Freedom to express ourselves as we choose is essential to ethics and democracy. The right to speak freely and to be heard is an indispensable part of equality. Equally indispensable is the community’s receptiveness to ideas: its willingness to listen and hear. This is a daunting challenge in the modern urbanized and suburbanized world, because most of us can never…
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Value for Friday of Week 42 in the season of Assessing
Appreciating Beauty and the Arts
“. . . our creative works carry the wisdom of the world.”
The following quotations are from the National Endowment for the Arts (United States):
- The arts matter because I learn something about people and places I would have never known otherwise. The arts make my brain and my heart stretch to make room for newness. Sometimes, parts of me are displaced and replaced by wiser stuff. And that’s a fine thing. [Victoria Hutter]
- Art matters because it illustrates the human experience—the wonder of it, the bewilderment of it, the whimsy of it, and so much more. We would not be connected so deeply without the existence of art. [Kathleen Dinsmore]
- The arts matter because they give us a mutual space where we can talk to one another about the most important things to us. [Maryrose Flanigan]
- The purpose of art is to cause a reaction and with this purpose it can create a synergy of change; change in attitudes, perceptions, and thoughts. [Catherine Brookes]
- The arts matter because without them our strong emotions, our vital voices, our move-to-the-groove energy and necessary empathy and life-affirming connectedness and tendency toward complexity might all wither from disuse . . . [Amy Stolls]
- There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones that is intrinsically artistic. [Vladimir Nabokov]
- The arts matter because we matter, and our stories matter. [Mohammed Sheriff]
- The arts matter because they help us see the world from different perspectives. They give us empathy and help us understand people, places, periods of history, and issues with which we may otherwise be unfamiliar. [Monica Waters]
- The arts matter because creativity is an infinite and enduring resource, one to draw upon in both the most joyous and the most challenging of moments. [Sarah Burford]
- The arts matter because they are the record of our civilization and the arrow pointing forward to our future. [Greg Reiner]
- Art matters because people matter, and arts events are one of the best ways to gather individuals and build communities around a shared experience. [Eleanor Billington]
- The arts matter because they help you see what’s in between – they help you think twice. Notes, chords, images, and words float within you and have the power of surfacing at any moment, to soothe, distract, entertain, or give comic relief. That’s a lovely thing and yes, it matters. [Wendy Clark]
The arts matter because they allow people to uniquely express themselves… without fear of giving a wrong answer. [Lauren Tuzzolino]
This subject boasts a wealth of narratives, most of them true, if unembellished by the artist. The character of artists renders fiction unnecessary. In the technical section, below, is an exploration of musical intelligence, one of Gardner’s nine kinds of identified intelligence.
Arguably, music is the most spiritual art form, because it is unbounded by the physical world in the same way as the visual and bodily-kinesthetic arts are. Like other arts, music reaches deep into subconscious, often serving as opening into joy or an outlet for suffering.
Music processing in the brain is being mapped. The frontal and temporal lobes of the cerebral cortex are highly involved in music listening. Frontal-temporal-cerebellar beta neural circuits appear to be related to auditory-motor rhythm learning. Several cortical regions appear to be selective for music. The orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala appear to respond to the flow of tension and resolution in music. On the dominant side of the brain, an area of the frontal cortex called “Broca’s area supports enhanced visuospatial cognition in orchestral musicians”. Consonance, dissonance and harmony generate activity in the brainstem but not exclusively. The neural basis for music perception is under study.
Oliver Sacks famously underwent fMRI imaging while listening to Bach’s Mass in B Minor, then to Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis: the results confirmed his strong subjective preference for Bach. EEG technology can also be used to track emotional responses during music listening. “Formal musical training seems to have a domain-general, but modality-specific beneficial effect on selective attention.” A three-channel model has been developed, which has yielded insights into why “music directly affects the cognitive system and leads to improved brain efficiency through well-defined mechanisms”. Some research suggests that “nonmusical associations with music training are limited to measures of intellectual ability and their correlates”.
Musical intelligence is associated with other forms of intelligence, and abilities. “Producing and perceiving music engage a wide range of sensorimotor, cognitive, and emotional processes.” “Cognitive Control in Auditory Working Memory Is Enhanced in Musicians”. “. . . musicians (have been) found to attain significantly higher spatial test scores than nonmusicians. . .” “Musical abilities are known to be associated with factors like intelligence, training, and sex”. “ . . . cognitive processes such as musical input analysis, decision making, and output monitoring are independent of general intellectual status.” Perhaps this partly explains why music education of young people is so popular.
Real
True Narratives
General histories:
- Penelope J.E. Davies, et. al., Jansen’s History of Art:The Western Tradition (Prentice Hall, 2006).
- Editors of Phaidon, 30,000 Years of Art: The Story of Human Creativity Across Time and Space (Phaidon Press, 2007).
- Fred S. Kleiner and Christin J. Mamiya, Gardner's Art Through the Ages : The Western Perspective (Wadsworth Publishing, 2004).
- Marilyn Stokstad and Michael Cothren, Art History (Prentice Hall, 2010).
- Harold North Fowler, A History of Sculpture (MacMillan, 1916).
- Angelika Taschen, Sculpture: From Antiquity to Present Day (Taschen, 2010).
- Herbert Read, Modern Sculpture: A Concise History (Thames & Hudson, 1985).
- Andrew Causey, Sculpture Since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 1998).
- Penelope Curtis, Sculpture 1900-1945 (Oxford University Press, 1999).
- Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Oxford University Press, 2004).
- Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford University Press, 2005).
- Ben Ratliff, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty (Farrar, 2016): twenty essays that distill popular music.
- Jonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar, eds., Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop From Elvis to Jay Z (The Library of America, 2017). See a review here.
- Nicholas Fox Weber, The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009): “As conceived by Walter Gropius, then a lieutenant in the World War I German Army, (Bauhaus) was meant to reconcile beauty, simplicity, utility and mass production — a radical departure from the prevailing decorative elaborations.”
- Hisham Matar, A Month in Siena (Random House, 2019): “After three years spent writing about his crucial return visit to Libya, he takes himself to Siena to do nothing but look at pictures painted between the 13th and 15th centuries.”
Personal histories:
- Andrew Motion, Ways of Life: On Places, Painters and Poets (Faber & Faber, 2008).
- Rudolf Wittkower and Margot Wittkower, Born Under Saturn:The Character and Conduct of Artists (NYRB Classics, 2006).
- Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment (Yale University Press, 1981).
- Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists (Oxford University Press, 2008).
- William Wallace, Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man, and His Times (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
- Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (Abrams, 2010).
- Justin Spring, The Gourmands’ Way: Six Americans in Paris and the Birth of a New Gastronomy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017): “One critic’s often harsh take on a generation of influential food writers.”
- Ingrid Rowland and Noah Charney, The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art (W.W. Norton & Company, 2017): “He was capable of narrative embellishment when the facts were not sufficiently dramatic.”
- Guy Trebay, Do Something: Coming of Age Amid the Glitter and Doom of ’70s New York (Knopf, 2024): “Guy Trebay, a cultural critic and a reporter for the Style section of The New York Times, happens to be a sensualist so native to the task that his expertly perfumed memoir might easily have been sponsored by Guerlain.”
Art and the person:
- Eric Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain from Vienna 1900 to the Present (Random House, 2012).
On the power of art and beauty:
- Jack Lowery, It Was Vulgar & It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic (Bold Type, 2022), “tells the story of the art collectives whose work became the iconography of a movement.”
On art and culture, through film:
- Noah Isenberg, We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie (W.W. Norton & Company, 2017). “’I stick my neck out for nobody,’” said Bogart’s iconic character; then he did.
- Glenn Frankcl, High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic (Doubleday, 2017). “ . . . a profile in collective cowardice”, based on the Red Scare of the 1950s.
The beauty of art, illustrated:
- Abelardo Morell, Flowers for Lisa: A Delirium of Photographic Invention (Abrams, 2018): this book of photographs and commentary arose out of a gift the author gave to his wife.
Technical and Analytical Readings
Technical journals:
- Journal of Art Histiography
- Journal of the National Art Education Association
- Arts Journal
- Journal of Art & Design Education
- Sculpture Journal
- Leiden Journal of Pottery Studies
- Journal of Musicology
- International Journal of Musicology
- Journal of Musicological Research
- Journal of Music Theory
- Journal of Culinary Science & Technology
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
Novels:
- Aysegul Savas, White on White: A Novel (Riverhead Books, 2021): “suggests that art reflects the spirit, that even without our knowledge, changes in the way we express ourselves mirror the condition of our souls.”
Poetry
Poems:
- John Keats, “Endymion” (“A Thing of Beauty”)
- John Keats, “Sonnet to a Friend Who Sent Me Some Roses”
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
Arthur Rubinstein was a classical pianist known for his lyrical style. “One of the greatest Chopin interpreters of his time, his warmly outgoing and the beneficent lyricism of his phrasing, 'are expressed in tones of richest and most gorgeous hues.'” “. . . Rubinstein was a polyglot raconteur and indefatigable bon vivant who lived to perform; instead of a fire-breathing dynamo, Rubinstein was an elegant virtuoso, his mature playing a spontaneous balance of color, lyricism and verve, with a rich, warm tone . . .” A performance review stated: “Whether it was Brahms, Chopin or modernist Spaniards, everything was carried by the force of a powerful lyrical imagination. With Rubinstein, the nobility and vitality of emotion is the finest spiritual tool there is.” In this, his playing expressed the beauty and emotional depth of music, which perhaps is the essence of its vitality. Here is a link to his playlists.
Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky composed a set of musical impressions, “Pictures at an Exhibition”, after attending an art exhibit. During the nearly three weeks in which he was composing the work, “Mussorgsky exulted: ‘Ideas, melodies, come to me of their own accord. Like roast pigeons in the story, I gorge and gorge and over-eat myself. I can hardly manage to put it all down on paper fast enough.’ The fevered inspiration was activated by a posthumous exhibit in 1874 of watercolors and drawings by the composer’s dear friend, Victor Hartmann, who had died suddenly the previous year at the age of 39. Mussorgsky’s enthusiastic and reverent homage to Hartmann is a series of musical depictions of ten of the artist’s canvasses, all of which hang as vividly in aural space as their visual progenitors occupied physical space.” “Not just music about an art museum, ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ is music about friendship. It mourns and celebrates a friend of Mussorgsky’s, tells a story about memory, and works to stir up Russian pride, all under the guise of music about paintings.” Top performances on piano version (1874) (approx. 30-35’) (list of recorded performances) are by Richter in 1956, Pletnev in 1991, Tsujii in 2010, Kobrin in 2017, Paremsky in 2018, Abduraimov in 2021, Campanella in 2021, and Radoslavov in 2023.
Maurice Ravel scored the composition for orchestra at the urging of conductor Serge Koussevitzky, transforming it into “shimmering orchestral technicolor” (1922) (approx. 34-36’) (list of recorded performances). Leopold Stokowski also orchestrated the work (1939) (approx. 25-28’) (performances conducted by Stokowski, Serebrier and Kazuki). The rock group Emerson, Lake and Palmer has adapted, performed and recorded it. Best recorded performances of Ravel’s orchestral version (1922) (approx. 30-37;) are by Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Kubelik) in 1951; Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Reiner) in1957; Philadelphia Orchestra (Ormandy) in 1966; Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra (Mehta) in 1967; St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (Slatkin) in 1975; Philadelphia Orchestra (Muti) in 1979 ***; Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Solti) in 1991; National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine (Kuchar) in 2001; and Mariinsky Orchestra (Gergiev) in 2014.
George Frideric Händel, Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, HWV 76 (1739) (approx. 47-55’) (text) (list of recorded performances) (text of Dryden’s poem): “For nearly twenty years beginning in 1683, the musicians of London held special celebrations on November 22, the feast day of St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music. Following a church service, there would be a banquet and a performance of a new ode to St. Cecilia, which would praise the power of music.” “The cantata’s text is a setting of a 1687 poem by John Dryden based on the Pythagorean theory of harmonia mundi, linking the movement and origin of the celestial bodies to music. The cantata’s opening chorus, From harmony, from heavenly harmony, is a bright and joyful celebration of the power of music.” Top recorded performances are by: Harper & Pears (Britten) in 1967; Lott & Rolfe Johnson (Pinnock) in 1985 ***; Kermes & Hartinger (Neumann) in 2008; and Crowe & Croft (Minkowski) in 2009.
Henry Purcell celebrated the same story and idea with “Hail! Bright Cecilia”, Z. 328 (1692) (approx. 52-58’) (text) (list of recorded performances). Top recorded performances are by Monteverdi Choir & English Baroque Soloists (Gardiner) in 1983; Taverner Choir, Consort & Players (Parrott) in 1985; and Les Musiciens de Lourve (Minkowski) in 2009.
Other compositions inspired by the arts:
- Tan Dun, Eight Memories in Watercolor, Op. 1 (1978) (approx. 15-17’). Of the work, the composer states: “I had just moved from Hunan to Beijing. At that time, the Cultural Revolution had just ended. China had just begun to open up. At the same time that I was learning Western classical and modern music, I was also very homesick, and I missed the memories and folk songs of my youth. Therefore, I wrote my first piano composition. It was the journal of my homesickness.”
- Ralph Vaughan Williams, Serenade to Music (choral version) (1938) (approx. 13’) (lyrics) (list of recorded performances); orchestral version (1938) (approx. 12’) (list of recorded performances): “The words used in the piece come from Act V of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, a romantic scene where the lovers sit under the stars and become enraptured by the music of the spheres.”
- Claudio Monteverdi, L’Orfeo (1607) (approx. 100-120’) (libretto) (list of recorded performances) is about the power of music. Performances are conducted by Agnew, Harnoncourt, Savall, and Savall.
- Qigang Chen, Enchantements oublies (Forgotten Enchantments), for large string orchestra, harp, piano, celesta, timpani & percussion (2004) (approx. 26’). Chen explains: “Refined beauty often shows too many traces of deliberate planning and, on close inspection, signs of deception and falseness. The most powerful beauty is of course the least processed: that is, nature.”
- Raga Tilang originated as a raag in Hindustani classical music and has been adopted as a Carnatic classical ragam. Usually it is performed at night. Performances are by S.D. Batish, Amjad Ali Khan and unnamed artists.
- Margaret Brouwer, Rhapsody, Concerto for Orchestra (2009, rev. 2021) (approx. 14’): “The composer . . . describes it as a celebration of the virtuosity of which orchestras are capable.”
Franz Schubert is widely known as history’s greatest lieder composer. These German art songs have been widely recorded. Aside from Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s recordings, some of the greatest albums of Schubert lieder are:
- Carolyn Sampson & Joseph Middleton, “Elysium – A Schubert Recital” (2023) (68’)
- Christian Gerhaher & Gerold Huber, “Nachtviolen” (2014) (77’)
- Matthias Goerne & Ingo Metzmacher, “Heliopolis” (2009) (72’)
- Ian Bostridge & Julius Drake, “Schubert – 25 Lieder” (2005) (79’)
- Bryn Terfel & Malcolm Martineau, “An die Musik” (1993) (70’)
- Gundula Janowitz & Irwin Gage, “Schubert Lieder” (1972) (124’)
- Elisabeth Schwarzkopf & Edwin Fischer, “Schubert Song Recital” (1953) (42’)
Broadway shows about Broadway shows and other musical arts
- 42nd Street (1979) (48’): “In New York City in 1933, dance director Andy Lee is auditioning kids for the chorus of a new show . . .”
- A Chorus Line (1974) (51’): “The characters . . . are, for the most part, based upon the lives and experiences of Broadway dancers.”
- Dreamgirls (1981) (47’) “is the story of three black singers . . . who began as a group called the Dreamettes. . . Little do they know of the hard, competitive world of show business.”
- Sunday in the Park with George (1983) (77’) “is about a painter, George, who is creating a painting inspired by characters he encounters on his Sunday strolls in the park. Sondheim created a story from a real painting called A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by late 19th century French painter George Seurat, basing his fictional characters on the ones in the painting.”
Albums:
- Diana Baroni, Ronald Martin Alonso & Rafael Guel Frias, “Mujeres” (2023) (46’) is an album about women in the arts.
- Jonathan Tetelman, “The Great Puccini” (2023) (54’) is an exceptionally beautiful album of Puccini arias.
- Alessandro Fisher & Anna Tilbrook, “A Gardener’s World - Flowers in Song” (2024) (59’)
Music: songs and other short pieces
- Boston Modern Orchestra Project, “To Music” (John Corigliano, composer)
- Franz Schubert (composer), “An die Musik” (To Music), D. 547 (1817) (lyrics)
- Robert Schumann (composer), "Die Lotosblume" (The Lotus Flower) (lyrics)
Visual Arts
- Marc Chagall, The Concert (1957)
- Chaim Soutine, Little Pastry Cook (1921)
- Georges Braque, Musical Instruments (1908)
- Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Ballet Dancers (1885)
- Edgar Degas, Two Dancers Entering the Stage (1877)
- Claude Monet, Monet's Garden in Argenteuil Sun (1873)
- Jan Vermeer, The Art of Painting (c. 1665-68)
- Rembrandt van Rijn, Musical Allegory (1626)
Film and Stage
- Singin’ in the Rain exemplifies the art of musical theatre.
- An American in Paris is in the same vein.
- Fantasia, encouraging music appreciation
- L’Atalante: . . . the power of L'Atalanteis “in the way the camera captures the world in rich, dreamy images, steeping the audience in a viewpoint both innocent and stark.”
- Chinatown, a study in the art of film making
