Category: Uncategorized

If you Google “music” there are over 4.8 billion results and those results vary from internet radio sites to random YouTube clips to intellectual discussions on music theory to debates on whether Justin Beiber or Justin Timberlake is hotter. Most of those results would be labeled as music by the average listener, but when it comes to pieces which challenge the commonplace definition of music, what distinguishes music from noise?

The first line of the music Wikipedia page reads “Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence”. Webster provides five definitions, the most notable defining music as “the science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity”. Much of classical and modern music easily fulfills these requirements but what is to be done in the unique case of John Cage’s 4’33”?

4’33” is a deliberate absence of sound requiring nothing more of the performer than to be present for four minutes and thirty three seconds as the audience is forced to listen to the sounds of the environment surrounding them. Is this music? The intention is there, John Cage is a highly respected modern composer and music theorist. The piece does use sound and silence, which is the conventional medium of music, in a highly unconventional way. When we ask, “Is this music?” we are debating whether the squeak of a chair during a performance is disruptive or part of the live musical experience.

To John Cage “there is no noise, only sound” however the distinction between music and noise is defined uniquely from person to person based upon cultural norms and personal experiences with sound within a musical context. The qualifications for a collection of sounds to be considered music vary greatly throughout the world and the relativist, post-modern viewpoint is that there is not one universal concept defining what is and what is not music.

During my Musicology class freshmen year we were taken to the pond and told to listen to the music of the environment, our very own 4’33” experience. In that context; the birds chirping, the muffled coughing, and the cars honking were part of a musical experience and united to create music. Yet, normally I just hear it all as noise pollution. Perhaps John Cage is right and the noises of the world are secretly creating beautiful harmonies which one must simply listen for to hear the music. For me, music is in the ear of the beholder and I am going to keep my ears open.

These are stunning portraits of some of the world’s most remote tribes before they pass away.

Amazing photography.

I am Telugu, an Indian sub-lingustic/ethnic group. It’s funny, I remember a few years ago, going to a Telugu cultural event and the MC telling the audience that according to anthropological and scientific studies, Telugu was going to die out in about a hundred or so years and I remember being stunned at that fact.

Because I’ve lived in so many places, I feel uncomfortable labeling myself one specific term or narrowing my identity down to one culture but Telugu was the exception. I’ve never quite had a home but Telugu was as close as it got and the idea of the culture and language I grew up with having a concrete expiration date haunts me, the way it’s troubling to accept your aging parents will soon die, pass away, cease to exist, and those you love will no longer have the ability to get to know them the way you did.

Though these tribes are unique and entirely different than the predicament Telugu people are in, I can’t help but feel solidarity. The sorrow of our situation, however, is bittersweet because it is reassuring and humbling to realize that cultures will come and go but civilization will march on.

We are all but a mote of dust, suspended on a sunbeam.

Piet Mondrian: a name associated with straight lines and primary colors, whose famous compositions many would consider as the epitome of abstract art. Today we can buy Mondrian furniture, tablecloths, T-shirts – you name it. He’s widely considered one of the most important somewhat contemporary painters in the Dutch tradition. But he didn’t always work with the vigorous control and machine-like technique of his later years, which has been brought to attention by the Amsterdam Museum’s current exhibition of the artist’s early work.

 

Mondrian had his beginnings in the Impressionist era, resulting in paintings that could be likened to Van Gogh or Cezanne. His colors were bold, his strokes gestural – yet even here we can see a kind of foreshadowing in his stress on vertical and horizontal lines that segment the representational composition, as well as the use of primary colors.

But he didn’t focus on integrated landscapes for very long, quickly turning to the singular tree for inspiration. Here the use of color is still based on dramatic contrast between complementaries like blue and orange, and the negative space of the tree becomes the central motif of this time period for the artist.

Even without bold colors, we can see that ordered segmentation of space within the web of branches is clearly what drives each painting. These interior pockets begin to look geometricized, imposing what is still clearly a tree onto a suggested framework that shows the beginnings of a grid-like format.

And that’s about the last we see of real trees from Mondrian. His work continues to evolve (or devolve, depending on your point of view) by way of breaking down the composition into shapes that look more and more geometric. Curved, black lines suggesting organic form delineate most of these color swatches, but those on the outskirts of the canvas are allowed to bleed and blend into one another.

It is here that any semblance to natural representation is lost, and Mondrian’s paintings begin to look decidedly abstract. The majority of lines have been straightened out, and each canvas is made up of variations on two or three central colors. Yet these compositions are still dynamic, coming into focus towards the center of the almost-grid, and a sense of space is apparent.

The last few changes that had to occur before he’d reach the most “Mondrian-esque” paintings happen surprisingly slowly. First was the introduction of a complete grid made up of only vertical and horizontal lines containing quadrilaterals in solid colors:

Followed by the disappearance of any color besides red, blue, yellow, black, white, and grey.

This change was further constricted by the use of primary colors for squares, black for the lines that separated them, and white for seemingly “empty” boxes in the composition. It is here that Mondrian reaches his most well known form in the search for the perfect abstraction.

 

Further development resulted in more lines and boxes of color that didn’t have to be surrounded by black.

The last painting created by the artist marked a proportionally huge jump in this fundamental structure that had become his bread and butter. The black lines that had functioned as the spine of each painting were finally omitted in favor of colors differentiated only by the contrast between adjacent squares.

And thus, we have the evolution from natural representation to purely abstract form, demonstrated by a collection of paintings that represent the real evolution of Mondrian’s perception. While it can be said that his work grew more visually simple as his ideas developed, it was a necessary transition as well as the only path to painting accurate generalities rather than specific gestures. By breaking down each composition into its most basic elements of line and color, Mondrian strove to make work that would be understood by everyone, whether they knew why they “got it” or not. This evolution was also representative of his ideas that modern man would become more and more disconnected from nature, something as obvious in today’s society as it was in his paintings. Regardless of at what stage his work was most interesting to look at, it must be said that he clearly wasn’t wrong in his understanding of simplification as abstraction, nor of the logical connections that take place inside the human mind.