VISUAL IN COMPOSITION

CREATING A VISUAL WORLD, E.XENI (Ed.) INTER-DISCIPLINARY PRESS 2015, pp. 51-64

Chain of Thought: From the Visual in Composition to Experiential Art

Esthir Lemi

ABSTRACT

Based on how the structure of music is connected to myth, this chapter presents the way visual thinking shapes particular schemata that can be detected in various 20th century artistic endeavours, and the evolution of contemporary artworks involving immersion, embodied performance and trans-disciplinary art. These complicated structures, referred to in Romanticism as total artworks, cultivate audience perception. Using the work of Samuel Beckett in the same way as phenomenology came to understood, the author will attempt to show how art evolves creating new boundaries and inter-connections. A musicological approach is considered apt in presenting the connectivity between music composition and visual thinking. The end of tonality in music and the beginning of more complex presentation lead to music interfering with and depending more on other art-forms, producing a new generation of music readers who can follow abstract structures in multiple ways. Focusing on visual metaphor and the revealing basic structures as laid down in the scores of music composition, we can see the similarities between an aleatoric score and Beckett’s work. This point of view is relevant for the cultivation of senses in contemporary interdisciplinary, experiential performances that involve interaction and go beyond the performance to affect everyday perception.

Keywords: Visual thinking, Beckett, aleatoric score, total artwork, perception

Building an Aleatoric Score from a Draft of Beckett’s “Fizzle 3”

In this chapter the presentation of a step-by-step procedure to an aleatoric (non linear) music score stemming from the first lines by Samuel Beckett’s text “Afar a Bird” is the guide for an experiential process in understanding the visual structures in composition. The author collected two verses. A Theme and its Variation which also functions as Coda, taking into consideration that the phrase” Ruinstrewn land” is repeated. Using Levi-Strauss’s guidance from his book “The Raw and the Cooked” multiple choices for visual-music representations are proposed. The first step is the selection of the basic scheme (Image 1). In order to choose an audio and visual palette for this “score”, the author endeavours to present the present the pre-history of such a technique, the way we have been taught from masters in visual music. To this effect, we will present a trans-disciplinary process in a form of an embodied performance that stems from the theory of total artwork and arts’ complementarity.

The Bipolar of Sound of the Visual and the Image of Sound in the History of Total Artwork

Referring to analogies of a total artwork, a visual music score has been created in which, in general, sound information and visual elements follow the concept of an experiential incident that aims for an intentional character. The intentional character has two properties, an external and an internal one. Sokolowski supports the projection declaring that rejecting inentionality constitutes a form of self-limitation that leads to internal isolation and he refers to an intramental and an extramental world in balance. For his example he uses Beckett’s novel Murphy a concept that is very useful in this process, referring to chapter six, where Beckett interrupts his narrative to undertake a justification of the expression, Murphy’s mind.

He distinguished between the actual and the virtual of his mind, not as between a form and the formless yearning from form, but as between that of which he had both mental and physical experience and that of which he had mental experience only... Thus as his body set him free more and more in his mind, he took to spending less and less time in the light, spitting at the breakers of the world; and less in the half light, where the choice of bliss introduced an element of effort; and more and more in the dark, in the will-lessness, a mote in its absolute freedom.

The author will attempt to connect the above mentioned quote with the philosophical theory of Wagner- the composer and founder of the term Total Artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk), concerning Schallwelt and Lichtwelt. In his theoretical work on Beethoven (1870) he refers to Schallwelt (the essential, intuitive) that connects music the visual with common sense. If the soundscape is a system that connects communicative skills that cannot be detected, the music cultivates the limits of perception on an intentional level. This development has improved and enhanced our perceptive abilities in both painting and musical fields. To comprehend the path which integrates different artistic genres into one perception, we obtain more information concerning a Lichtwelt-Schallwelt dual perception, we obtain more information concerning a Lichtwelt-Schallwelt dual perception regarding this specific artistic presentation. In Wagner’s words:

Everyone can observe the effect of music to be such, that during its influence our vision is enfeebled, until, though with our eyes open, we still do not see clearly … Such a sight, which alone occupies one who is not touched by the music, eventually does not in the last disturb those who are captivated by it; but rather that, with our eyes open, we have arrived at a condition which bears considerable resemblance to the condition of somnambulistic clairvoyance, and, in truth, it is only whilst in this state that we immediately partake of the musicians world.

Inspired by Schopenhauer’s Traumorgan, Wagner insisted that for every activity an internal and external process is formed concluding in the comprehension of the visual world. Every thought and vision is affected by our daily consciousness; either by simply day-dreaming or just contemplating, our mind creates pictures which are imprinted in our conscious, becoming, from that point on, the property of our vision. As in the case of a dream that is perceived as an experience, the same applies to the intersection of the imaginary with our reality (something which is immediately tangible and visible). The composer called the exterior world Lichtwelt (the world of light) and the internal one Schallwelt (the world of sound). It is these two worlds that comprise the conscious:

If, retaining the often employed analogy of the allegorical dream, we look upon music as prompted by an innermost perception, and communicating this perception outwards, we are compelled to assume a particular cerebral capacity as the proper organ for this communication (as with the “organ of dreams”), by virtue of which the musician at first recognises the inner “thing per se”, which is closed to all direct perception, an eye turned inwards, which, when turned outwards becomes hearing.

He understood that the pre-given system mimics reality and wished to dissolve the barriers between imitation and reality offering the ultimate challenge, that of perfection. This perfection would be achieved through immersion into the musical abstraction and induction of other artistic parts, in other words via immersion in the memory space where we comprehend what is not linear. The riddles surrounding human consciousness and human creativity were mysteries to be solved only when dissolved.

Concerning the aleatoric score in the process of encoding two verses of Beckett’s Fizzle 3, inspired by the above theories we have two elements to declare as distant- Visual (he) and close-Musical (I), the Lichtwelt and Schallwelt respectively constructing the duets of Light-Schadow, Resonance-Dissonance, Yellow-Bluw, Outside-Inside and we have the first depictions- as rhythmical chart (score) to follow.

3. Selecting Material for the Experiential Artistic Process

Now that the first basic schemes are settled, it is time to decide about the sound, since it is the ambience of the scheme that makes this function an experiential process. A colour chart ha a plethora of information and needs a perspective that re-collects all information and furthermore proposes a unity; Then, this can be visually represented by the presence of noise (with its equivalence and isolation in total black or white, where the information regarding other colours can be absorbed or extracted) or as a mirror revealing all the information that can possibly be revealed from memory, until music is followed via its score in an open, flexible space- in a bur of undefined information. Such an internal code comprises the essence and core material of a total artwork and can carry any message rendering communication feasible.

New information from this practice can be drawn concerning contemporary artistic material, defined by its complexity and flexibility as a whole, regardless of shape and form. First, it is necessary to segregate the spectrum of internal and external information: in other words to separate the intellect (subtractive, semantic) from the aesthetic. These features are contributing factors of immersion that, with the addition of new technologies are integrated in extravaganza crucial for the audience in order to feel absorbed in the process. Focusing on timbre- the colour of sound- we pave the way for art to move from aesthetic extravaganza to the intellect of immersion.

Let us consider that “he” is a noise (depicted as a “noise filter”) and symbolises the enter in the Lichtwelt and “I” the melody sound of a whistle (depicted with a “texture filter”), symbolising the enter in the Schallwelt. In this respect we have the leitmotiv of noise from the point when “he” is mentioned and so on until respectively the leitmotiv of texture from the point “I” (also) appears and so on:

Leitmotiv is the term broadly used to describe Wagner’s inspirational technique of establishing associations between musical motif and what is seen on-stage, essentially affecting the memory, sentiments and the comprehensive ability of the audience. Through repetition of the same structures, hidden information is received and, depending on the context, is transformed into various meanings. The Riemann-Lexicon not only attributes the definition of leitmotiv to Wagner’s technique, but it goes further to note that it is vital to his achievement of phantasmagoria. Information theory was used as a tool to deal with conception and aesthetics in a rational, precise way since, as with leitmotiv, semantic messages are expressible in symbols and determine translatable, logical decisions and aesthetic messages which determine interior states which are untranslatable. Furthermore, it is interesting to note that the term “leitmotiv” is associated with computer science.

When the project consists of interactive elements, the communicative parameters are uncountable and undefined. The author was interested in this particular sense of hidden information that can only be detected by means of creating noise. When using the term noise here, reference is made to the definition that stems from the term in signal processing, describing random data without meaning. This information is not relevant to the context being investigated or tested. High noise levels can block, distort, change or interfere with the meaning of a message. Long before A. Moles’ system that included information theory in aesthetic analysis- due to the wide spread of symbolism in the 19th century and the beginning of the science of psychology, synaesthesia became a research pattern for artistic connectivity between all the senses. Since an uncountable measure of information in art succeeded in creating communication channels between the artists, the artwork and the audience, a part of the meaning is transferred, undetected, “as noise” that is magically transformed and de-coded but never revealed or selected. Youngblood (1970) refers to noise in order to describe such transformations in the contemporary synaesthetic cinema:

Synaesthesis is the harmony of different or opposing impulses produced by a work of art. It means the simultaneous perception of harmonic opposites. Its sensorial effect is known as synaesthesia, and it’s as old as the ancient Greeks who coined the term. Under the influence of mind-manifesting hallucionogens one experiences synaesthesia in addition to what Dr. John Lilly calls “white noise” or random signals in the control mechanism of the human computer.

Earle Brown recounts the earliest and most “predominant” influences on his conceptual attitude toward art as being Alexander Calder (a sculptor who envisioned kinetic art) and Jackson Pollock (a painter who introduced gestural movement in painting): “The integral but unpredictable “floating” of a mobile, and the contextual “rightness” of the results of Pollock’s directness and spontaneity in relation to the materials and his particular image of the work- as a total space (of time)”. Contemporary art is more a process of finding a non-verbal way of communicating crucial matters of correspondence.

4. Memory-Space

Contemporary notation was influenced and inspired by the changes in the instant depiction of the ambience of music, where the whole structure (a total space of time) can be presented and where different symbols are selected by observers capable of decoding abstraction. The new age that was brought to musical notation through aleatoric music was a transposition from graphic imagery to the mental one. It is interesting to note that, this notion of abstraction, in the way Kandinsky puts it into question, is reflected in mental imagery and the aleatoric notation that appeared later in the 60’s is followed by a structure similar to that of computer desktops that propose a minimal structure for maximum information capacity.

To appreciate the similarity between desktops and the structure for the notation of musical schemes, it is necessary to acknowledge the “Simonides effect” that is well known in the history of musical computer technology and was inspirational in the construction as well as in later forms of interactive depictions. It is the artist-engineer model that made this reality plausible. Fleckenstein’s team analyses such formation in depth:

Regardless of its omni-presence in our lives, scholars have attended only sporadically to imagery over its 2.500- year history. According to Simonides, mental imagery first came into prominence in Greece when an Athenian dinner party went awry. Supposedly the roof fell in on the guests, mangling the bodies beyond recognition. A survivor (in some accounts Simonides himself) identified the bodies be referring to a mental schema of the seating arrangements. From this beginning, mental imagery has been historically privileged as a mnemonic, as a tool for memory, not unexpected in an era when rhetors (and poets) were required to orate elaborate speeches from memory. As print technology increased in sophistication, reliance on mental imagery waned and interest in it languished. It was not until cognitive psychology within the last 50 years that interest in mental imagery experienced a renaissance.

Notification in composition - at least the first notification- constructs a flexible language of a linear incident (e.g. an eight-minute piece) on paper that can be easily transformed into a three-dimensional depiction. Moreover, it is the essence of ambience that is stressed and appreciated as the information of a blank page. In referring to this ambience Richard Coyne notes:

Attention to sound, sense, body, place and increment might imply a return to a more sympathetic and organic order of being, where creatures adapt to their environments and each other, there is harmony between part and whole, and integration between human and machine, apparently important in a world otherwise dominated by impersonal machines, ceaseless communications, and digital surveillance. To follow this line of inquiry would be to tread the well-worn path of romantic organism. Along with several theorists of the senses I conjecture an opposite trajectory, and affirm the agony of the senses. After all, according to Aristotle sound is produced by one object striking another.

The space and the individual perception were matters of examination in 20th century art. In order to understand the way compositional thought can be depicted in visual charts as well as what triggers human perception- cubism being a great paradigm - especially because via this technique, the possibility of attendance of hidden elements in a multi-linear form of different possibilities was revealed. Lefebvre points to Picasso’s structure of painted surface’s dialectical treatment that altered visual perception forever:

In the first place, the liberation in question went so far as to affect the signification itself, in that the sign (the signifier) became detached from what is designated (the signified). The sign was now no longer the “object” but rather the object on the canvas- and hence the treatment received by the objective realm as (at the same time and a tone stroke) it was broken up, disarticulated, and made “simultaneous”. As for the “signified” it remained present- but hidden.

Depicted for the first time by Picasso, it is re-constructed in the observer’s memory-space; this complex form of perception demands a multi-layered pattern that is based on simplified schemes. The depiction of an eye signifies a human head, in the same way as one musical note depicts chords and music in the tonal structure of harmony, de-structured - already lived and experienced - thus, offering further information and the possibility for ambience to be read. In this way, more complex schemata are now comprehended on a conscious level by the audience, depending on their knowledge. We can hear the same thing twice, and every knowledge and experience carries sub-knowledge of all multiple lived experiences, classified by each individual according to their unique level of music education, language and corporeal cognition etc.

This persistence in the power of a picture created and re-created in a memory-space constitutes an environment identified with the conscious. In order for such an internal process to succeed, the observer must attain awareness: in other words, the ideal for an experiential art where they are more than just participants- they become the interpreter via their enthusiasm, cultivation and therefore contribute to as well as experience the immersion.

Other possible depictions follow:

5. Conclusion

This chapter was an attempt to depict the brilliant structure of Beckett’s work in order to present abstract schemes in compositional thought based on abstract painting theories. Interaction and immersion in performance have taken this possibility one step further, bringing us to an experiential level that remains faithful to the model of the total artwork that is based on non-verbal communication patterns; music is promoted, not as harmony opposing dissonance or noise, but as an equilibrium and serenity in a common memory-space built on empath and the common experience of the abstract world of music.

Notes

1 Steven Gontarski, ed., ‘Afar a Bird,’ The Complete Short Prose of Samuel Beckett 1929-1989 (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 232-233.
2 Claude Lèvi-Strauss, Mythologiques: Tome 1, Le Cru et le Cuit (NC: Plon, 2009). 3 Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 11.

4 Samuel Beckett, Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1938), 108-110.
5 Richard Wagner, Beethoven (Beethoven, with a Supplement from the Philosophical Works of Arthur Schopenhauer) (WM Reeves, 83 Charing Cross Road, WC, 1908), 24-25.
6 Ibid., 32.
7 Danko Drusko, Ein Diskurs über Leitmotiv und ihre Anwendung in Richard Wagners‘Ring der Nimbelungen’ und J. Williams ‘Star Wars’ (Munich: Grin Verlag, 2011), 12.
8 Abraham Moles, Théorie de l'Information et Perception Esthétique (Paris: Denoinfoël, 1973).
9 Hans Dieter Hellige, Geschichten der Informatik: Visionen, Paradigmen, Leitmotive. History of Computer Science (Berlin: Springer, 2004).

10 John C. Lilly, The Human Bio-Computer (Miami, Fla: Communications Research Institute, 1967), 81.
11 Earle Brown, ‘Transformations and Developments of a Radical Aesthetic, Audio Culture’. In Readings in Modern Music, eds. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York, Continuum 2005), 189.

12 Kristie S. Fleckenstein et al, ‘Language and Image in the Reading-Writing Classroom’. In Teaching Vision (New Jersey: Routledge, 2002), 301.
13 Richard Coyne, The Tuning of Place: Sociable Spaces and Pervasive Digital Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010),10.

13 Henri Lefebvre, ‘La Production de l’ Espace 1974’. In: The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (Massachusets: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992), 25.

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