new work for the eye and ear

by Jeffrey Hoover

Combining my music with my paintings. . . It is something that has developed over a period of many years. It's not something that I one day simply set out to do, but it is something I have grown into.

I can place the line of demarcation at my first residency at an artist colony. As a composer, I felt I needed a retreat - a brief period of time at a location where I would concentrate on nothing but composing. It was at the end of May, 1987, that I found myself a in residence as a Fellow at the Hambidge Center in Northern Georgia.

As is the custom at artist colonies, the Fellows often share their work with one another. A few of us had asked Ray Pierotti, the Executive Director, to show us some of his paintings. When I saw the paintings of a specific series - Separate Realities - I commented on the graphic score-like quality they possessed. I then learned of Ray Pierotti's background as a musician, and heard an intriguing story of how a musician became a visual artist and arts administrator.

The time at the Hambidge Center was very fruitful for me as a composer. As the residency drew to a close I made an unusual proposal to Ray Pierotti: I would project slides of his paintings during an upcoming Wind Ensemble Concert at Southwestern Michigan College where I taught, and the Wind Ensemble would perform classical improvisations based on those striking paintings. Through this, my first experience in creatively combining music with art was as a conductor. It was arranged for Ray Pierotti to have a show of his music related paintings at the college, including two of the large tapestry-like Separate Realities paintings, as well as smaller works on paper that focused on individual musical tones - one such painting devoted to the tone "G", for example. The Wind Ensemble "played his paintings," performing two of his paintings from the Separate Realities series. That practice of projecting slides during the performance for the audience to view became the model for performance of my combined music and art works, whenever practical.

The process of working with a performing ensemble, translating visual elements of the paintings into musical gestures was significant for me. I continued to experiment with improvising from paintings and other visual sources, and at various times in the future I would repeat the process with different college wind ensembles I conducted, even after I had begun to combine composition with painting.

In 1990, while I was working on my Doctorate at Texas Tech University, I had started a collaboration on a performance art piece with a doctoral student from the Theatre program. The discussions did not result in the collaborative piece hoped for, however, it did inspire me to begin working on a piece for electronic tape and dancer. After working briefly on this new piece, I found myself wanting to add a visual dimension to the work, to create an unique backdrop for the dancer. The thought came to me: "Why not combine composing and painting, joining the three disciplines involved - music, art, and dance - as tightly as possible."

Before painting the pastel paintings, I created a matrix indicating visual color relationships. This is an idea I borrowed from my work as a composer, not unlike using a matrix of pitch relationships for musical composition. What resulted from all this was The Colors of Music, a seven-movement piece for tape, and dancer. While the paintings and the music were linked, both the music and the paintings may be presented separately.

People sometimes wonder whether the music or the art comes first. It can be either way, and sometimes the work develops simultaneously. In the case of Peacock Blue and An American Toccata the music was written first, then the paintings were created. I wrestled with the idea of how to best represent the music. Would a graphic score be appropriate, or some type of freely conceived representation? I resolved this dilemma by the majority of the painting being an intuitive representation of the music, inserting a graphic score/sonic representation as an entablature on the bottom of the painting.

In 1994, I was commissioned to create a new work for solo viola. I began by composing the work. I began to have a strong visual image of three flourishes crossing a canvas, representing the three major section of the music. I sketched this image, and continued to work on the music. Later, as the music became finalized, so did a painting for French Blue. Over a period of four years, I created musical and visual sketches for a large-scale work. The piece that eventually resulted was Five Mysteries, a concerto in five movements for soprano saxophone and orchestra (or electronic tape.) This work was completed in the summer of 1997, with the paintings exhibited in a solo exhibition in September, 1997 in Milwaukee, WI at the Center for Arts and Performance. As well as Five Mysteries, The Colors of Music (seven paintings), French Blue, An American Toccata, and Peacock Blue were exhibited. A concert of my chamber music was performed, in conjunction with the opening of the exhibition. Several pieces on that concert had an accompanying painting that was exhibited.

I have led workshops and have given lectures describing the process of combining these two art forms. One especially interesting workshop was during a 1997 exhibition and concert in Milwaukee. I had the opportunity to serve as an Artist-in-Residence at Wisconsin Lutheran College, working with both music and art students and faculty.

For the Milwaukee workshop, I employed poems that had strong musical and visual imagery by the 12th-century Persian poet Rumi. I wanted to provide the artists and musicians with a common focus and place them on equal footing for the workshop. The Rumi poems provided an ideal vehicle. I located an interlinear translation of the poems, showing the poem in the original Arabic script, a phonetic transliteration of the poem (showing the sound of the poem), and an English-language translation of the poem. The visual, sonic and literary impact of the poems helped the participants, and they able to work together in teams of two, musically and visually interpreting their selected poem.

Exploring how technology could be used to execute my ideas, I have created computer artist prints to accompany music I have written. These have included Oaxaca (electroacoustic), Legend of Magic and  Berceuse (piano), and Chiaroscuro (violin).

Another question I'm sometimes asked is "Are you synaesthetic?" Although one may say I am "associative," the answer to whether I am synaesthetic is "No." To have a true synaesthetic response (central nervous system), that response would have to be medically durable. In other words, one would need to have the same response to the same stimulus each time it was presented. Although I have never been tested, my musical/visual associations often evolve, something that is not part of the medical definition of synaesthesia. That being said, interestingly enough, it is not uncommon for me when composing to have a very strong visual image I associate with specific sounds or passages of music. When talking to people about music, I will sometimes describe the music in terms of shape or visual color.

Combining the two disciplines of Music and Art is a very personal way of working for me. While the whole notion of combining music and art may seem to be very Postmodern (or very ancient), I will most likely continue to work this way in the next millennium. For me, it is a very natural thing to do. And like the beautiful paintings and illustrations on ancient music manuscripts, it is illuminating.

Reprinted from Composer NewsUpdate, Vol. 3, No. 1, January, 1999. © Jeffrey Hoover, 1999, All Rights Reserved.