Alexander Korosteloff
How I connected Painting and Music. Lecture for Children.
COLORED SURFACE AND LINE.
Once, when looking at a picture with different colored stains, and sharp color transitions and lines, I thought: "If we imagine this picture sounding, how to read it, in what order? Every spectator sees in his own way. What makes the eye to move just like this, not like that? Can we make the eye of anybody in the same way in order to all that the painter wanted to say can be seen and heard correctly? As you know, music sounds in consecutive order". I understood that it is quite impossible to do it in the plane picture, if we give a special order of reading. This is how the lining composition of many-colored stains was born, which are to be read from left to right like a book text. Thus, we can write down any state of ours by color, and they can understand us.
So, the first step was made: the surface was separated from the line; in case of the stain, its contours began to be considered separate from it itself.
SURFACE
EDGE
COLOR AND SOUND.
It is good knowledge in physics what helped me to connect the colored surface within the stain with sound. I saw that each component of color is analogous to some component of sound, namely:
1. Brightness of color is analogous to sound volume.
2. Color intensity (I. e. degree of its difference from grey) is analogous to cleanness of sound (I. e. degree of its difference from noise).
3. Chromaticity is analogous to pitch of tone (frequency of sound).
4. Character of the surface is analogous to timbre.
The first point is clear to everybody. The lighter, the louder. Black is analogue of silence. We draw the blinds, turn off the light and close our eyes when we want to have a rest. It is possible to invent such interior for a bedroom: black furniture, black walls, and black bed-clothes.
BLACK SILENCE
On the second point. Try to select the note for noise of a street or waterfall. It cannot be a success because every note presents in equal quantity in noise, like every color does in grey. Let us memorize: noise is not colored, but grey.
GREY NOISE
Let me explain the third and the fourth points. Let us suppose that sound and electric oscillations are the same. Then, if we imagine a long piano, then, moving from one octave to another to the right, we can come to a visible octave of the spectrum the rainbow, known to everybody. Thus, we can know what color corresponds to each note. But you may say, We cannot hear there! It is true. We cannot hear because our ears are too large. Mice have smaller ears; they can hear ultrasound, so the piano for them must be longer to the right. Mosquitoes can hear yet righter, bacterium yet more righter. You may play a melody of your favorite song for them and they may like it, but you must play in their octave. On the contrary, for elephants you must play in infra-sound, which is to the left so that we cannot hear it.
COLORED NOTES
But sound of a clarinet, for instance, differs from sound of a trumpet even if they are same pitch. They are different timbres. In color, they are different surfaces: for instance, a surface of red velvet and a surface of red copper. Wooden wind-instruments and copper ones sound and look differently. A surface, as well as a timbre, is characterized by mixing something other to it, just as mixing seasonings in cookery. It changes that is getting into our eyes and ears, as the seasonings change taste of that is getting into our mouth.
(For example, a shining surface is characterized by mixing white. On the contrary, there is nothing mixed to a mat surface. This surface is not dynamic. I have to notice that dynamic surfaces emphasize relief and non-dynamic ones smooth it. Thus, shining oil shows up muscles of a body-builder and powder hides wrinkles. Character of a surface has much influence on us. A lit surface evokes high spirits, like a sunny day; offer a shower or a basin, a skin of your face is semi-transparent and fresh so hurry up to be photographed; in a new plaster, chemical processes have not end yet and the walls shine after repairs because of that. If you want to get a new impression, change the surface! Character of a surface is a means of artist. You may invent illuminating cosmetics, such as in pictures by Rembrandt, or create a surface changing its color depending on angle of vision, such as painter Agam has. You may make encaustic that is waxen portraits, reproducing mans semi-transparent skin better than oil-paint, and may create an impression of being just washed. And so on. All these examples show how one can get a new impression by chanding only character of a surface, not by putting over any picture.)
COPPER RING
And what about contours of the stain? I had to return to the line and to try how it sounds.
LINE AND SOUND.
It is evident that a straight line corresponds to invariable frequency of sound and its turning to change of frequency. The sharper is the turn, the more is change; a non-fixed turn means slow change (mewing by a cat), fixed one sharp change.
Maximal change of direction of a straight line is a right-angle turn; in music it must be half-octave change. Such interval is called a fourth. In color, it corresponds to so call complementary colors, for instance to red and green. Barking by a dog after its growling we can represent as a fourth, dogs bark by fourths.
They wake soldiers by a fourth, too. The anthem of Russia begins from a fourth, as well. But a line has one more quality, except turn. It is its rhythm. Equality of parts evokes more powerful impression, than inequality, where one is stronger than oddness. As an example, we can take rhythms of any March and waltz.
And not only! If to imagine the segments so short that they are drawing to dots, we can get some rhythm of accents, to which we come across everywhere. It can be windows of a building, leaves of a tree, as well as books on a shelf. Just as surface is a means of an artist, a line is means of a drawer. One can reproduce expression and inward state only by lines. (Let us remember pictures of Van Gogh and Jackson Pollock.) Smooth wavy lines do for a bedroom (a smooth turn), and contours of a square for putting a firm, certain full stop in the end of a sentence (a maximal fixed turn, honesty and equality). Malevich signed his works just by a small black square. Well, let us finish, too.
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