THE CORRELATION OF
MUSIC AND PAINTING
By
DR. DUDLEY CRAFTS WATSON
of The Art Institute of Chicago
Dr. Dudley Crafts
Watson
Noted
Lecturer
LL T H E F I N E ARTS are structurally identical. The two
that are closest in medium and expression are music and
"painting. All have to do with the expressions of life.
Music essentially expresses the love of life, while painting
expresses the truth of life.
These two languages are conveyed through almost identical
vocabularies—music being a successful organization of the vi-
brations of sound, while painting is the successful organization
of the vibrations of light—one appealing to the human conscious-
ness through the ear, the other through the eye. The scales
of music and painting are almost identical—the C D E F G A B
of music corresponding to the red, orange, yellow, green, blue,
violet, indigo of painting. It is not strange, therefore, to dis-
cover a parallel throughout the history of music to the history
of painting.
From the music in the Temple of Solomon it took nearly
2000 years, however, to reach the music of Schubert. While
in painting, the wall decorations in the Byzantine churches of
the eighth century—comparable in structure to early Hebrew
and Greek music—developed into the art of Raphael in less
than 800 years. Much of the supreme composition in painting
during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries pre-
ceded equal compositional perfection in music by more than
300 years. But since the middle of the nineteenth century the
similar achievements in all the schools of painting and music
have been parallel and contemporary. For instance—Debussy
and Renoir, expressing almost identical emotions through the
audible and visual techniques of Impressionism, produced music
and painting of exactly the same timbre. And yet seldom have
composers and painters worked together to achieve correlatively.
A
The first and still the most perfect example of this correlation
is "The Love of Three Oranges", which Prokofieff and Anisfeld
produced in minute collaboration. * The premiere of this opera
twenty years ago in the Chicago Auditorium was probably
forty years ahead of its time. The original Russian Ballet
under Serge de Diaghilev achieved many things in very close
art correlation, but such an attempt has not been made by other
outstanding groups.
One reason for this is that most musicians of today know
little or nothing about color or the art of painting, and an amaz-
ing number of brilliant painters are totally unaware of the value
and spirit of music. That richness of general art comprehension
which engulfed the great masters of the Renaissance making
Michelangelo an architect, a painter, a lute player, and a poet
as well as a mighty sculptor and Palestrina a writer, a painter,
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and an architect as well as a great composer seems not to hold
an) such sway over the geniuses of modern times.
Musicians' studios of today—at least many that 1 know—
are void of the first principles of good taste in color or deco-
ration, while I seldom see painters of distinction in the concert
hall. In fact, I would say with rare exception that concert halls
in Italy, Germany, France, England, and America are about
the worst rooms in the world. The English concert halls have
ever been particularly dreadful in color, lighting, proportion,
and all other things that manifest interior decoration. Not until
the Chicago Civic Opera House was built did America have a
truly good opera house artistically. Sullivan's Chicago Audi-
torium had grand and original elements of architecture, but not
until Sue Higgenbothom Carpenter really did the room over
in color during the latter days of its splendor did it even approach
a truly artistic theater. The great music hall in Rockefeller
Center, New York, is the world's outstanding achievement in
concert halls from the architectural and illumination standpoint.
But it lacks much that could have been done in color. The
art of the painter is still not felt by these designers.
If the music for the New York World's Fair—1939—in any
way approaches the expression and the ensemble of color and
proportion that has already been achieved in the erection of
the buildings for the great Fair, we will have during this com-
ing summer the greatest correlation of the arts the world has
as yet experienced. The collaboration of painters, architects,
and sculptors of the Fair is more keenly at tune than anything
mankind has ever undertaken.
With the rapid development of the color motion picture it will
be necessary to compose music to go identically with it. The
mood and the story of the moving picture is now excellently
revealed through the sound track, and certain movements in
Walt Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" almost
reach perfect correlation. But many times the color goes helter-
skelter from the established motif or theme, and the music goes
skelter-helter. The musical setting for an English color film—
"Wings of the Morning"—is probably the best atuning of this
idea so far realized.
The modernists in both music and painting, realizing the new
uses of these languages, will probably work together to produce
for the new color film such correlations as the imagination has
never dreamed.
Visitors to the Municipal Art Gallery in Glasgow, Scotland,
when the great organ is sending its lovely reverberations through-
out the vast building, or who go into the Art Institute of Chicago
between 12:00 and 1:00 o'clock on a Wednesday noon when
the organ in Blackstone Hall is being played cannot help but
realize the value of seeing master paintings while listening to
master music. Emotionally and aesthetically each increases the
value of the other.
One way to begin this correlation is to give all art students
a short course in music and all music students a short course
in art. Why not?
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