Vassily Kandinsky / Composition VIII 1923
The painting of sound (part one)
What we hear and what we see are two separate yet interconnected realms,each with it's unique and individual textures and unique identities,the sound of painting, it's timbres, cadence, rhythms and harmony and disharmony,the vision, it's colours, it's perspectives,it's variation of light and dark, it's symmetry, it's asymmetry, but yet these same qualities these elements are found in both vision and sound and connect the minds perspective it's consciousness to illumination, it's no coincidence that since the beginning of human life that these elements have shaped evolution and within that the expansion of consciousness.
It's becoming more evident with the Advent of Archeoacoustics that extremely earlier civilisations used and understood the role of psychoacoustics that could aid the resonation of frequencies within the vocalisation of sound and the timbre of drumming into infrasonics that induce states of being that could transcend the waking alpha patterns to states outside of these.
These techniques developed throughout time and cultures and expanded into spirituality the vocalisation of language into a form of expression of the vision of the world of spirit.
As Music has no material form it's ephemeral, not tangible as a painting so it's a perfect carrier of feeling or what we term the soul and it's spiritual Art. The Egyptians related the Ka to breathe and this link of breath to such instruments as the flute which have long association to the soul.
And yet Music also gives rise to vision and musics dreamlike form creates illuminations and evokes the senses enabling the mind the consciousness access to the unconscious which is the state we spend half of our life span within, a intra psychic realm the imagination the dream state which is a fundamental element of life and effects our psychological state of being.
It's no coincidence that art and music in it's various disciplines and media's express what can not be fully expressed or explained in words or in other disciplines and technologies such as science and mathematics but yet both these have in-depth and profound connection with sound and Art and sacred geometry within nature.
The history of 20th century Art is perhaps the most expansive point in the relationship between Painting / Art and Music. As more Artists explored the concept of a form of expression that melded these two media's into a form a media of expression and there are many artists and movements in Art particularly in Painting that began to explore and create new forms of expression.
“Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis.
One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.” Albert Camus (1)
Kandinsky believed that music could reveal the route to a new art, an art that shed the material appearances of things in favor of a mysterious inner reality. “The various arts are drawing together. They are finding in Music the best teacher” (2) he wrote in his Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912).“A painter (…) in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art.”. (3) Kandinsky wrote an enthusiastic fan letter to Schoenberg introducing himself and pointing out several philosophical similarities between them. This would spark a close friendship as they enthused about the synesthetic crossover between music and visual art. They would explore the boundaries of representation together. Schoenberg would share his own painting with Kandinsky, and would show his paintings in the Blue Rider’s first exhibition in the winter of 1911. Kandinsky would translate Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony into Russian. Schoenberg would describe his music in terms of painting; Kandinsky would describe his painting in terms of music.
Arnold Schoenberg / The Red Gaze 1910
It's impossible to fully explore this relationship / concept of Sound and Painting within this article but there are many books and works that exist that document and explore this concept a few of the following are Recommended works by, Peter Vergo “The Music of Sound”, David Toop “Ocean of Sound”, “The Sound of the Unconscious,Psychoanalysis as Music” By Ludovica Grassi and “The Art of Noise: Destruction of Music by Futurist Machines” by Futurists Luigi Russolo, Francesco Balilla Pratella, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, are but a few of the myriad of publication that explore sound and Art and its interrelationships.
Luigi Russolo, Selbstbildnis (1920)
There are signs that we need not be quite so pessimistic about the ramifications of Russolo’s work: his musical vision has lived on, for instance, through the iconic American composer John Cage (1912– 1992), whose aesthetic priorities differ from Marinetti’s and Russolo’s politics in crucial ways. Although Cage’s emphasis on noise and his championing of “sounds in themselves” bears a striking resemblance to Russolo’s own writings, the American musician entirely rejected sorting sound by category or hierarchy. Rather than controlling noise, Cage wanted to guide it, drawing on Zen philosophy to articulate a spiritual practice of music, which was antithetical to the channeling of public violence through cacophony. It seems that Russolo found his most important audience where the Futurists had been looking all along: in the future.
La Musica, with its leering, tumbling noteheads and a shadowy, solitary organist, suggests that, for Russolo, sound and color were parts of the same sensory whole.
Luigi Russolo / La Musica / 1911 / 12
Giacomo Balla / Forms Sound / Forme Rumore 1925 /30
Carlo Carra / The Painting of Sounds Noise & smells
Extract from Carlo Carrá "La Pittura dei suoni, rumori, odori: Manifesto futurista"
Before the 19th century, painting was the art of silence. Painters of antiquity, of the Renaissance, of the 17th and 18th centuries, never envisaged the possibility of rendering sounds, noises and smells in painting, even when they chose flowers, stormy seas or wild skies as their subjects.
In their bold revolution, the Impressionists made some confused, hesitant attempts at sounds and noises in their pictures. Before them nothing, absolutely nothing!
However, we should point out at once that between the Impressionists’ swarming brush-strokes and our Futurist paintings of sounds, noises and smells there is an enormous difference, like the contrast between a misty winter morning and a sweltering summer afternoon, or to put it better, between the first signs of pregnancy and an adult man in his fully developed strength.
In the Impressionist canvases, sounds and noises are expressed in such a thin, faded way that they might have been perceived by the eardrum of a deaf man. This is not the place for a detailed account of the principles and experiments of the Impressionists. There is no need to enquire minutely into all the reasons why the Impressionists never succeeded in painting sounds, noises and smells. We shall only mention here what they would have had to drop to obtain results:
The extremely vulgar trompe-l’oeil, a game worthy of an academic of the Leonardo da Vinci sort or a foolish set-designer of realistic operas.
The concept of color harmonies, a characteristic concept and defect of the French which inevitably forces them into Watteau-style prettiness and an abuse of light blues, pale greens, mauves and pinks. We have said more than once how much we despise this tendency towards soft, feminine, gentle effects.
Contemplative idealism, which I have defined as a sentimental mimicry of natural appearances. This contemplative idealism contaminates the pictorial construction of the Impressionists, just as it contaminated those of their predecessors, Corot and Delacroix.
Anecdote and detail, which (although it it a reaction and an antidote to false academical construction) almost always leads them to photographical reproduction. As for the Post- and Neo-Impressionists, such as Matisse, Signac and Seurat, we see that far from perceiving the problem and dealing with the difficulties of sounds, noises and smells in their paintings, they preferred to withdraw into static representations in order to obtain a greater synthesis of form (Matisse) and a systematic application of light (Signac, Seurat).
We Futurists therefore claim that in bringing the elements of sound, noise and smell to painting we are opening fresh paths. We have already taught artists to love our essentially dynamic modern life with its sounds, noises and smells, thereby destroying the stupid passion for values which are solemn, academic, serene, hieratic and mummified: everything purely intellectual, in fact. Imagination without strings, words-in-freedom, the systematic use of onomatopoeia, antigraceful music without rhythmic quadrature, and the art of noises —these were created by the same Futurist sensibility that has given birth to the painting of sounds, noises and smells.
It is indisputably true that [1] silence is static and sounds, noises and smells are dynamic; [2] sounds, noises and smells are nothing but different forms and intensities of vibration; and [3] any succession of sounds, noises and smells impresses on the mind an arabesque of form and color. We must measure this intensity and perceive these arabesques.
The painting of sounds, noises and smells rejects:
All muted colors, even those obtained directly and without using tricks like patinas and glazes.
The banality of those velvets, silks and flesh tints which are too human, too refined, too soft, and flowers which are too pale and drooping.
Greys, browns and all muddy colors.
The use of pure horizontal and vertical lines, and all other dead lines.
The right angle, which we consider passionless.
The cube, the pyramid and all other static shapes.
The unities of time and place. (4)
Carlo Carra/ Rhythms of Objects 1911
Article compiled and edited by Adi Newton Jannuary / 2025
Music and video concept and production Adi Newton and Enrico Marani
Bibliography
Albert Camus “Youthful Writings” (1967)
Wassily Kandinsky “Concerning The Spiritual In Art” (2000)Arnold Schoenberg “Theory of harmony” (2010)
Peter Vergo “The Music of Painting” (2010)
David Toop “Ocean of Sound” (2001)
Ludovica Grassi “The Sound of the Unconscious: Psychoanalysis as Music” (2021)
Luigi Russolo, Francesco Balilla Pratella, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti “The Art of Noise: Destruction of Music by Futurist Machines” (2023)Carlo Carrá "La Pittura dei suoni, rumori, odori: Manifesto futurista" (1913)
Notes
(1) from Albert Camus “Youthful Writings” (1967)
(2) from Wassily Kandinsky “Concerning The Spiritual In Art” (2000)
(3) from Wassily Kandinsky “Concerning The Spiritual In Art” (2000)
(4) from Carlo Carrá "La Pittura dei suoni, rumori, odori: Manifesto futurista" (1913)
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