Boulez series

The first time I envisioned putting Pierre Boulez’s music into pictorial form was when he conducted “Rituel”, composed after the death of his composer friend Bruno Maderna. That was during the 1984 Festival Boulez in Los Angeles. At the time I pictured a 20 ft. canvas freezing the sounds of one of “rituel’s” fifteen sections, a vision that has not as yet materialized. My wish to work with Boulez’s music was rekindled at a marvelous performance of “Le Marteau Sans Maître” which he conducted in April of 1987 in Los Angeles.

I had met Boulez in Chile some thirty years ago at a performance of the play Cristobal Colón by Paul Claudet, with music by Darius Milhaud. A small group of us were selected from the choir of the University of Chile to accompany the orchestra, which was directed by Boulez. He was not well known yet, but very much appreciated by those of us in the new musical avant garde movement in Chile. Those were days of great intellectual and artistic ferment in my country.

I told myself that the reason I wanted to represent the sounds of Le Marteau was to see what would happen to my painting if I tried to follow someone else’s voice. In retrospect I think that I was also trying, through Boulez, to re-capture my own earlier involvement with music.

It was after I completed the series and some artist friends learned about them, that I began to find out about the many attempts by other painters to depict music. I was surprised, for example, to find in one of Kandinsky’s essays, Point and Line to Plane, a detailed description of the graphic equivalents of sound. His illustrations of certain melodic lines resemble greatly the ones I arrived at for the flute, viola and voice of Le Marteau. Another painter of the Bauhaus School, Paul Klee, who was himself a competent musician, was initially suspicious of any attempt to represent music graphically. He therefore kept his music away from his paintings and his thoughts about painting. With his move away from representation and his venture into what he came to call “absolute painting”, Klee began to think of painting as capable of attaining something of the condition of music. He then began to incorporate music into the mainstream of his professional life and thought. Klee did many paintings based on the music of Mozart. The characteristic whimsy and playfulness of Klee’s paintings is probably based on the more delicate forms of charm and humor of Mozart’s instrumental compositions.

During a lecture of creativity Pierre Boulez gave in Los Angeles, he was asked which composers had inspired him the most. To the musicologists’ surprise, Boulez replied, “The paintings and writings of Paul Klee”. He then elaborated on the value of stepping out of one’s own artistic realm to gain insight from other art forms. During that lecture Boulez also stated that a composer is a thief. So is the poet, the painter and anyone involved in putting things together in a new way. Boulez was sanctioning our need to take from each other to discover something of us in it and make that something our own.

When I approached him with my idea of bringing some of his music into paintings he was as encouraging, freeing and generous as René Char, the poet from whom he took inspiration from for “Le Marteau sans Maître”, was with him when Boulez wrote him about the wish to work with the poems by that title. I hoped that I would discover something new about my work if I tried, as I did, to use Le Marteau and Boulez’s guidance. I have since been surprised that people respond to the musicality of the paintings, even when they don’t know the source. I am even more surprised when they say these paintings are not that different from my other work. This is especially puzzling since my experience working from Boulez’s music has been in many respects quite different from the way I work when I just follow myself.

To start with, I heard the music several times and studied the score to do justice to what Boulez had done. Le Marteau began to reveal itself to me in a new way and I began to understand and appreciate more fully Boulez’s compositional process. In my other paintings I work on figure and background simultaneously, but in these works I deliberately prepared the background and placed the musical events “on top”, just as Klee did in some of his small paintings. At times I felt constrained by the music and wanted to expand the visual image, forgetting the music. At other times I was quite content to just do it justice. That the paintings are not that different than my other work, may indicated that what we may think we have stolen was in us all the time.

Why did I choose Boulez? The choice itself may have been prompted by my wish to find again what was also in me. In any event, I have not had to face these dilemmas before. The contact with the music wavered as a result of the conflict between the requirements of the music and those of the painting, which seemed at times to want something else. This may be reflected in the relative fidelity of each of the paintings with the respective musical movement. I do not mean to give the impression that it was a painful struggle. On the contrary, after finishing Le Marteau Series I began and finished a painting based on Boulez’s Second Sonata and the music still lingers in me.

“Le Marteau sans Maître” is based on three cycles of poems: “L’artisanat furieux”, with three movements; “Bourreau de solitude”, with four movements, and “Bel edifice et les pressentiments”, with two movements. Boulez does not make life easy for the listener when he alternates the order of these movements. In addition, some movements are commentaries or reflections on the poems and they take place before and after the movements that contain the poems. I have followed Boulez’s order for the paintings.

Following are the nine movements by Boulez as they appear in the score:

I Avant “l’artisanat furieux”
II Commentaire I de “bourreaux de solitude”
III “L’artisanat furieux”
IV Commentaire II de “bourreaux de solitude”
V “Bel édifice et les pressentiments”, version première
VI “Bourreaux de solitude”
VII Apres “L’artisanat furieux”
VIII Commentaire III de “bourreaux de solitude”
IX “Bel édifice et les pressentiments”, double

Just as it is not necessary to have read or understand René Char’s poems to appreciate and enjoy Boulez’s music, it is not necessary to listen to Boulez’s music to respond to the paintings based on it. I believe that during the creative process work eventually becomes independent of its sources, acquiring a new and independent life. It also becomes separate and independent from us, the creators. And that is a constant source of amazement to me.

Santa Monica, CA. Oct. 1987