The colour of sound: Modernism in music and painting
The consideration of exchanges between music and painting is an interesting enterprise. For someone with decades of experience as a musician and also as an artist, this subject holds particular fascination and, hopefully, presents some intriguing insights. It is a huge subject. Only a small part of it can be presented here, and that drawn from my own experience. I choose examples from painting rather than printmaking, sculpture, photography or architecture, and in reference to music the examples belong to piano and orchestral repertoire rather than other categories of music.
What is, or was, Modernism and its timeframe? The beginnings and endings of movements in art and music are not always precise. Daniel Albright believes Modernism’s story began before 1884 and that the potentialities within earlier Modernism have carried over into Postmodernism. This is at odds with other scholars, who date the most exciting period of Modernism to be the century between 1850 and 1950—and this is the timeframe largely adhered to in this essay. Albright suggests that Modernism’s major breakthrough was the liberation of artists from technical constraints. Rules governing the composition of music, like established conventions in the visual arts, were questioned or discarded.