James Leggio
The British critic Sir Herbert Read wrote in Art Now (1933): “Kandinsky’s aesthetics (a total aesthetic covering all the arts) stands or falls by the justness of this [musical] analogy, and from the early days of the Blaue Reiter it was based on discussions with composers like Arnold Schoenberg.” Let’s look at the all-important musical analogy as found in some of Kandinsky’s written remarks, where it is bound up with the notion of synesthesia, and consider some of Schoenberg’s music, and at the end let’s see whether this crucial analogy holds up.
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Let me start at that defining moment in Kandinsky’s visual life: the ecstatic vision he had at a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin: Kandinsky writes: “The violins, the deep tones of the basses, and especially the woodwind instruments at that time embodied for me all the power of that pre-nocturnal hour. I saw all my colors in my mind; they stood before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me. It became, however, clear to me that art in general was far more powerful than I had thought, and on the other hand, that painting could develop just such powers as music possesses” (Kandinsky: Collected Writings on Art, p.364). This color-hearing synesthetic vision set him on the course to become an artist — and an artist whose practice would take music as a model.
What I find most interesting about his account is that it is truly visionary, in an almost religious sense: a vision of immaterial things, things that aren’t really there, comes to the artist, unbidden, from some other, invisible world. It’s not Saint Paul struck down on the road to Damascus, but it’s received as a kind of divine intervention nonetheless.
And the emergence of a vision from another world seems especially apt in this case, as Kandinsky was attending a performance of Lohengrin, which recounts the arrival, and departure, of an otherworldly visitor, the knight of the Holy Grail, Lohengrin, son of Parsifal, his descent from a sacred realm accompanied by shimmering, hushed, rapturous strings.
And thus, Kandinsky’s music-induced vision announces itself as essentially a spiritual phenomenon, as in the title of his treatise On the Spiritual in Art (1911). Will Grohmann wrote that at this time, “Kandinsky was still a dualist, recognizing a polarity between spirit and matter” (Kandinsky: Life and Art, p. 97). Kandinsky was indeed an avowed anti-materialist, calling for the abstract art of the future to shed the dross of the material world and strive for the spiritual. On the Spiritual in Art is mostly about moving out of what its author called “the nightmare of materialism” and upward into the realm of the spiritual. Over and over, Kandinsky lambasts the modern world as a spiritual wasteland, attacking “materialism” not only in the sense of what we would now call consumerism but also in a larger sense attacking the philosophical theory of materialism, which holds that physical matter is the only reality. “Men … hail technical progress, which serves and can only serve the body, as a great achievement…. Spiritual night falls gradually deeper and deeper” (CWA, p.135).
He was interested in the phenomenon of synesthetic vision because it allowed painting to approach the “spiritual” condition of music; that is, painting was bound to its material media (the canvas, the tube of paint, the brush) and traditionally had to depict some material object; while music, in contrast, has no material medium, just itself: it is pure form, pure disembodied spiritual expression — you can’t see it, it depicts nothing, it’s like a ghostly presence hanging in the air. Since the time of Walter Pater, this is the way the music analogy has been applied to artists, from Whistler to Rothko, as expressing the ineffable, the impalpable thing beyond words and beyond representation.
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When Kandinsky first heard the music of Arnold Schoenberg, at a concert in Munich on January 2, 1911, devoted to the composer, the program included a work that especially capitalized on this sense of music as providing a vision of the otherworldly. For in Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, in the last movement a vocal soloist finally escapes the confines of the body and travels, by a kind of astral projection, to other planets, an out-of-body experience that begins with the onset of atonal writing.
Stefan Georg’s poem “Transport,” the sung text of the last movement, begins with the famous line “I feel the air of other planets” and goes from there to a soaring experience: “I am dissolved in a swirling sound … above a sunlit, vast, and clear expanse that stretches far below the mountain crags, beneath my feet a flooring soft and milky … carried aloft beyond the highest cloud. I am afloat upon a sea of crystal splendor, I am only a sparkle of the holy fire, I am only a roaring of the holy voice.” Heady stuff. And this out-of-body experience can float aloft because in this movement Schoenberg has at last released the singer from the gravitational pull of tonality.
As Kandinsky wrote in On the Spiritual in Art, “Schoenberg’s music leads us into a new realm, where musical experiences are no longer acoustic, but purely spiritual. Here begins ‘the music of the future’” (CWA, p.149).
This flight from the body can sometimes seem to be what Kandinsky’s move to abstraction was largely about. In various autobiographical writings, he repeatedly mentions that when he studied in art school in Munich under Anton Ažbè, he hated drawing from the nude. For example, in his “Reminiscences” (1913) Kandinsky describes the naked models as “smelly, apathetic, expressionless, characterless natural phenomena,” going on to note that “The play of lines of the nude sometimes interested me greatly. Sometimes, however, I found it repulsive. In many positions of certain bodies I was put off by the effect of the lines and had to force myself to reproduce them…. Only on the street could I breathe freely again, and I not infrequently succumbed to the temptation to ‘skip’ classes.” And then, in addition to drawing the nude, he had to hold his nose and take actual anatomy classes: “I did, however, feel obliged to follow the course in anatomy, which I did conscientiously, and indeed, twice.… I drew the apparatus, made notes from the lectures, and breathed the corpse-ridden air” (CWA, pp.374–75).
This sense of distaste underlies the way some understand the music analogy as a source of inspiration for Kandinsky: as a vehicle of spiritual transcendence, leaving the body far behind.
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And yet, there are real problems with this “spiritual” view of the music/painting nexus. Because when you stop and think about it, music in general, and Schoenberg’s in particular, is not disembodied — not spiritual — at all. Instead, it is almost grossly physical, and visceral, appealing directly to our carnal being. Schoenberg’s music of this time is largely “about” emotional crisis and about the distress of the body.
Let me say a little more about what I mean by this carnality of music.
The musical instruments of the orchestra have their basis in material bodies, human, animal, even vegetable. The string players use instruments cut from the wood of trees; these instruments are traditionally strung with catgut (actually goat intestine) and are played with bows using horsehair. Drums were once just stretched animal skins. When playing their instruments, the woodwinds and horns use their bodily respiration to produce tone, and must train their diaphragms to sustain the desired pressure and endurance, developing breath control like Olympic swimmers. Other bodily aspects of music: When I myself go to a concert and hear the sublime prelude to Wagner’s Lohengrin, which induced an unforgettable synesthetic experience in Kandinsky, I can’t help but notice that every once in a while, when not actually playing, the French horns open up the spit valves on their instruments and blow out the built-up saliva, to prevent a bubble from ruining their solos. Orchestral musicians are subject to many workplace injuries: the swollen lip of the trumpeter, the sore fingertips of the violinist, the aching back of the bass player. For all the instrumentalists, in a way, the making of music is an athletic exercise, as it is, of course, for singers, whose instruments are their own bodies: the vocal chords, diaphragm, lungs, throat, mouth, tongue, palate, and resonating nasal cavities that make up the singer’s instrument.
If music is bodily or carnal in these different ways, Schoenberg’s is even more so than most. Take his music drama Die glückliche Hand (The Lucky Hand), about which he and Kandinsky corresponded. The stage action in the piece is a Freudian nightmare, a sustained episode of sexual rage, ultimately snuffed out only when the furious baritone character, The Man, is finally crushed by a gigantic boulder. An early reviewer of the piece complained about the inescapably bodily noises of the instruments, an indignity the writer thought was brought upon them by the extreme demands of Schoenberg’s scoring: “Mysterious things have taken place on the stage, concerning which a person of normal intelligence would scarcely be in a position to unveil the mystery. In the orchestra it sounds as if the instruments had come alive and begun to blow their noses, to clear their throats and cough, to whimper, to slurp noisily, and to bawl” (Arnold Schoenberg/Wassily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures, and Documents, p.199).
This is to say nothing of music that seems to act out the very feeling of bodily experiences, such as the climactic musical orgasm in Isolde’s Liebestod at the end of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (which replaced Lohengrin as one of Kandinsky’s favorite Wagner operas). Or the convulsive suffering undergone by the dying man whose corporeal dissolution we witness in Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration. Or poor Wozzeck’s subjective experience of drowning in Berg’s opera, little bubbles of violin figures swirling up out of him as he sinks. Or, of course, the wrenching emotional traumas and physical distress heard in Schoenberg’s Expressionist and atonal works (such as the morbid torment of Erwartung), which lead, toward the end of Schoenberg’s life, to his String Trio, which (as the composer reported to his neighbor Thomas Mann) expressed his near-fatal heart attack and the course of his recovery. Kandinsky, we know, had little use for program music. But these examples are not programmatic in the normal sense of telling a story, incident by incident, like, say, Strauss’s tone poem Don Quixote: No, these musical works depict what the body feels and inwardly experiences in extreme states. They answer the doctor’s familiar question, “Where does it hurt?”
Concert music can express these things because it is already, in some ways, a transcript of bodily activity. The rhythm of the drum is based on the heartbeat, as is the whole notion of tempo, fast for excitement, slow for rest or contemplation; the winds extend out from our breathing; they and the strings, in their highs and lows, their loudness and softness, reflect the rising and falling excitements we feel, and so on. Theodor Adorno famously said that Schoenberg’s atonal music in full cry, such as Erwartung, was “a seismographic record of traumatic shock,” a metric allowing us to gauge unseen eruptions, like a diagnostic instrument. That can be true of music more generally: If the emotions are, as has been said, “the thinking of the body,” then certain kinds of music might be called “the speaking of the body.”
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Music is carnal in another sense as well: You can touch and feel it. Recall that Kandinsky played the cello. To play that instrument, you must wrap your arms and legs around its body, like a lover; when you play it, you feel its vibrations against your torso as much as you hear them, mixing touch and sound in ways not unrelated to synesthesia. Closer to our own time, Nam June Paik would be aware of the erotic charge in embracing the cello, in the performance pieces he created for the cellist Charlotte Moorman to enact while partially nude.
This experience of felt vibrations is part of the reason why Kandinsky so frequently refers to art, like music, as evoking “spiritual vibrations.” Some of this comes from Theosophy, but some not. Music is among the few art forms in which the audience physically experiences a direct tactile sensation: You feel the vibrations as well as hear them. From the performer’s side, we see this most clearly with the remarkable, deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who functions in concert not only by counting the beats but, more important, by feeling the shifting vibrations of her drums and gongs in her hands and feet and trunk, thereby closely monitoring what they must sound like to the audience.
To Kandinsky’s revolutionary mind, vibrations were tremendously important. They’re what earthquakes are made of.
He speaks with special fervor about the phenomenon of “sympathetic vibration” by which a sound of a particular pitch will resonate — or resound or reverberate or call forth — the corresponding pitch from a replying source that is similarly “tuned,” a concept he learned from the science of acoustics. Sympathetic vibration is a bit like the FreshDirect truck idling outside your apartment; your windows will rattle if they’re “tuned” to the same pitch as the engine. The related phenomenon of acoustical resonance provides the cosmic title of today’s symposium, “The Universe Resounds”: Kandinsky said that an especially vivid experience he once had of visual wholeness or composition (which he called his “Moscow hour”) was like “the last great chord of a symphony” (“Reminiscences,” CWA) reverberating through the concert hall, where you hear and feel the full depth and extent of the echoing space because every thing and every body in it vibrates to the same pitches, like a set of tuning forks all struck at once. Looked at this way, maybe the music of the spheres is not so much heard cosmic harmony as tactile cosmic resonance. This is perhaps the burden of the idea of a “sounding” or “resounding” world in Kandinsky’s writings generally.
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If musical vibrations do indeed invoke a carnal world, as I’ve been saying, then what are the ramifications for the music analogy that underlies Kandinsky’s aesthetic, and by which, Herbert Read said, this aesthetic stands or falls? Well, let me address that with the artist’s analogy about the piano.
In addition to the cello, Kandinsky also played the piano, which perhaps made him especially receptive to Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces, opus 11, at that January 1911 concert, as he recalled the auditory experience of these keyboard works in his color-drunk painting Impression III (Concert) made shortly thereafter (and in which the piano can just be made out amid the chromatic splendor). In On the Spiritual he had already formulated an astounding analogy, likening the human sensory apparatus to a living piano, with the eyes being, of all things, the hammers that strike the strings. As Kandinsky writes: “Generally speaking, color is a power which directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul” (M.T.H. Sadler translation, p.25). This baroque little metaphor of the piano-body amounts to a kind of revisionist anatomy lesson. Along with his color-hearing, his spiritual vibrations, and his interest in the sciences, it suggests, I think, an artist studying the workings of the central nervous system, as it receives stimuli through the eyes and ears and sends signals on into a vibrant, pulsating core of consciousness: the resonating chamber that is the experiencing mind. Kandinsky celebrates a richly corporeal assimilation of music because it bodies forth the workings of the sensorium — the physiological basis of subjectivity.
His piano analogy comes down at last to this: The human body is a musical instrument, strung with the central nervous system. And the artist plays it.
If I were a philosopher or an aesthetician, I might want to claim that what Kandinsky explores through his music analogy is the phenomenology of aesthetic experience. But I will have to leave that to others.
(A talk given at the symposium “The Universe Resounds: Kandinsky, Synesthesia, and Art,” Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, January 12, 2010, in conjunction with the retrospective exhibition Kandinsky)