the time, but over the years has come to carry a deeper meaning. He said that I should not buy a picture that I found immediately attractive or interesting; those pictures, he said, don't always "wear well". He strongly suggested that I rent a picture I was considering purchasing, hang it in a prominent place in my house, and keep it for one or more months. His final comment was that the most satisfactory pictures were not necessarily those that grabbed you, but those that somehow got your interest and increased it over time.
It has been said that an "art" photograph takes an everyday object or view and makes us see, as if for the first time, how interesting/beautiful it is. Changing the scale to a larger size, as in Georgia O'Keefe's paintings, is an effective way to accomplish this. Or a dozen other "darkroom tricks" such as changing the color, can have the same effect. I recently saw a painting of a pear, easily 4 feet tall, which was quite good. Every subtle gradation of color and shape were brought out. I stayed interested in that painting for several days, but it falls short of the ideal in that it failed to draw me into it more deeply over time.
That really sums up my thoughts about photos as genuine art. They have to be more than pretty, more than interest grabbers. Somehow they must pull you deeper into the image and sustain your interest. Now, however, we get into the question of what it is that constitutes real art. Of course, there's no answer to that other than the cliche about knowing what we like. We want to make people like our photos, but more than that, we want their interest to continue and deepen. Just being able to win a contest isn't even in the ball park.
I would welcome any comments on this topic.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
What makes art "art"?
Theories abound in all fields of art. Some are simple and some more complex. We have a variety of criteria, mostly exclusionary; we have no positive defining characteristics. Even the intent of the artist has little to do with whether his/her output is perceived as "artistic"; many works of art now widely considered to be masterpieces were simply commercial ventures, things created to please the purchaser. From "Mona Lisa" to Mozart, the intent of the artist was simply to earn a living. Battles have raged among differing groups, yet no group has found a standard that cannot be contravened.
It has occurred to me after thinking about this topic most of my adult life that the failure in the attempted definitions of art arises from thinking of art as a property belonging to the artistic creation. All definitions of which I am aware focus attention on the work of art itself, attempting to ascribe its value as an artistic work to the shape, form, color, sound or skill involved.
I propose that the definition of art be focused instead on the relationship between perceiver and creation. When the creation has the power to evoke strong feeling in the perceiver, even negative feeling, the artistic creation has done something of importance. Unfortunately, such a standard is transitory; things that were highly evocative at one time may lose their power to stimulate response. What moves us and touches us varies from century to century, place to place, person to person. Many if not most people in the world are totally oblivous to the possibility of being emotionally moved by a series of sounds or shapes on paper or the written word.
And some insist that only certain feelings may be evoked. However, this is a weak argument and many instances can be found to be exceptions. Do we consider being moved to anger or disgust to be an artistic experience? How about impatience or contempt or amusement? Another problem with this definition is that it is very culturally specific. A Frenchman may be moved to tears by the sounds of the "Marseillaise", while a Chinese may not even find the sounds particularly interesting. People of all cultures tend to favor certain emotional states over others: sadness, longing, loneliness, love, tenderness, excitement and the like are universal favorites. Other feelings may not even have names, yet their effect is real and understandable. Some art is majestic, overwhelming, even glorious or tragic, but what do we call the feeling that rises up in us when we encounter it?
Still, we should consider that we bring ourselves, our personalities and unique histories, to the artistic creation, with all our prejudices and biases, and in spite of that, we find some creations to have the power to move us quite irrespective of where or when we live in relationship to it. I think an interactive definition is as close as we can come.
It has occurred to me after thinking about this topic most of my adult life that the failure in the attempted definitions of art arises from thinking of art as a property belonging to the artistic creation. All definitions of which I am aware focus attention on the work of art itself, attempting to ascribe its value as an artistic work to the shape, form, color, sound or skill involved.
I propose that the definition of art be focused instead on the relationship between perceiver and creation. When the creation has the power to evoke strong feeling in the perceiver, even negative feeling, the artistic creation has done something of importance. Unfortunately, such a standard is transitory; things that were highly evocative at one time may lose their power to stimulate response. What moves us and touches us varies from century to century, place to place, person to person. Many if not most people in the world are totally oblivous to the possibility of being emotionally moved by a series of sounds or shapes on paper or the written word.
And some insist that only certain feelings may be evoked. However, this is a weak argument and many instances can be found to be exceptions. Do we consider being moved to anger or disgust to be an artistic experience? How about impatience or contempt or amusement? Another problem with this definition is that it is very culturally specific. A Frenchman may be moved to tears by the sounds of the "Marseillaise", while a Chinese may not even find the sounds particularly interesting. People of all cultures tend to favor certain emotional states over others: sadness, longing, loneliness, love, tenderness, excitement and the like are universal favorites. Other feelings may not even have names, yet their effect is real and understandable. Some art is majestic, overwhelming, even glorious or tragic, but what do we call the feeling that rises up in us when we encounter it?
Still, we should consider that we bring ourselves, our personalities and unique histories, to the artistic creation, with all our prejudices and biases, and in spite of that, we find some creations to have the power to move us quite irrespective of where or when we live in relationship to it. I think an interactive definition is as close as we can come.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
