CLASSICAL Archives

Moderated Classical Music List

CLASSICAL@COMMUNITY.LSOFT.COM

Options: Use Forum View

Use Monospaced Font
Show Text Part by Default
Show All Mail Headers

Message: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]
Topic: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]
Author: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]

Print Reply
Subject:
From:
Ian Crisp <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 29 May 2000 22:46:30 +0100
Content-Type:
text/plain
Parts/Attachments:
text/plain (32 lines)
With some reservations about the mappability of these realms onto each
other, I'll give it a try.  This is the first, unrevised, effort and it
took about 30 seconds.

Melody - subject
Harmony - colour
Tempo - perspective
Form - subject layout
Rythm - brush strokes
Timbre - light source & shadowing

Tempo was perhaps the most difficult one to match up - unsurprisingly,
because music exists in time and a painting doesn't.  OTOH, I paired up
rhythm with brush strokes straight away.  Perhaps the fact that I'm an
ex-drummer comes into it - I've spent a lot of time laying down the rhythm
with (wire) brush strokes.

How can you compare the temporal aspects of listening to music and looking
at a painting? To some extent the eye takes in everything at once, but at
a finer level you only look at one thing at a time.  There's a "scanning"
process covering the whole canvas, and another process whereby the eye is
drawn by the composition to a particular feature of interest and then on
to another.  A traditional representative picture in perspective allows
the eye to wander slowly between "near" and "distant" parts of the picture,
absorbing the whole structure gradually, but a picture without conventional
perspective throws everything at you all at once, forcing the mind to work
at full speed to sort it all out.  There is at least some loose sort of an
analogy with slow and fast tempi here.  Possibly.

Ian Crisp
[log in to unmask]

ATOM RSS1 RSS2