CNE Journal

Music and Art: Stella and Diamond

By Cathy Fuller   |   Wednesday, January 19, 2011   0 comments.

I’ve been exploring the new Art of the Americas Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts. In trying to find music that was created in the same year as one of the pieces of art, I’ve discovered that even when artists work using vastly different approaches, we’re still somehow compelled to find connections.

Here’s a pair from 1940-1941:

Joseph Stella came to New York City as a 19-year-old Italian immigrant and fell so in love with the place that he began calling the city “his wife.” This description of the city’s power comes from his autobiographical notes:

"Steel and electricity had created this new world. A new drama had surged from the unmerciful violations of darkness at night, by the violent blaze of electricity… The steel had leaped to hyperbolic altitudes and expanded to vast latitudes with the skyscrapers and with bridges made for the conjunction of worlds."

Stella adored the Brooklyn Bridge and made several paintings of it, combining realism, abstraction, and surrealism to capture its force. He painted his Old Brooklyn Bridge from 1940 to 1941, and now it hangs in the Art of the Americas wing at the MFA. For me it’s a bold, prismatic homage to the bewildering beauty of the city’s geometry. A dizzying display of craftsmanship – like a view from a set of eyes that can’t stop moving.




On December 21st, 1941, while the Brooklyn Bridge shivered in the cold, Carnegie Hall was ablaze with bright, propulsive sound. New York composer David Diamond’s Symphony No. 1 was getting its premier with the New York Philharmonic. Diamond had studied in Paris with the great teacher Nadia Boulanger and then headed off to an art colony near Saratoga to write his first symphony.

As you hear it, I feel sure that you’ll hear elements of Joseph Stella’s city image right away. As in Stella’s painting, there is a kind of beautiful, throbbing geometry in it. The symphony has a uniquely American sound – reflecting, you could imagine, an awe-struck affection for the great structures of a growing city.

The steel had leaped to hyperbolic altitudes. Diamond seems to have turned that image into music.

I hope you can take a little time with each of these American voices – and let me know what you think!

Music and Art: O'Keeffe and Still

By Cathy Fuller   |   Friday, January 14, 2011   0 comments.

Nobody sees a flower - really - it is so small - we haven’t time - and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small.

So I said to myself - I’ll paint what I see - what the flower is to me, but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it - I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.

These thoughts appeared in a letter written by Georgia O’Keeffe, whose painted flowers overwhelm their canvases with her marvelous, signature style.

Born in Wisconsin in 1887, O’Keeffe studied in Chicago and New York. There was a time of discouragement, though -- a point when she realized that she was seeing in her art an unhealthy sense of obligation to please the public. She began creating abstract charcoal drawings. In 1916 the American photographer and art gallery director Alfred Stieglitz (whom she married in 1924) became interested in those drawings and exhibited them at his gallery in New York City; her work was shown annually in Stieglitz's galleries until his death in 1946. She moved to New Mexico in 1949, a place that attracted her deeply and felt like home.

The painting White Rose with Larkspur, No. 2 is a product of 1927 and hangs in the Art of the Americas wing at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Delicate and powerful, I love its color and size. Its uncountable petals seem to crowd out the rest of the world. Busy Bostonians, like the New Yorkers O’Keeffe gently scolds, need to take time, too. I hope you can find some time for it.



Here in our Host Notes, I’m bringing you art in pairs: a piece of music paired with one of the pieces of art in the Art of the Americas Wing. I’m finding pairs that were created in the same year. Even artists with opposing approaches, I’ve found, compel us to find connections.

Today I’ve got a couple of pieces to share with you. The first was composed by William Grant Still in the year that O’Keeffe painted her White Rose. Still was an extraordinary man – the first African-American to conduct a major American symphony orchestra, the first to have a symphony of his own performed by a leading orchestra, the first to have an opera performed by a major opera company, and the first to have an opera performed on national television. He’s known as "the dean" of African-American composers. Below is a clip from his ballet score “La Guiablesse”, a ballet commissioned by Chicago Allied Arts with a story based on a legend of Martinique.

If either of these pieces, O’Keefe’s painting, or her story hold a particular resonance with you, I’d love to hear it! Post a comment below.

Music and Art: Louis Moreau Gottschalk & Fitz Henry Lane

By Cathy Fuller   |   Wednesday, January 12, 2011   0 comments.

Pairing a piece of music with one of the pieces of art in the Museum of Fine Arts’ new Art of the Americas Wing, I’ve tried to find pairs that were created in the same year. Even when artists have vastly different sensibilities, there is inevitably a meaningful connection to be made.

The year is 1855, and the two artists come from very different circumstances. One of them was forced to stay in one place all his life; the other was famous for globetrotting.

The painter Fitz Henry Lane (1804-1865) lost the use of his legs before his second birthday. The paralysis was thought to have come from ingesting poisonous jimsonweed. He would never recover.

The musician Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) became America’s first traveling virtuoso – a pianist/composer who did an unbelievable amount of touring. He gave uncountable concerts in Europe, Central America, South America and Cuba. Sometimes called the “Chopin of the Creoles,” he worked into his music the syncopations of Louisiana and the Caribbean, creating pieces that anticipated jazz and ragtime. His music really had little to do with Chopin’s, but his spectacular control of the instrument was caricaturized by images of a wild pianist with hundreds of flying fingers.

Fitz Henry Lane was born in Gloucester. While he could have followed in his father’s footsteps as a sail maker, his artistic talents bloomed early. He went to Boston and apprenticed as a lithographer, and then came back to Gloucester, where he designed a house and lived at Duncan’s Point until his death. It’s easy to feel his deep connection to the water. The 1855 painting “New York Harbor” radiates a rich and emotional glow with noble ships and a warm sunrise. There is a kind of reverence in his vision that makes the busy place seem serene.



While Lane was sitting still, mastering his evocative, signature marine style, composer/pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk was taking the world by storm, giving concerts of his own music to adoring crowds. America’s first touring virtuoso became a sort of matinee idol, giving monster concerts, sometimes with up to 650 musicians! If you’re interested, the diaries of his travels are published and available. Notes of a Pianist: The Chronicles of a New Orleans Music Legend (Princeton University Press) tells his story masterfully. In one account he describes an unfortunate piano that he had to play in Panama: "The audience appears to be charmed, while I am playing on a cottage piano that I suspect was the product of an illicit union between a jew's-harp and a large kettle."

In 1855 Gottschalk wrote his famous piece “The Banjo”. Here are clips of Boston-based pianist Michael Lewin playing it, as well as the Mazurka “Souvenir de Lima”.

Let me know what you think! Please post a comment below.

(image courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts)

Music and Art: Homer and MacDowell

By Cathy Fuller   |   Friday, January 7, 2011   0 comments.

When the Museum of Fine Arts opened its new Art of the Americas Wing in November 2010, the vibrancy of that collection in its new space inspired thoughts about the music written at the same time as these incredible artworks were created. So I decided to experiment and look at specific pieces from the collection with music written around the same time.

This installment focuses on Winslow Homer, who was born here in Boston and spent his adolescence in Cambridge. His father disappeared to California to pan for gold, and when Homer was 19 when he began creating illustrations for sheet music covers at John H. Bufford’s lithography shop, one of which is at the bottom of this page.

At 21 he moved to New York and worked for Harper’s magazine as a “special artist” documenting the civil war.  By the end of his life, he was capturing the serenity and drama of the Maine Coast with oils.  His uncanny ability to convey the complex and stirring nature of the sea has made him one of the world’s most recognizable artists, and one of the most dramatic of those paintings is "The Fog Warning."




This painting puts you so close to the fisherman’s world, it feels as though you’re tipping the boat. The horizon threatens with fog and nightfall and the fisherman lifts his head to make the sensory calculations that a life at sea has taught him to make to get himself home.

"The Fog Warning" was finished in 1885, the same year that the American composer Edward MacDowell finished his Piano Concerto No. 1. It took two slightly desperate weeks to get it done. MacDowell’s teacher, Joachim Raff, had asked what music he’d written, and apparently, out of sheer intimidation, MacDowell blurted out that he had a piano concerto. (He hadn’t even thought about a concerto at that point!) Raff asked to see it the next Sunday. MacDowell finished only the first movement and managed to evade meeting his teacher. He put him off the next Sunday, too, and finally by the Tuesday after that, he had a piano concerto. Raff loved it, and sent MacDowell to Weimar to play it for Franz Liszt.

It’s not his finest – but it’s his first. And well worth hearing. Below is a clip from Seta Tanyel’s performance of MacDowell’s A minor Concerto with the BBC Scottish Symphony and conductor Martyn Brabbins.
 

I hope you enjoy it, and if you feel so inclined, post a comment below.

Music and Art: Cassatt and Chadwick

By Cathy Fuller   |   Monday, January 3, 2011   0 comments.

One thing I love about Boston is that there are new sources of inspiration cropping up constantly. In November 2010, the Museum of Fine Arts added to those sources by opening its new Art of the Americas Wing, and it seems like a great opportunity to pair works that hang there with music that was written at the same time.

The extraordinary painter and printmaker Mary Cassatt was born in Pennsylvania and brought up in an environment that valued travel as a key part of education. She spent most of her adult life in France where she became a friend of Edgar Degas, and where she would later exhibit with the Impressionists.

She’s popularly known for her tender and warm portraits of women and was able to evoke the depth of the bond between mothers and children with a signature style. That style was apparent also in her visions of women in society, which you can see in "In the Loge" to the left.

I love this painting for its deep browns and the luminous pearl that sits on the woman’s ear. It’s one of many by Cassatt depicting women in theater boxes, seeing and being seen in Paris. The woman is perhaps peering at someone else in another loge, while a man at the upper left has his glasses trained directly on her.

This Cassatt comes from 1878, the year that George Whitefield Chadwick wrote his String Quartet No. 2. Like Cassatt, Chadwick was interested in a realistic vision of people’s lives. He comes from what has been called the New England School of American composers.

Born in Lowell in 1854, he studied at the New England Conservatory, where he would later become Director, establishing the school with many of the German conservatory features that he knew well. He also invited many of the Boston Symphony Orchestra members to join the faculty, establishing a relationship that thrives to this day.

Here is a part of that String Quartet No. 2, with the Portland String Quartet:

Let me know what you think of these works—the painting, the music—or any thoughts on Boston’s cultural vitality.

(Image courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts)

Rescued from the Trash Heap

Tuesday, January 8, 2013   0 comments.

Watch Appraisal: 1922 Giuseppe Pedrazzini Violin on PBS. See more from Antiques Roadshow.
 

In this season's premiere of Antiques Roadshow, a gentleman brought in a violin he found that had been set out with the trash. Much to his surprise, the appraisers on the program informed him that the violin was from Cremona, Italy, home to many great violin makers in the 17th century. They estimated the value of his violin to be about $50,000. One man's trash really is another man's treasure!

Hear Managing Director Benjamin Roe discuss the find with Antiques Roadshow executive producer, Marsha Bemko.

At the end of their conversation, violinist Cecilya Arzewski performs the Prelude to the solo Partita No. 3 in E major by Johann Sebastian Bach. Arzewski is the concertmaster of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and she plays on a 1714 Petrus Gaurneri, another of the many great violin makers from the area of Cremona, Italy.

If this makes you want to run to your attic and grab that old trumpet, don’t get too excited. Most items brought in to Antiques Roadshow are estimated to be worth less than $500, but if you do have an object you think might be worth a lot, take Ms. Bemko’s advice for how to get an accurate appraisal.

"If you are seeking information on the value of one of your antique items, take it to someone who isn't interested in buying it," she said.

You can also take your find to Antiques Roadshow during the 2013 tour:

June 1 - Detroit, MI
June 8 - Jacksonville, FL
June 22 - Anaheim, CA
June 29 - Boise, ID
July 13 - Knoxville, TN
July 27 - Baton Rouge, LA
August 10 - Kansas City, MO
August 17 - Richmond, VA

For more information visit Antiques Roadshow.

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