BAUHAUS
Bauhaus and Greece Conference, Athens School of Fine Arts 30 May-1 Jun 2019 N. Skalkottas and Bauhaus:
A musical Approach on Bauhaus
Dimitris Andrikopoulos (ESMAE-IPP/CESEM), Esthir Lemi
Abstract:
This paper focuses on the gestural study of music. The music of N. Skalkottas (1904-1949), a greek composer who lived and studied in Berlin between the two great wars, incorporates a gestural vocabulary that presents many common points with attitudes and principles of Bauhaus. Through the gestural analysis of Skalkottas works research intents to demonstrate the similarities between the two arts based on contemporary music analysis and its visual 3D representation.
Keywords: N. Skalkottas, Bauhaus, gesture, music composition, music analysis, visual representation
I.
Traditional analysis of a musical work is deeply rooted into a methodological tradition. This tradition focuses on operations that constitute a scientific practice in order further to articulate axiological values on the work itself.
Its scientific practice is largely connected to a detailed examination of the higher-level elements of the work through their segmentation to relatively simpler constituent elements. Consequently, through the discovery of their theoretical constraints, relations, hierarchical order and functions all these individual parameters are summed back to its previous higher order structure. The final objective is to define the more abstract cognitive elements of the work such as musical style, musical language and music aesthetics.
On questioning the bound between music and visual arts in Bauhaus- whether it is a parallel activity of intellectual creative minds - or there is a stem that connects all of them together, it is W. Kandinsky’s words in the introduction of the Spiritual in Art (1910) that may give the most authentic reply: “Every work of art is a child of its time, while often is the parent of our emotions.” “The child of its time” represents the audience capacity and needs to understand specific attributes on any artistic genre, since all arts are forms of communication. Artists communicate ideas that collect a very complex variety of knowledge not particularly specified in the arts. In this effect, the audience in the beginning of 20th century, in what we called at that time western world, had the cultivation to demand this information needed to enjoy artistic works which provide “hidden recipes” on artistic act. These hidden recipes had as result the “talented audience” that interacts in the near future in the same century. What Paul Klee provides in his notebook at the classroom combining visual arts with music, is a well known skill composers have from the beginning of history of musical notation for classical music, that we nowadays call aleatoric and we owe its name to Amadeus Mozart’s Musikalisches Würfelspiel (Würfel therfore alea). The delay of giving a musical term to this representation, when Paul Klee already during Bauhaus had given us significant theoretical material for notation in music, and the fact that we started using the term in the fifties as the definition was set during Darmstadt International Courses in New Music, signifies the importance of communicating musical structure with visual representations/ criteria in a short delay. It seems that the audience needed an average of forty years to accept abstraction as an aesthetic value so they could follow notation. Similar to this in the contemporary music- gestural attributes seems to be an applicable way to represent a score when music is in process- so that we may have a (graphic/ visual) idea before listening the piece on what is about.
Moving out of the area of musical analysis, this kind of segmentation, especially during the second part of the 20th century, was used as a common compositional procedure, a way to create the individual compositional tools needed for the composition of new music. Pitch, duration, dynamics, articulation, register, timbre were dissected and formalised into larger scale structures through diverse combinatory procedures in order to produce larger scale works with the belief that individual parameters could maintain their features regardless of the way that they were combined.
Further, starting from the 1960’s and the 1970’s this kind of segmentation and formalisation took place into a higher level of the musical construction. Pitches themselves were treated as individual parameters and through the use of an extended palette of instrumental resources and synthesis, they were integrated into sound masses, diverse musical spectra and sound sculptures as seen in many works by Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001), Gyorgy Ligeti (1923- 2006) and later, in many works of the French spectralists as Tristan Murail (1947- ) and Gerard Grisey (1946-1998) among many others.
Already from the early 1980’s, and resulted out of the various transformations that contemporary music creation went through during the 1960’s and 1970’s, there was a clear shift towards the importance of the mutual influence that the various parameters had to each other when combined. Pitch, duration and timbre were mutually influenced, for example, by the development and the complexity of a new instrumental sound vocabulary; the physical action of performance, the physical gestures of the performer during performance, became factors that predetermined the qualities and the kind of the material used for the composition and not the other way around; quotation led to the understanding of the importance of sound references taken out of their initial context and then used back as sound objects and combined to new sonic worlds; the sonic sculptures of the spectralists helped composers not to look to sound and composition through the traditional cell based point of view but more through the creation of musical gestures that occupy a specific sonic space during a specific time. Among all these characteristics we will focus on the element of musical gesture and its importance to the analysis of past works.
II.
There exist diverse ways on looking into musical gesture. Traditionally when we speak of musical gestures we refer into gestures that involve a human agent that through the use of a mediatory physical action leads to the production of a sound event with all the psychological apprehensions of the resulted sounded context. This could lead to the possibility of abstraction of pertinent values from the sound event by the listener and further, the inclusion of these values to the construction of a musical code and finally their attribution to a specific musical language. All these are lying inside the space of the perceptual experience of the listener and must therefore have roots into a common set of archetypes, experiences and musical code, even if all these exist unconsciously inside the listener.
Regarding composition, musical gesture is understood as a sound movement that generates a recognisable sound unit, a sound unit that is associated to one signification and it is easily recognisable inside a work. The previous individual treatment of the diverse parameters that compose this gesture is not anymore present and all elements depend on each other adding all together to a characteristic sonic event. Further, a network of different gestures can be present and coexist in a singular moment, creating even more complicated textures and, by diverse ways of treating them, creating the possibility of diverse significations and interpretations to a specific sonic object.
As mentioned earlier, gestures can have diverse sources of inspiration, from a specific physical movement of a performer that results to a characteristic sonic event, a specific sound object that has a distinctive sonic character created out of instrumental or a synthesized, artificially generated source, to a visual, almost three dimensional representation of a sound movement, already present from the early stages of creation and constitutes a fundamental construction element of a musical work.
In opposition to traditional music analysis, the identification and visual representation of these characteristic sonic objects can give a more clear and immediate visualisation of the inner structure of a musical work on matters of structure, directionality and texture. In this manner, the musical work is abstracted from its microstructural theoretical elements, it is elevated to a higher degree of representation where only sonic movement and sound masses are visually represented.
Our method of analysis is focused firstly in the identification of such musical objects inside the works written by Nikos Skalkottas (1904-1949) during his Berlin period, the creation of a visual network of gestures that immediately clarifies their inner gestural structure and in the same time studies the possibility of the existence of common elements with some principle ideas on point, line and movement of the Bauhaus school as presented in the Pedagogical Sketchbook by Paul Klee.
III.
Paul Klee (1879-1940) had a knowledge in music as a violinist who puzzled in his youth whether he should chose a music career. Apparently his interest in music affected his lectures at Bauhaus, where he set a curriculum based on the visual representation of various musical attributes. He shared similar focus on the complementarity of music and visual abstraction with Johannes Itten (1888-1967) and Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). From the archive of the development of this curriculum by their students, it is the Stereometric Representation by Heinrich Neugeboren (1901-1959) in 1928, that could be considered as the first representation in what we interpret as gestural in the contemporary thinking in composition practice when analysing sound.
The gestural concept can be understood in Klee’s analysis at his 15th lecture on “problems of earth attraction and movement in the cosmos”, where motion is the norm, with obvious reference from the world of philosophy by Plato’s Timaeus analysis. Ιn his notes for the lectures on Bauhaus Paul Klee forms an explanation of the structural influence in nature making a parallel on the bone and ligament structure and muscle fibbers. He furthers his thought on the sixteenth chapter of his lectures where he presents the organism as a movement machine. This machine combines the execution of movement (that is apparent visual) and the decision of movement (Bewegungswillen) both combine the final action that the audience embodies as performance: An organisation of a scheme has attributes that project specific coordination for the next move. This “Bewegungswillen” has an equivalent on music composition. Within this combination, Klee results that there is a relativity between structural and individual functioning and he calls this: a progression of the functional values.
This movement machine he represents has a multi- vector combination: from the ligaments over the bones, nerves of muscles to the brain, therefore a machine. He concludes on a distinction of the active medial and passive and characterizes the brain as active, the muscle as medial and the bone as passive.
In a compository level we organise sound in macro-structure and microstructure, where such representations can lead to an architectural representation of the score, same as paul Klee successfully did in J. S. Bach’s Fugue in the same Bauhaus notes, a representation that has been taught in musical composition studies as well, in order the students to get inspired in contemporary representation on musical notation. Fuge’s structure is so clear represented in his notes that we could say it has spatial representative patterns. Therefore in 2011 Barbara Haskell curated at Whitney Museum of American Art the successful retrospective exhibition by visual artist and composer Lyonel Feininger (1871- 1956) that
followed a concert at Carnegie Hall at 21.4. 11 entitled Bauhaus Bach. Feiniger composed musical Fugues and considered in many ways his visual work as depiction of such a structure. In his words: “Bach’s essence has found expression in my
paintings”, “The architectonic side of Bach whereby a germinal idea is developed into a huge polyphonic form”, considering the composer Bach as his “master in painting”.
From all the above we conclude that a gestural analysis pre-existed in music composition thinking and can be easily represented in simple - structural forms as Fuge and from its visual representation we can get new feedback for compository thinking while having a “floor-map” of macro and micro-structure as a notation of gestural movements. For an architect this looks like a floor-map. For a visual artist there may be a chart to understand the macro-structure of a composition. For the composer is a notation that contributes an average of 10% of musical information.
IV.
Bauhaus like every emblematic moment in history is probably not an innovation that stems on its results and motivation of artistic creation. Its successful outcome that we analyse today in multiple artistic works is an approach of the rare future. It is not clear that there is a direct influence of the Bauhaus school and its aesthetic principles to the work of contemporary composers of that period. It appears that during the 1920’s and 1930’s Bauhaus artists were much more interested into music than the composers of the same period to the Bauhaus. The only documented composer that studied in Bauhaus was Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972) that had been attending the Bauhaus classes since almost its beginning, around 1923, having at the time a more dissonant, closer to Schönbegian dodecaphonic music idiom.
There is a documented existence of “The Bauhaus Band” that included a diversity of instruments that fall out of the common paradigm such as prepared pianos, a large amount of diverse percussion instruments, string and wind instruments as well as a falsetto tenor singer performing something that at the time was characterized as jazz.
Related to the more mainstream contemporary music of the time, it is clearly documented the presence of many of contemporary for the time composers at the “Bauhaus week” of the 1923, composers like Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924), Paul Hindemith (1895-1963), Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), Ernst Krenek (1900-1991), Wladimir Vogel (1896-1984) as well as Stefan Wolpe. Paul Hindemith’s “Triadisches Ballett” was performed at the Bauhauswoche exhibition in 1923, a piece for mechanical piano performed by a piano roll, created by Hindemith himself and the only existing visual representation of the piece itself.
Other main figures of the between the great wars composer generation like for example Arnold Schoenberg (1854-1951) and George Antheil (1900-1959) have been later associated with that period but important questions arises from this type of associations; what was the level of influence that the Bauhaus school had to these composers? Does its attitude towards the arts and its aesthetics influenced or helped to form a new musical aesthetic or what we observe is merely an inevitable attraction between prominent figures of a specific period in a specific place with a common contemporary attitude towards their individual artistic practises?
V.
Nikos Skalkottas (1904-1949), one of the most prominent Greek composers of the 20th century was living between 1921 and 1933 in Berlin, studying violin under Willy Hess at the Prussian Academy of Arts and later composition, with Robert Khan, Paul Juon, Kurt Weil, Philipp Jarnach. Between 1927 and 1932 he continued his studies at the Academy of the Arts in the Masterclass of Composition under the supervision of Arnold Schoenberg.
During this first period of his compositional outcome he composed diverse works for piano solo, chamber music, vocal and orchestral works.
Skalkottas spent time in Berlin at the moment when Bauhaus was in its pick - and even though he didn’t touch the aura of Bauhaus style in his music work, still we can consider him as an ambassador of that epoche back to Athens, where he spread his knowledge and manifest the time. Same as Klee used Bach’s Fugue in order to explain a compositional way of thinking in his work we have the gestural attributes that we analyse in the Bauhaus composers influence and the contemporary works.
It is out of the scope of this research to go in detail into the traditional analysis of the work of Skalkottas of that period, there are already existing excellent academic texts like Eva Matzourani’s, “The life and Twelve-Note Music of Nikos Skalkottas” that deal in a great detail with the inner structural elements of Skalkottas twelve/tone idiom of that period. As previously announced we are going to present a visual gestural analysis of some works of Skalkottas.
VI.
The chosen works for this early stage of the research to this subject are the theme and the first eight variations of the 15 little variations for Piano solo, a work written in 1927, one of the early works of Skalkottas. The reason of choice for this work it is its reduced size and its variation character of the work that permit a focus to the gestural difference between the variations.
For this research a Computer Assisted Composition software was used, PWGL in order to convert the musical text into its visual representation. As an input the musical text was converted firstly into midi information. This step was followed by a separation of the different musical objects into different layers of similar musical gestures and then their conversion into the visual image.
At the following example we have the first variation of the 15 Little Variations for Piano solo in its original form.
The next example demonstrates the small algorithm that converted the musical text into its visual representation inside PWGL. Arriving to the final stage, a clearer visual representation of this first variation. The vertical lines represent the musical time in its bar segmentation. Similarly, we present the other three first variations of the work.
Conclusions:
Visual representation in music is important as it provides a macroscopic view of the musical piece and connects the audience with structural analysis of music. Studying gesture in music is a new form to approach the process and development of music in composition and makes possible an adequate preparation for visual representation of musical structure. It seems that Paul Klee’s Notebooks provide knowledge shared for both visual artists and composers, as motion is a norm, and a score is “a moving machine” same as human body representative feelings of emotion (up- down/ deep- on the surface) as well coordination patterns (up down /diagonal/ left right etc). The schemes that may represent the music outcome, can also then comment a further visual representation in 3D or visual abstraction. Nikos Skalkottas as a “Berliner student” at the period that the movement was spreading up its ideas, creates in his work if not the Bauhaus genre, definitely patterns on same gestural intention. In this effect the idea we provide on gestural analysis is to gather works of that period and analyse them through these specific information they do provide- so that we
could further define their probable spatial equivalent and understand their work in a compository level as an audience as a similar approach to compositional thought.
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