In Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko but Don’t Get Stockhausen David Stubbs proceeded more or less on the assumption that art and music could ultimately be regarded as aesthetics parallels. This was the major flaw in the book and its premise, and what understandably led to his protesting that experimental music isn't appreciated by the public to the degree that experimental art is (an imbalance that was exhaustively described but wasn’t very lucidly or thoroughly explained in the book). The reality is that the aesthetic experiences of art and music (and film, architecture etc) are, psychologically speaking at least, wholly different, and the dream of meeting autonomous art objects of any and every medium similarly and with detached contemplation is a myth.
But as anyone passionate about music and art or any writer on music (such as Stubbs) will tell you, music inevitably will - must even – be understood by a listener in terms other than the purely sonic. Such ‘synesthetic’ adventures may not be enough to motivate grand histories of aesthetics, but they are able to radically enrich aesthetic experience in certain instances. So in what ways might such an ‘aesthetic equivalence’ between a work of art and a piece of music be (objectively) talked about? Specifying some terms on which these aesthetic comparisons might be made allows us to imagine a number of possibilities for enriching the experience of works while preventing relatively imprecise, misguided or prohibitively subjective comparisons.
Neuropsychology has discovered some exciting evidence for the visualisation of sound and the kind of overlap of sensory-aesthetic responses that allows us to dance and understand metaphors but I'm thinking on a much more casual, generalised level. I’m not going to claim there is some literal, objective neuro-aesthetic ‘truth’ or any other kind of truth inherent in a comment like ‘this bassline oozes’ (as I should really be using an FMRI scanner for that and the family next door is borrowing mine at the moment). The related concept of synesthesia has been used and abused in writing about art and music as, at best, an alluring but vague metaphor for aesthetic equivalence, sometimes misguidedly leading to the belief that there is some similar aesthetic ‘truth’, kudos or Holy Grail in it, but ultimately it’s only a particular neurological condition affecting certain individuals, the consequences of which are subjective and restricted to those individuals. So I’m leaving neuropsychology to the neuropsychologists.
FMRI scanners know about the bad thoughts.
What follow then are four suggestions for paradigms or heuristics describing aesthetic equivalence, hopefully specifying the ways in which works or collections of works can be thought of as aesthetically comparable even when they are very unlike in medium and/or context. Naturally they are not mutually exclusive, in fact the more paradigms apply to a particular aesthetic comparison the richer and more reasonable the equivalence (and if there’s been any writing on this before, I haven’t found it yet).
When works are topically equivalent they handle relatively similar subject matters. The term is derived from topic theory in musicology, which itself is imperfectly derived from rhetorical topoi. How these subject matters are defined or divined, either by author or audience, would be a matter for debate – telling whether and on what level a work is ‘about’ something can be complex, especially where supplied texts are relatively unforthcoming or non-existent. But in many cases, this can be sufficiently unambiguous: Poussin’s painting Et in Arcadia Ego and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 (known as ‘the Pastoral Symphony’) are topically equivalent because they both explore the pastoral genre, along with many works of literature, and more specifically, they show negative ideas and emotions interrupting the pastoral bliss (death in Et in Arcadia Ego, a storm in the Pastoral Symphony). The subject matter of a work can be an emotion but that, though very similar, would technically be somewhat distinct from an equivalence of emotional effect on the audience experiencing the works, which would be better described as functional equivalence (see below): a work can clearly portray happiness but then have a very different emotional effect on an audience: indifference, sadness or anger at its artificiality perhaps - some listeners might hear The Boo Radleys' Wake up Boo in this (admittedly cynical) way.
Poussin's Et in Arcadia Ego and Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. The bittersweet portrayal of Utopia is perhaps where the contemporary appeal of the Pastoral genre is at its strongest.
Topical equivalence in itself doesn’t necessarily make for a fascinating insight if the subject matter is related only relatively vaguely. John Martin’s epic painting The Great Day of His Wrath is topically equivalent to Ultravox’s Dancing With Tears in My Eyes because both describe the Apocalypse, but any similarity of significance arguably ends there. If Martin’s painting had two tiny figures ‘lov[ing] to the sound of [their] favourite song’ as in Ultravox’s lyrics, that might be something to think about. But it doesn’t.
Topical equivalent of Rothko: Difficult to say that Rothko is ‘about’ anything, as his paintings are usually non-representational and named after the colours and shapes involved. To this end, a somewhat facile topical equivalent would be something like Michael Torke’s Color Music. Slightly more high-mindedly we could say his work is ‘about’ emotionalised perceptions of space and form, so something like J. G. Ballard’s short story The Enormous Space might be, to a certain extent, a relevant equivalent, or ‘about’ the straightforward juxtaposition of potential emotional resonances - so perhaps the more minimal poetry of William Carlos Williams.
Topical equivalent of Stockhausen: Again, as Stockhausen was a bit of a formalist, subject matter doesn’t really apply. Spiritual, cosmic, mystic awareness is something that figures in his later work, so something like Jodorowsky’s film Holy Mountain seems appropriate.
Socio-historically equivalent works originate from a relatively similar social or historical context. The works themselves or their authors or audiences could be from a similar time, place or social background, or both associated with a social or historical event, idea, discourse or institution. For example, some of Egon Schiele’s paintings and Arnold Schoenberg’s song cycle Pierrot Lunaire were created around the same time, 1912 in Vienna (more or less).
One of Egon Schiele's self-portraits and Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. Whoever posted Pierrot Lunaire on youtube chose some suitable images to accompany the music, one of which is another Schiele self-portrait.
Socio-historical equivalence should be unlikely to constitute an aesthetic by itself. It’s only when it’s particularly detailed, or another kind of equivalence comes into play that it becomes aesthetically relevant. Both Schiele’s paintings and Schoenberg’s music from 1909-1918 could be said to respond to a certain Zeitgeist characterised by, among other things, madness, the self, the unconscious, modernity and modernism, which can also become described in terms of a topical equivalence in some respects. There is little to say when comparing Schiele’s paintings, and say, some of Mozart’s music other than that they were both created in Vienna (the intervening century gave rise to a lot of crucial dissimilarities).
Ethel Smyth’s opera The Boatswain’s Mate and Virginia Woolf’s first novel The Voyage Out were both written in the same two year period (1913-1915) by middle-class white English women. Moreover they're also topically equivalent as they both involve sea-faring, and functionally equivalent as they’re both comedic social satires (these factors may also give rise to socio-historic resonance).
Rothko: composer Morton Feldman. Like Rothko, he was a jewish man working with the avant-garde in New York in the fifties and sixties.
Stockhausen: somebody like artist Joseph Beuys, who was a German from roughly the same generation. Beuys’s work relies on symbolism while Stockhausen’s generally doesn’t, but that aspect could be variously described as pertaining to any or all of the other equivalences.
Functional equivalence means works have or have had (intentionally or not) relatively similar functions. This category is broader than it may appear, stretching all the way from similar original purposes for the works to causing similar psychological effects and states (fear, disorientation etc) in present audiences. For example, music, art and poetry can both serve the function of making aristocratic life pretty or aiding religious worship, or excite similar feelings (of course emotions can also variously be excited by subject matter – the apocalypse, socio-historic context – racist Nazi propaganda, or perhaps form, but here it is strictly in its directly functional sense). An ensuing discussion would compare the ways in which the works fulfilled that function. Strictly speaking, any art is functional if it’s consumed as art but sometimes that’s irrelevant: Philip Guston paintings serve the function of being appreciated and filling up walls in galleries, but that in itself wouldn’t usually be the basis for an aesthetic comparison with Raphael – something else would.
Rothko: Since a lot of people these days use reproductions of Rothkos to promote a mellow, mildly cerebral atmosphere (whether or not doing this is ‘correct’ is beside the point), I’m thinking piano music by Debussy, or 'chillout', maybe acid jazz. Today Brian Eno’s Ambient series would be unlikely to feature on the CD player of a place that hangs glossy Rothko posters, but it would make a good functional equivalent too, since both can be used to relax and their forms are rather similar (anyone who appreciates Rothko's paintings as artifacts of an eventually fatal bipolar disorder - for which an equivalent might, according to popular belief, be found in late Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann or Scott Walker - would be unlikely to find them relaxing, but ultimately there shouldn't be correct answers in appreciation).
Two musical works which could have a similar function to Rothko's most famous paintings, one meditative or ambient, '2/1' from Brian Eno's Music for Airports and one highly expressive: the Lento Assai from Beethoven's String Quartet No. 16 op. 135 (one of Beethoven's very last pieces - he was famously staring his down own mortality while writing the late quartets).
Stockhausen: You wouldn’t normally describe Stockhausen’s work as functional. He sometimes wrote commissioned works, but this is a weak basis for equivalence. Today his work is often used to teach composition students so an equivalent work, interestingly enough, could be something like Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier or Art of Fugue, and I don't know if there are any specific works of art used to teach art students (at art school some friends of mine were once made to stand in a room with a corpse for inspiration - this isn't a snide comment on Stockhausen's music).
This one is perhaps the sexiest to talk about, but for all that is also the most difficult to discuss validly. It’s the one people are usually referring to when they name-drop synesthesia, so how far objective formal equivalence can reasonably be taken will ultimately be up to neuropsychology. Works with formal equivalence have relatively similar structures and processes, so how this works depends entirely on the analogies involved. Both sounds and shapes can be low, high, rising, falling, busy, minimal, distorted, fragmented etc (it may not be a coincidence that Martin's Great Day of His Wrath and Ultravox's Dancing With Tears in My Eyes both feature prominent descending forms in depicting the end of the world). It becomes more complicated when sounds and shapes can be likened more exotically, such as with words like ‘brittle’, ‘gloopy’, ‘abrasive’, ‘delicate’, ‘chaotic’ and ‘plastic’, because it’s difficult to pin down the aesthetic bases for these descriptions (valid and inspiring though they may be) as they often involve a messy, subjective mixture of mental visualisation, conventional connotation and musical onomatopoeia.
Many structures and processes can be likened relatively unambiguously however: few would dispute that collage is a form that occurs in both art and music, see for example collage in the album covers and music of Julian House aka The Focus Group. Mathematical structures may also dictate form in art or music, such as in certain minimalist works, or in the case of the golden ratio (apparently someone sat down and started this list of works designed with the golden ratio).
Rothko: As Rothko’s painting have small amounts of large, simple, plainly deployed colour then (taking colour to be pitch or timbre) non-repetitious ultra-minimalism or drone music could be a suitable formal equivalent, such as the work of La Monte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, Phill Niblock or even, again, Morton Feldman (a close formal equivalence could be drawn between his 'fields' of chance sound operations and Rothko's juxtaposition of areas of colour, as his work and that of contemporaries such as Barnett Newman could be associated with the movement fittingly labelled 'colour field painting'.)
Stockhausen: his work explores a wide variety of forms and processes, but I think the shapes of Kontakte are similar to those in small sections of paintings by Matthew Ritchie or Julie Mehretu: complex, three-dimensional and superficially chaotic, but cleanly carved (few Stockhausen compositions have, in a relatively short amount of time, the frantic, overloaded complexity of their paintings taken as a whole). Any non-minimalist geometrical abstraction.
Stockhausen's Kontakte and a painting by Matthew Ritchie. I'm not claiming to be a synaesthete or to fully understand the processes of perception involved - but at 0:16 don't these two 'look' and 'sound' alike? It's quite possibly just me and my big fat subjectivity.
So hopefully these are some ways to look for and describe aesthetic equivalence between different art forms. The best kinds of aesthetic comparison are those which can draw on all four paradigms of equivalence. All I have done is outline some heuristics for the purposes of orientation, so this is in no way a watertight theory. If a piece of music and a work of art give rise to the same connotations, something like ‘war’ for example, that could be down to a inextricably complex mess of topical, socio-historical, functional or formal reasons. The topic of ‘War’ could even be connoted in an abstract painting for socio-historical reasons (maybe WW2, Vietnam) and connoted in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem for functional reasons, and on the back of that compared and discussed in terms of formal equivalence (busy, violent, clashing textures). None of that would be invalid. The four paradigms could be seen as food groups, primary colours or physical dimensions – abstractions that combine in various ways to constitute real-world stuff.
If there’s anything I’ve missed, anything reminiscent of something else, or any plain bad thinking, leave me a comment.
But as anyone passionate about music and art or any writer on music (such as Stubbs) will tell you, music inevitably will - must even – be understood by a listener in terms other than the purely sonic. Such ‘synesthetic’ adventures may not be enough to motivate grand histories of aesthetics, but they are able to radically enrich aesthetic experience in certain instances. So in what ways might such an ‘aesthetic equivalence’ between a work of art and a piece of music be (objectively) talked about? Specifying some terms on which these aesthetic comparisons might be made allows us to imagine a number of possibilities for enriching the experience of works while preventing relatively imprecise, misguided or prohibitively subjective comparisons.
Neuropsychology has discovered some exciting evidence for the visualisation of sound and the kind of overlap of sensory-aesthetic responses that allows us to dance and understand metaphors but I'm thinking on a much more casual, generalised level. I’m not going to claim there is some literal, objective neuro-aesthetic ‘truth’ or any other kind of truth inherent in a comment like ‘this bassline oozes’ (as I should really be using an FMRI scanner for that and the family next door is borrowing mine at the moment). The related concept of synesthesia has been used and abused in writing about art and music as, at best, an alluring but vague metaphor for aesthetic equivalence, sometimes misguidedly leading to the belief that there is some similar aesthetic ‘truth’, kudos or Holy Grail in it, but ultimately it’s only a particular neurological condition affecting certain individuals, the consequences of which are subjective and restricted to those individuals. So I’m leaving neuropsychology to the neuropsychologists.
What follow then are four suggestions for paradigms or heuristics describing aesthetic equivalence, hopefully specifying the ways in which works or collections of works can be thought of as aesthetically comparable even when they are very unlike in medium and/or context. Naturally they are not mutually exclusive, in fact the more paradigms apply to a particular aesthetic comparison the richer and more reasonable the equivalence (and if there’s been any writing on this before, I haven’t found it yet).
Topical equivalence
When works are topically equivalent they handle relatively similar subject matters. The term is derived from topic theory in musicology, which itself is imperfectly derived from rhetorical topoi. How these subject matters are defined or divined, either by author or audience, would be a matter for debate – telling whether and on what level a work is ‘about’ something can be complex, especially where supplied texts are relatively unforthcoming or non-existent. But in many cases, this can be sufficiently unambiguous: Poussin’s painting Et in Arcadia Ego and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 (known as ‘the Pastoral Symphony’) are topically equivalent because they both explore the pastoral genre, along with many works of literature, and more specifically, they show negative ideas and emotions interrupting the pastoral bliss (death in Et in Arcadia Ego, a storm in the Pastoral Symphony). The subject matter of a work can be an emotion but that, though very similar, would technically be somewhat distinct from an equivalence of emotional effect on the audience experiencing the works, which would be better described as functional equivalence (see below): a work can clearly portray happiness but then have a very different emotional effect on an audience: indifference, sadness or anger at its artificiality perhaps - some listeners might hear The Boo Radleys' Wake up Boo in this (admittedly cynical) way.
Topical equivalence in itself doesn’t necessarily make for a fascinating insight if the subject matter is related only relatively vaguely. John Martin’s epic painting The Great Day of His Wrath is topically equivalent to Ultravox’s Dancing With Tears in My Eyes because both describe the Apocalypse, but any similarity of significance arguably ends there. If Martin’s painting had two tiny figures ‘lov[ing] to the sound of [their] favourite song’ as in Ultravox’s lyrics, that might be something to think about. But it doesn’t.
Topical equivalent of Rothko: Difficult to say that Rothko is ‘about’ anything, as his paintings are usually non-representational and named after the colours and shapes involved. To this end, a somewhat facile topical equivalent would be something like Michael Torke’s Color Music. Slightly more high-mindedly we could say his work is ‘about’ emotionalised perceptions of space and form, so something like J. G. Ballard’s short story The Enormous Space might be, to a certain extent, a relevant equivalent, or ‘about’ the straightforward juxtaposition of potential emotional resonances - so perhaps the more minimal poetry of William Carlos Williams.
Topical equivalent of Stockhausen: Again, as Stockhausen was a bit of a formalist, subject matter doesn’t really apply. Spiritual, cosmic, mystic awareness is something that figures in his later work, so something like Jodorowsky’s film Holy Mountain seems appropriate.
Socio-historical equivalence
Socio-historically equivalent works originate from a relatively similar social or historical context. The works themselves or their authors or audiences could be from a similar time, place or social background, or both associated with a social or historical event, idea, discourse or institution. For example, some of Egon Schiele’s paintings and Arnold Schoenberg’s song cycle Pierrot Lunaire were created around the same time, 1912 in Vienna (more or less).
Socio-historical equivalence should be unlikely to constitute an aesthetic by itself. It’s only when it’s particularly detailed, or another kind of equivalence comes into play that it becomes aesthetically relevant. Both Schiele’s paintings and Schoenberg’s music from 1909-1918 could be said to respond to a certain Zeitgeist characterised by, among other things, madness, the self, the unconscious, modernity and modernism, which can also become described in terms of a topical equivalence in some respects. There is little to say when comparing Schiele’s paintings, and say, some of Mozart’s music other than that they were both created in Vienna (the intervening century gave rise to a lot of crucial dissimilarities).
Ethel Smyth’s opera The Boatswain’s Mate and Virginia Woolf’s first novel The Voyage Out were both written in the same two year period (1913-1915) by middle-class white English women. Moreover they're also topically equivalent as they both involve sea-faring, and functionally equivalent as they’re both comedic social satires (these factors may also give rise to socio-historic resonance).
Rothko: composer Morton Feldman. Like Rothko, he was a jewish man working with the avant-garde in New York in the fifties and sixties.
Stockhausen: somebody like artist Joseph Beuys, who was a German from roughly the same generation. Beuys’s work relies on symbolism while Stockhausen’s generally doesn’t, but that aspect could be variously described as pertaining to any or all of the other equivalences.
Functional equivalence
Functional equivalence means works have or have had (intentionally or not) relatively similar functions. This category is broader than it may appear, stretching all the way from similar original purposes for the works to causing similar psychological effects and states (fear, disorientation etc) in present audiences. For example, music, art and poetry can both serve the function of making aristocratic life pretty or aiding religious worship, or excite similar feelings (of course emotions can also variously be excited by subject matter – the apocalypse, socio-historic context – racist Nazi propaganda, or perhaps form, but here it is strictly in its directly functional sense). An ensuing discussion would compare the ways in which the works fulfilled that function. Strictly speaking, any art is functional if it’s consumed as art but sometimes that’s irrelevant: Philip Guston paintings serve the function of being appreciated and filling up walls in galleries, but that in itself wouldn’t usually be the basis for an aesthetic comparison with Raphael – something else would.
Rothko: Since a lot of people these days use reproductions of Rothkos to promote a mellow, mildly cerebral atmosphere (whether or not doing this is ‘correct’ is beside the point), I’m thinking piano music by Debussy, or 'chillout', maybe acid jazz. Today Brian Eno’s Ambient series would be unlikely to feature on the CD player of a place that hangs glossy Rothko posters, but it would make a good functional equivalent too, since both can be used to relax and their forms are rather similar (anyone who appreciates Rothko's paintings as artifacts of an eventually fatal bipolar disorder - for which an equivalent might, according to popular belief, be found in late Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann or Scott Walker - would be unlikely to find them relaxing, but ultimately there shouldn't be correct answers in appreciation).
Stockhausen: You wouldn’t normally describe Stockhausen’s work as functional. He sometimes wrote commissioned works, but this is a weak basis for equivalence. Today his work is often used to teach composition students so an equivalent work, interestingly enough, could be something like Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier or Art of Fugue, and I don't know if there are any specific works of art used to teach art students (at art school some friends of mine were once made to stand in a room with a corpse for inspiration - this isn't a snide comment on Stockhausen's music).
Formal equivalence
This one is perhaps the sexiest to talk about, but for all that is also the most difficult to discuss validly. It’s the one people are usually referring to when they name-drop synesthesia, so how far objective formal equivalence can reasonably be taken will ultimately be up to neuropsychology. Works with formal equivalence have relatively similar structures and processes, so how this works depends entirely on the analogies involved. Both sounds and shapes can be low, high, rising, falling, busy, minimal, distorted, fragmented etc (it may not be a coincidence that Martin's Great Day of His Wrath and Ultravox's Dancing With Tears in My Eyes both feature prominent descending forms in depicting the end of the world). It becomes more complicated when sounds and shapes can be likened more exotically, such as with words like ‘brittle’, ‘gloopy’, ‘abrasive’, ‘delicate’, ‘chaotic’ and ‘plastic’, because it’s difficult to pin down the aesthetic bases for these descriptions (valid and inspiring though they may be) as they often involve a messy, subjective mixture of mental visualisation, conventional connotation and musical onomatopoeia.
Many structures and processes can be likened relatively unambiguously however: few would dispute that collage is a form that occurs in both art and music, see for example collage in the album covers and music of Julian House aka The Focus Group. Mathematical structures may also dictate form in art or music, such as in certain minimalist works, or in the case of the golden ratio (apparently someone sat down and started this list of works designed with the golden ratio).
Rothko: As Rothko’s painting have small amounts of large, simple, plainly deployed colour then (taking colour to be pitch or timbre) non-repetitious ultra-minimalism or drone music could be a suitable formal equivalent, such as the work of La Monte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, Phill Niblock or even, again, Morton Feldman (a close formal equivalence could be drawn between his 'fields' of chance sound operations and Rothko's juxtaposition of areas of colour, as his work and that of contemporaries such as Barnett Newman could be associated with the movement fittingly labelled 'colour field painting'.)
Stockhausen: his work explores a wide variety of forms and processes, but I think the shapes of Kontakte are similar to those in small sections of paintings by Matthew Ritchie or Julie Mehretu: complex, three-dimensional and superficially chaotic, but cleanly carved (few Stockhausen compositions have, in a relatively short amount of time, the frantic, overloaded complexity of their paintings taken as a whole). Any non-minimalist geometrical abstraction.
So hopefully these are some ways to look for and describe aesthetic equivalence between different art forms. The best kinds of aesthetic comparison are those which can draw on all four paradigms of equivalence. All I have done is outline some heuristics for the purposes of orientation, so this is in no way a watertight theory. If a piece of music and a work of art give rise to the same connotations, something like ‘war’ for example, that could be down to a inextricably complex mess of topical, socio-historical, functional or formal reasons. The topic of ‘War’ could even be connoted in an abstract painting for socio-historical reasons (maybe WW2, Vietnam) and connoted in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem for functional reasons, and on the back of that compared and discussed in terms of formal equivalence (busy, violent, clashing textures). None of that would be invalid. The four paradigms could be seen as food groups, primary colours or physical dimensions – abstractions that combine in various ways to constitute real-world stuff.
If there’s anything I’ve missed, anything reminiscent of something else, or any plain bad thinking, leave me a comment.
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