I left the museum charmed, refreshed and fascinated … but unmoved, as in feeling I was standing in the same place emotionally and spiritually as when I entered. Despite pieces with pleasing shapes and radiant colours there seemed little depth. The pigment was always playing on the surface. Fish might have been swimming underneath but we were shown only the sparkle of the sun on the rippling water.
After the final room of paintings I arrived at the shop and realised, looking at the shelves of merchandise, that Klee’s doodling calligraphy seems almost designed for reproduction. There are works of art that can never be adequately photographed (from Rubens to Rothko). It often has to do with size, but also with texture, with scope, with inner intensity. But Klee’s pieces seem as if they were made to be borrowed for postcards or posters – indeed I had a few Blu-tacked on my bedroom wall as a teenager. Part of this has to do with the medium of Klee’s pieces (so many of them are both small and on paper) but it goes deeper than that.
To me they are underwhelming … but I think that’s the point. Klee was a fragile bird’s claw in an angry twentieth-century world of fists, a tweet in an epoch of screams. In fact the greatest shock of the show for me was noticing the dates and country of creation. Many of these pieces came to life in Germany amid the deadly devastation of the First World War, and later works date from the beginning of the curdling of culture in the Nazi era. But nothing seems to have affected his work. The shapes, the colours, the subject matter all remain restful or quirky: no Guernica here.
To borrow Harry Eyres’s teasing inversion of James Bond, ‘stirred, not shaken’, I was certainly not shaken by this show. And stirred? Well, only if that means the gentle turn of a spoon in an afternoon’s cup of tea. But later, rethinking my visit, I realised that there’s a quiet soulfulness in Klee, which avoids the self-consciousness of ‘spirituality’ and which I missed on this occasion. I was expecting the paintings to be powerfully communicative whereas instead they are the hushed source of their own contemplation. I’m ready to see them again.
Almost the same: van Doesburg and Mondrian
Theo van Doesburg is the painter whose work you see in a museum from a distance and think it’s by Mondrian and then see the card underneath and realise it’s not. But actually there are significant differences between the two. Van Doesburg’s colours are more romantic, his shapes softer, the temperature slightly warmer than in Mondrian’s refrigerated, disinfected world. There is more butter in van Doesburg’s sauce. Even with the limited palette of a piece such as Composition XIII, note the gentle lines and soft greys, like a cottage with sloping walls rather than an apartment with razor-bladed angles. Where later Mondrian takes us to an abstract world of chilly perfection, and Josef Albers repeats his schoolroom geometry lessons with polished confidence, van Doesburg’s shapes seem to dream and dance.
Nevertheless, in the end, Mondrian does seem to have the ‘edge’. His pieces bear repeated and lingering viewing in a way narrowly missed by his contemporaries. Perhaps it’s the Webernesque brevity and transparency of his work, the utter discipline of utter simplicity, and his absolute trust in line over pigment, in counterpoint over the harmony it produces.
Gerhard Richter not naked
I own a Gerhard Richter … well, it’s an autographed postcard bought from an auction house in Germany for around 40 Euros. The curious thing about his signature on my card is that it’s upside-down – or the printing of the image on the postcard is. My initial thought was a disappointed, disillusioned consideration of the tailor where the emperor goes for his suits: ‘If the artist himself doesn’t know when his painting is upside-down then what chance do the rest of us have?’
But this is missing the point of abstract art. It is of value because it pleases or disturbs our vision as a celebration of colour and shape. It doesn’t have to mean anything or represent anything because it relies on the viewer (or rather directly on the viewer’s eye) to find its purpose. In some ways it asks more of the spectator than a country scene or a portrait of a princess. With these we can stand back and simply admire the control of the artist; with an abstract piece we need to lean forward, not to interpret or ‘recognise’ but to absorb, to be engulfed by something that plays directly on the pupil of our eye.
The great abstract canvases of Richter (or Rothko or Pollock) bypass the mind, with its calculations and associations, and force us to stop thinking, to stop imagining – to enter another dimension. Because the imagery is somehow naked, we come to realise that the emperor doesn’t always need to be dressed.
Old Masters: either we kill them or let them die naturally
I visit quite a lot of art galleries on my travels. It’s one of the joys of being in major cities with an hour or two to spare on the day of a concert.
One thing that brings a rush of anxiety to me though is being informed that such and such a famous piece has been ‘restored’. Not that I think there’s any automatic merit in preserving a dirty, muddy canvas blotched with soot or candle wax for nostalgia’s sake when it would have begun its life sparkling and dazzling with bright colours. But there is a real dilemma to face: how much can we clean grime before we begin removing paint? If a finger on a hand is missing should we replace it? If colours are faded can we simply touch them up? What is the point at which precious pigment becomes disagreeable grunge?
Every painting (and every restorer) will provide a different answer to these questions, but whatever the decision made the person restoring must approach the throne with fear and trembling. A painter told me once that apparently Ingres was reluctant even to touch up his own earlier work. I fear some restorers have no such scruples. I’ve visited galleries where an old triptych has been restored and I’ve been convinced that two or more different people (with four or more different eyes) have been at work, so different were the choices made of pigment on the three panels. Granted, the colours would not have been wan and pale or a soup of brown mud when they were originally created but were those the colours on the artist’s brush? Who can tell? And that’s the problem. We know the flaking surface of the untouched picture is genuine – art with centuries of wrinkles – but to my eyes many restored pieces look as if a plastic surgeon has stretched flesh across an ageing cheek. Aunt Mildred might look sprightly these days, but she never actually looked like that, even as a frolicking maiden. Often the choice ends up being: do we kill a piece by restoring it, or do we let it die by doing nothing?
When staying a few years ago on the Tuscan–Umbrian border I visited many places to see the frescos. Because of the technique of painting a fresco, as a wall crumbles so do these images. In the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi restorers were faced with a task on a totally different scale after the devastating earthquake in 1997. When a vast panoramic image lies on the floor in dust there’s little choice but to start afresh. What has been achieved there is extraordinary, even heroic, although it did seem strange to me to see tourists gazing up at a modern artist’s medieval pastiche with the same awe as they would at the surviving masterpieces from the original walls and ceiling. But, unlike a painting hanging on the walls of an air-conditioned museum, here to restore was to rebuild.
I left the crowds and walked across town to one of the oldest churches in Assisi, Santa Maria Maggiore, which had been the city’s cathedral until around 1035. There were no visitors or souvenirs in sight and there was an uncanny, electrifying silence inside the stone space. I then glimpsed a priest and deacon saying Mass in front of a fresco reredos, hidden at first on a side altar – imperfect, crumbling and frail. It was utterly exquisite. The irony is that this fresco in its ancient fragility was revealed to modern eyes only in 1997 after that same earthquake. Apparently some meddling restorer in 1640 had covered up the older image from around 1560 with an ‘improved’ version. It’s somewhat reassuring that even in ancient times taste can be questionable.
And in modern times … I’ve noticed that some of Mondrian’s iconic white boxes are beginning to crack, barely a hundred year
s after they were painted. Should we fill in the monochrome fissures or just let nature take its course?
Maths and music: joined at the hip or walking down different paths?
A number of years ago I took part in a brief but interesting discussion on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme with Marcus du Sautoy, Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Fellow of New College, Oxford, and John Humphrys, one of the programme’s presenters. It followed on from a debate at Oxford University with the motion ‘Is music the act of sounding mathematics?’ Marcus was in favour of the motion and I was asked to join the discussion on the radio as a voice against it.
Is there some special affinity between maths and music? People always say there is, as if it’s a perfectly obvious equation. But I think the ultimate issue in this debate is a subjective one: even if music is underpinned with mathematical principles, does the musician have to be aware of them in the act of creating or re-creating the notes on the page or the sounds in the air? I hope not, as my own abilities in maths at school were … well, let’s not go there. But there are more objective issues involved in this debate.
Mathematics is a lean subject. It aims to prune away the superfluous, the redundant. It has an eagle eye for clarity and it delights in rules that can be proved or definitions that can be demonstrated. Ambiguity is anathema to the mathematician. Going off at tangents, fanciful decorations, illogical diversions … all of these would put me at the bottom of Marcus’s class. As he put it in an article for Science Spectra, ‘Music of the Primes’: ‘Mathematicians like to look for patterns.’ But the elements that would cloud the mathematician’s mind (tangents, decorations, diversions) are at the very heart of most great music, especially from Romanticism onwards. It is so often at the moments when logic is put aside that magic is conjured to life – and it is the bending and blurring of patterns (noticing them but then deliberately confusing them) that rescues music from mediocrity and is the trademark of the greatest composers. Until the early nineteenth century the link between maths and music was perhaps clearer. There is often a sense that composers from the pre-Romantic era were working with similar tools to mathematicians – a search for clarity and order. But so were theologians. Science and religion were seen as allies in the same intellectual debates, and the theologian and the mathematician were often the same man. Then, by around the 1820s, there was a breakdown, a parting of the ways.
Deliberate ambiguity
Schubert’s greatest work happened when he gave up the need to ‘make sense’. Take the strange, wandering harmonic progression in the middle of the second movement of his Sonata in D major D. 850. This irrational ramble has no structural purpose at all except to induce a kind of haze of uncertainty before returning to the main subject. It is mind-wandering (‘sleep-walking’ in Alfred Brendel’s apt phrase). It doesn’t return, it isn’t developed, yet it’s a moment of supreme genius. It is absolutely the opposite of a mathematical way of thinking. Schubert is not looking for ‘solutions’ but delighting in vagueness, allowing the chaos to remain unresolved with no attempt to offer an answer. Further examples of this in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music are literally countless.
Non-structural elaboration
If a mathematical formula could be stated in, say, 30 words, why would someone want to use 230 words? But music is constantly adding superfluous decoration, limitless ornamentation, carefree embellishment. The very form of variation is one example of this. A more telling instance is Schumann. How frequently when the singer has finished the song does the composer give to the piano a brief, wordless commentary as a coda? These extra bars add nothing to the strict logic of the song, but they are ruminations of exquisite beauty. Strictly speaking, they are an indulgence tagged on. After all has been said or sung, there’s something more.
Time-keeping and rhythm
It has been said that rhythm and arithmetic are ‘playing to the same beat’. I don’t agree with this. It’s not ‘beat’ but ‘pulse’ that is of central importance in music. The analogous relation of pulse to the human heartbeat is not without significance. Great music (and music making) involves the irregular, the unpredictable. In fact, a metronomic beat often kills a performance because its mechanical predictability is ultimately slack and dull, lacking the tension that comes from the push and pull of rubato. One of the reasons folk music’s vibrancy is so hard to notate is because of its irregularity. It keeps time and takes breath with heart and lung, not as a machine. It is never exactly the same twice. Mathematical equations are by definition repeatable. They aim to capture, to hold, to prove something in as final and immovable a form as possible. But the ‘final’ cannot exist in music because it lives only as a sequence of sounds passing in time. The score might be frozen on the page but the reality flows past/into our ears. We don’t, we can’t, ‘capture’ it. I’m aware that many composers from the mid-twentieth century onwards have specifically used mathematical principles to create their works, but this is both a departure from tradition and an exception that proves the point. These works use numbers as a sort of extra-musical theme or inspiration, not as the defining feature of the sounds we actually hear. They are like the wire mesh under the sculpture’s torso, providing structure and support – a point of creative departure. Maths in this music is the Diabelli waltz, not the thirty-three variations spiralling upwards in ecstasy from it.
I don’t believe composers think numbers when they think notes. Maths is an immortal diamond; music is a human heart.
Sport and music: on the same team?
I confess that, with the exception of Wimbledon or an exceptionally flashy snooker match, I have a bit of a blind spot with spectator sports. But there are some interesting and perhaps surprising connections linking the performance worlds of sport and music.
First, being a musician is a much more physical activity than is often presumed. Muscles, tendons, joints and their related reflexes need to be trained to the highest level of flexibility and skill. On the other hand, the athlete or sportsperson requires a deep inner strength in addition to any obvious, external physical prowess. The training of mind and concentration is at least as important for a prizewinning weightlifter as the bulging biceps bending the sleeve of the polo shirt.
Then there’s the issue of consistency in sport, so often the key to success. It isn’t so much about superhuman skill but about sustaining quality in an almost dogged way, never losing focus round after round. We see this clearly in an extended tennis match: a first set of the greatest brilliance is worthless if the next two sets are filled with mistakes. Plodding accuracy can triumph – no contest – over maverick genius.
To sustain a musical career over many decades requires a certain consistency too. Many young players have a first ‘set’ of pieces polished all ready to go as they collect their gold medal at the competition gala, but not a third, let alone a sixth … and at best a handful of concertos. That’s one issue, and it is about numbers. Beyond that it’s the consistency of energy and creativity that matters and that is the requirement for a lifelong career. The ability to draw something fresh out of familiar repertoire year after year.
So far sport and music are on the same team. But they part company at a deeper human level because the fallibility of the greatest musicians is their special treasure. I would argue that it is only when an artist reveals a certain vulnerability that genius ignites. When it seems inconceivable for an instrumentalist to fall off the ‘bar’ (technically or musically), there is no tension, attention is lost, fizz has fizzled out. A perfect human face (if it exists) is empty of eroticism; a performance that comes to a close without a bruise or a cut is bloodless, lifeless.
The main reason for taking part in competitive sports is to try to win, but in music there are no real goalposts. Any trophies are phantoms, shadows in the footlights. It’s the main reason why music competitions do not exist. Oh, wait a minute …
The curse of the perfect number
I met a woman once who to
ld me that the thermostat in her apartment was set to an unchanging 24 degrees Celsius, from January to December.
We can’t (yet) control the sun and clouds but we can create a home bubble of thermal perfection. But rather than a fixed temperature, maybe we could have a slight drop in the temperature during sleep, and then a gentle increase when our waking bodies pad down for porridge on a dark morning? A lowering during that workout on the exercise bike, a raising for that curl-up on a sofa with a book?
Actually we miss out on some of life’s greatest moments of pleasure when we assume such control over our hots and colds – the steps towards a blazing fire after a long, frosty Christmas walk, or the modern delight of entering a cool, air-conditioned building after the external heat and humidity of, say, Singapore. It’s not without reason that that country’s first leader, Lee Kuan Yew, cited air-conditioning as the greatest invention of the twentieth century.
I suppose I’m old enough to have been influenced by some of my grandparents’ ‘make do’ mentality. Living through rationing and the deprivation of two world wars made it impossible for that generation to demand the luxury of the perfect environment. ‘Is the temperature all right for you, sir?’ asks the limo driver. The cars of my childhood had two options: heating off or on; windows open or closed. I get hot and bothered with anxiety when offered the chance to lower the heat from 22 to 21.4 degrees. Is this really why my heart is unfulfilled? Happiness as a matter of six degrees of deprivation?
Rough Ideas Page 29