There are many
possibilities open to writers when dealing with the influence
of the visual arts (2D and 3D), as well as the built environment,
upon musical composition. This book is more compiled than
written in the conventional sense, as it lists visual artists
by name and then the musical composers and works they inspired,
giving minimal elaboration upon the relationship between
the two. The majority of the listing is straightforwardly
A-Z by artist surname, irrespective of art form, media,
or dimensionality.
The key to one
aspect of the book lies in the subtitle: A guide to recordings.
From this you can infer that the book is aimed largely at
archivists, librarians and the like who deal on a regular
basis with requests for obscure works and have to track
down recordings. Similarly too musicologists and students
might find it of use. But I would envisage a body of employers
larger than just the academic community. Anyone sufficiently
interested in the wider arts, and wanting to trace influences
through available recordings will find this invaluable.
Imagine working in the museum world, having to maybe programme
or outline a varied series of events to accompany an exhibition.
A book of this kind would be a useful reference.
Then of course
there’s always the stunned silence you’ll get when calling
your trusty second-hand dealer saying, “If you get a copy
of Leonid Grabovsky’s “Ukranian Frescoes” on Melodiya LP
CM 03833-34, let me know”… I picked the work at random,
but it could be a useful and authorative source book in
the right hands.
Take an artist,
Bramante (Italian painter, 1444-1514), one of whose Resurrections
inspired Edmund Rubbra’s Symphony no. 9. The next listed,
Constantin Brancusi (Romanian sculptor, 1876-1957) has inspired
eleven composers from five countries: Antheil, Mazurek,
Perera, Patti Smith, Ward-Steinman (USA), Terenyi, Stroe,
Olah (Romania), Baley (Ukraine), Holt (England) and Ligeti
(Hungary).
More provoking
perhaps is the short index listing composers alphabetically:
Hindemith is listed against Giotto, Grunewald and Raphael;
Poulenc against Benozzo, Braque, Chagall, Gris, Klee, Miro,
Picasso, Villon and Watteau. There is no index for individual
artworks or compositions: to do this would have doubled
the work in length.
This book is
impressive in its coverage in terms of artists, composers,
geographical spread, timeframe, recorded media (LP, cassette
and CD) and musical genres (jazz, punk and rock co-habit
cordially with the classical).
If there are
shortcomings, one is that it only lists recording released
up to and including 1999, making this already a reference
work over five years behind the times. Perhaps not a major
worry should you be researching details of a long deleted
item, but useless for anything remotely recent. (I overheard
a dealer last week seriously refer to a 2002 CD release
as ‘ancient’ – if so, where does that place LPs?) It’s
not as if I can see regular updates to this being published,
this is the product of painstaking research as it is.
The other shortcoming
might be in the listings of common repertory works, such
as Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, inspired
by Viktor Hartman as we in the West call him. The book lists
him under Gartman, his birth name, and refers you to this
if you look up Hartman. But the crux of the matter is made
obvious when it comes to the listed recordings (the book’s
raison d’être):
“Many recordings
in all formats. Numerous orchestrations are recorded.”
Might it have
been an idea to list, say, one or two mainstream recommendations
in cases such as this? And the listing of ‘many recordings’
occurs quite frequently. This at least would give students,
researchers, discographers, etc. some starting point for
their activities. That said it is interesting to note the
various recorded arrangements of Mussorgsky’s work for wind
band, wind quintet, organ, rock band, brass quintet, guitar,
synthesizer and jazz ensemble that exist, should one ever
need them.
The natural
home for this book would on balance be the performance library
or research-centred institution rather than the individual,
a point underlined by the cost of £46.00.
Still, it is
remarkable that a book founded on inspiration should reduce
it all to a list. The more I delved into this book I became
fascinated by the questions it plainly doesn’t attempt at
answering: the whys and wherefores of inspiration. Why might
it be that some composers respond more to artists and works
of another time and place, while others remain responsive
essentially to their contemporaries and the places they
know? Something far more inspired in itself, fitting an
altogether different purpose, is required for that task.
Evan Dickerson
