Art is the means of expressing reality in all its completeness. Art was invented by humans as a way of reconstructing reality and the phenomena of the objective reality in a picturesque form. Some scholars keep to the point of view that the notion of art is similar to that of culture, thus identifying art with culture. There are various forms of arts in the world; some of them are called classical, some others are called modernist or neoclassical. Among the kinds of art can be distinguished the following ones, as the most important and the most popular among people: visual arts (including painting and drawing), literature (prose, poetry), sculpture, architecture and of course various kinds of music.
Seeing that there are so many different kinds of art, we must clearly understand that they do not exist in complete isolation from each other. All kinds of arts interact with each other and are in close connection to those ones that are the closest to them. This means that arts developed closely connected and nowadays, more and more pieces of art are being created not by a single kind of art but by the combination of them that provides the reader or the listener or the spectator with the fullest image of this or that artistic idea. This can be exemplified by the films made after some literary works, like “Hamlet” or “Da Vinci Code,” or poetry created as the completion of a certain painting, like the painting and a poem titled “Hunters in the Snow,” or a musical creation which is a response to some literary work or painting. The latter is just the case that we are going to discuss in the current essay – this is called the phenomenon of musical ekphrasis. In order to avoid any possible ambiguity of the terms in this essay, we should start our analytical work by defining the notion of musical ekphrasis.
Musical ekphrasis – is the musical (sound) reflection of a certain piece of graphic or visual art. The musical ekphrasis is created by an artist other than the creator of the original work. One way to explore the ability of music to render works of visual art is to arrange instruments chosen by the composer in a single work of ekphrasis using an imagined scale between, at the one end, the iconic and, at the other end, the allusive. Another term that demands definition is the term of the program music and the musical ekphrasis.
Program music is the kind of music that narrates or paints, represents, or suggests stories or scenes (or even events or characters) that exist or are not out there but enter music from the composer’s point of view and from his/her mind. The sphere of application for the notion “program music” is wide, ranging from the emotional expression associated with nature, through the description of a historical or literary hero, up to the musical impression of a philosophically viewed “world” (Bruhn, 2008). The musical ekphrasis, on the contrary, depicts a fictional reality created not by the composer of the piece of music: a painter or a poet. Ekphrastic music often relates not only to the plot of the conveyed fictional reality but to the form and style of its representation as well.
After the terms are defined, we can move to the analysis of the chosen works of art from the point of view of ekphrasis. These works are the painting Die Zwitschermaschine (Twittering Machine) by the famous German painter Paul Klee, and the musical works under the same title executed by the well-known German composer Giselher Klebe and the Lithuanian composer Rytis Mažulis who is considered to be the “intellectual” artist.
The painting itself presents the image of a twittering machine, i. e. a thing consisting of thin lines and some springs. It is operated with a movable handle and is supposed to produce certain twittering sounds. Looking at the painting by Klee, every spectator imagines these sounds, but no one can say definitely they are exact or not. It is where the idea of the painting lies – it gives the audience possibility and space for uncontrollable work of imagination and inventing its own ideas. The challenge for any composer who would try to represent this painting in the sound form was the task of producing the sounds that would coincide with what the audience imagined while looking at the picture and what the painting’s author planned to say. The results of the work of the two above-mentioned worldwide famous composers will be discussed and compared below.
The instrumental interpretation of the work by the German composer Giselher Klebe presupposes the whole range of depictive means of the musical language. Some moments in this work can be considered close to onomatopoeia. Sounds throughout the piece of music really resemble the movements of a certain machine consisting of metal details and needs oiling. This machine produces twittering sounds, which do not allow any alternative when the listener perceives the work. The sound is exactly what the vast majority of the spectators of the respective painting expected to hear from the machine. While music is called “a language,” we know that it cannot describe directly simply saying “red” or “black.” In order for the listener to understand how music responds to the piece of art, it is necessary for the beholder to be well acquainted with the stimulus. The importance of the listener’s familiarity with the original work of art grows proportionately to the level at which a composer establishes links between musical and extra-musical content of that original work. In this case, listening to Klebe’s work, we would not be able to imagine exactly the machine painted by Klee if we had not seen the painting earlier than heard the piece of music (Bruhn, 2008).
Considering the second piece of music composed by Rytis Mažulis, we imagine an absolutely different picture. The thing is that Mažulis’ work was completed over twenty years later than the work by the German composer, and this fact found its reflection in the music. The means of music production changed since the first work was done, so did the idea of machinery and the sounds it produces. The people’s minds pictured different images of the Twittering machine created by Klee. In this case, we can listen to the music from the computer age, which is executed by a super-pianist who plays with a great many hands. This piece of art also possesses some features of onomatopoeia, but now it represents the sounds of a modern machine which is the product of technological progress. So, the comparison of these two musical works based upon the image created by Paul Klee at the beginning of the 20th century presents a lot of interesting material for thinking. We can clearly observe how art and people’s ideas of it changed with the course of time and the technological development of mankind.
To make the logical conclusion of this comparative essay, we should say that creating the work of art that is planned to be a response to some other piece of painting or a literary work; composers often set themselves the challenge to represent not only the plot of the story, but also the artistic language in which this plot was first expressed, its form, and sometimes stylistic and other details of the original representation (Bruhn, 2008). The musical works by Giselher Klebe and Rytis Mažulis represent exactly this case of musical ekphrasis, and that is why these works are considered to be real masterpieces of art in the whole world.
References
Bruhn, Siglind. A Concert of Paintings: “Musical Ekphrasis” in the Twentieth Century. Web.
Klee, Paul. Twittering Machine (Die Zwitschermaschine). 1922. Museum of Modern Art, New York.