Play it again, Samantha…
Had a really interesting discussion yesterday morning up at Glyndwr about music and art – or more specifically, about music and artists.
How many of us listen to music while we work? How important is it what kind of music we listen to? Does different kind of music inspire us to work in particular ways? How do we listen to our music – out loud, on headphones, via the radio? Do we listen to music when we work that we don’t listen to at any other time? Do we feel that music shapes our work? What about viewing art while listening to music? How does that shape our understanding of and appreciation of what we’re looking at? What about music and art? How many of us include music or sound as an integral part of our work? What difference might it make if we don’t… but did? What about “suggested playlists” for viewing our work? Book authors sometimes make suggestions for playlists, and musicians sometimes suggest reading lists – but I’m not aware of visual artists making similar connections.
Anyway, fascinating discussion – no conclusions reached, but plenty of ideas generated. I can feel a playlist coming on…
Inside Out Art Group 
Yes John-interesting crossovers-Karl Jenkins website has the full cycle of painter/musician link-a very intuitive attraction to a painting (which he purchased) later led him to meet the Artist who revealed that he had been listening to Karl’s music while painting.
JK’s website shows some paintings and links to the Artist’s website.
FULL CIRCLE!
Just had a look at some of Andrea Vizzini’s paintings and mixed-media works: very DeChirico-esque. There are some Karl Jenkins tracks up on YouTube too (search Karl Jenkins) – I’ve got “Benedictus” playing at the moment (from the anti-war “The Armed Man”); very nice indeed. I can certainly see why it would inspire Vizzini’s paintings.
An interesting topic. A painter friend of mine says she can only work if she is playing Mahler or Strauss or Wagner VERY loud. A glass engraver I knew many years ago said “just give me my shed and Mozart and I can work all day.” As for me, I always find myself much more productive if I have music playing in my studio while I work. That’s not to say I am listening to it, it is more a companion. Indeed I bless the advent of radio streaming on the internet where one can find stations which play music wholly uninterrupted by banal links and chat. Perfect.
But that aside, I have become interested in the notion of “soundtracks to art”; I have been speaking with Barry Edwards (of local fame) about a project of making live soundtracks to exhibited art, and in a slightly different vein with Thom Snell (of similar local note) about projects mixing sound/music and art. I should be interested in hearing the thoughts of others’ on this.
I’d be interested in the difference, too, between the construction of “sound environments” created *after* a work has been created, and sound environments created as integral to the work. Perhaps the former would respond to the work as completed object, while the latter to the work as process?
Perhaps Barry could perform *while* you work? Live feedback from an observing musician as part of the creative process? Wow.
And yes, isn’t internet radio fantastic? Some years ago I did a bunch of ident graphics for an online radio channel, and became fascinated with the communities that evolved around making and sustaining them: very particular musical tastes shaping very particular playlists – but that were also publicly available and listened-to. I was interested in the phenomenon of people from very different backgrounds who seemed to share extremely specific musical tastes.
I am interested not so much in “music while you work” as in the potential for art installations to be multi-sensory experiences. Brings to mind a few multi-sensory works that I have seen and loved in galleries, and also how when heightening one sense or two senses dramatically – as in Hockney’s multi-video installation of woodland in Yorkshire (Royal Academy The Big Picture) – in that case the visual and auditory, I felt acutely the loss of smell that would be there in the great outdoors. A similar situation exists under the domes at The Eden Project – fabulous exotic plants and running water, the smell of the vegetation but no birds or their sounds, or insects and their sounds.