Can a painting suggest a particular sound? This question is being explored by an exhibition in the United Kingdom this summer that matches paintings with specially created soundtracks. Running until September 6 at London's National Gallery, the Soundscapes exhibition features six paintings for which musicians and artists have recorded an accompaniment of music and/or sounds.
As it happens, the pairings aren’t always entirely successful – more on that later – but the exhibition does open up a can of creative worms whose wriggles are interesting to watch. Of course, music and painting have at times been joined by a two-way street, with composers and visual artists gaining inspiration from each other. But can we gain a fresh perspective on the visual by exploring it through music? Or is that pressing music into a role that doesn’t suit the medium?
These are big questions for an exhibit of six paintings to answer, but Soundscapes does succeed in suggesting some benefit to overlapping the aural and the visual. Music is time-based and thus encourages the listener to give time to the painting it accompanies. While most of us have the skills to listen attentively to a short piece of music, it is all too easy to drift through a gallery, scanning paintings briefly and vaguely without making a connection. Bringing the two together does enforce a degree of contemplation. At the National Gallery's exhibition, the six paintings are isolated from each other in a maze of dark rooms lined with benches. With the soundtracks unfolding over time, visitors are pressed to stay with paintings they might otherwise speed-digest.
As for the actual pairings of soundtrack and painting, some of them do work quite well. The exhibition features a pretty broad collection of contributors, with soundtracks from composers Nico Muhly and Gabriel Yared, sound and multimedia artists Susan Phillipsz and Cardiff and Miller, musician Jamie xx, aka Jamie Smith, and wildlife recordist and electronic music pioneer Chris Watson. Of all these, the most powerful contribution is Phillipsz's accompaniment to Hans Holbein the Younger's remarkable double portrait of 1533, The Ambassadors. A record of two wealthy, well-connected young men and a pointed reminder of mortality, it shows the French ambassador to England Jean de Dinteville posing with his friend, fellow ambassador and cleric Georges de Selve. Among the busy array of scientific and musical instruments that fill the space between the sitters, the painting's most famous detail is a huge skull painted on a slant so sharp that the identity of the object only becomes clear when viewed at an angle. Interestingly, Phillipsz draws inspiration not from this, but from another telling feature that is much less evident: a lute displayed on the table between the two subjects that turns out, on close inspection, to have a broken string.
She takes this as a departure point for a musical piece that brings out the painting’s subtle discord – it was, after all, painted during a period of high tension between England, France and the Vatican (represented by cleric De Selve). Phillipsz’s soundtrack amplifies this latent sense of unease, as three wavering, rasping notes on a violin overlap from separate speakers, jarring only just enough to set the ear on edge. It also underlines the air of melancholy in the painting, from which the subjects’ relative youth (they are both in their 20s) and sumptuously depicted clothing partly distracts. Accompanied by a constant dying fall on the violin, we see the clutter of learned devices in the painting for what they are, a quietly desperate warning to the viewer to make metaphysical hay while they still have the youth and strength to do so. Does the painting’s message need such amplification? No, it doesn’t – but then no one is suggesting that the musical accompaniment become a permanent fixture.
Elsewhere, Jamie xx does pretty well with a coastal landscape by the Belgian pointillist Théo van Rysselberghe. As other critics have commented, matching little blobs of paint with little bleeps of sound might seem a rather obvious approach, but Jamie xx’s brisk, skittish electronic piece also works well in evoking the sort of fresh, changeable, windy weather shown in the landscape.
There is, likewise, a neat reference to the painting’s heavily dappled surface, perfectly legible as a landscape when seen from afar, but just a mass of dots when viewed close up. Jamie xx’s piece mirrors this effect by placing separate tracks from separate speakers. Heard from one end of the room, the tracks mesh into melody, close to the painting, however, they overlap incoherently – a pretty but apparently random wash of sound.
Elsewhere, things fall a little flatter. A Finnish lake scene by Akseli Gallen-Kallela comes equipped with … recorded birdsong and branch rustles that could have been recorded in the scene itself – a somewhat redundant gesture, as it only underlines what is already present in the painting itself.
Muhly's obsessive, repetitive viola da gamba piece mirrors the obsessive repetitions in the famous English medieval religious painting the Wilton Diptych. That seems a valid enough response, but it doesn't necessarily create any extra layer of meaning or truly shock us into seeing the diptych anew.
These redundant additions show up the limitation of the exhibition’s concept. The point of a painting is that it can conjure up a world through using one sense only. It has no need to appeal to any other. Asking what a painting sounds like is thus a bit like asking what a building tastes like. Moreover, fixing a particular sound to a painting opens the door onto the perception of whoever puts the sound together, but it also crowds out the viewer’s response, leading them down one particular path and blocking off others.
Still, the impulse to connect the two forms is easy to understand. Music that seeks to illustrate, to connect with the visual, is of course nothing new.
The idea of painting with sound might sound like an oxymoron, but it was common during the romantic era, when so-called “programme music” sought to evoke natural phenomena such as landscapes or sunrises. Strands like this aside, music nonetheless enjoys an enviable position: it is arguably the only art form where the abstract, the non-representational, has been fully accepted. It is free.
This has made it an inspiration for visual artists seeking to draw the viewer away from concentrating on the objects they are painting and towards focusing on their chosen arrangement of lines and colours aside from what they represent. Thus, the 19th-century American artist Whistler called his murky, ambiguous 1870 night scenes Nocturnes after the musical form. The idea, one imagines, was to encourage the viewer to look at the blocks of colour as if they were notes, arranged not to illustrate per se, but to create a striking impression.
Claude Debussy repaid the compliment by composing a piece, Three Nocturnes in 1899, inspired by Whistler's paintings. In his introductory notes to the work, Debussy made the painterly inspiration explicit: "…it is not meant to designate the usual form of the nocturne, but rather all the various impressions and the special effects of light that the word suggests. Clouds [for example] renders the immutable aspect of the sky and the slow, solemn motion of the clouds, fading away in grey tones lightly tinged with white."
Rather than some union between the two forms, there is a sort of longing ache for alternatives on show here, albeit one that produces wonderful results. Whistler used the musical term nocturne to shift focus away from depicting actual objects, while Debussy goes the other way, to pull the listener away from abstract concentration towards imagining the sky, clouds and their movement. Moving in opposite directions without meeting in the middle, the painter hankers after the composer's freedom, while the composer longs for the painter's ability to represent the world explicitly. We see this impulse still alive and on display at the National Gallery's Soundscapes. The sound artist explores the painter's tools with curiosity and some passion but, somehow, true connection remains elusive.
Feargus O’Sullivan is a regular contributor to The National.
