Canaries in the Void
Beckett, Rothko and Caspar David Friedrich
I am thinking about …
the thrilling challenges and significance of music writing. Uncovering creative layers, lost histories, and new concepts for the reader/listener/audience strikes me as both compelling and necessary. By no means such a writer myself (I am more a collector), I thoroughly enjoy these long articles (or long reads as they are called in many publications), which deserve settling down for a while.
It is this kind of writing that wards off algorithms and influencers. It carves out a space where time (and content) matters in a different way. It offers a break, and a deep dive, sidestepping the competitive side of culture, the inflation of 5 star reviews combined with empty, overly excited cries of self serving enthusiasm. And it is an art form in itself.
I am looking at…
a canary. In 1969 the American writer Kurt Vonnegut wrote1:
I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts was. The best thing I could come up with was what I call the canary in the coal mine theory of the arts. This theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that there is any danger whatsoever.
and I cannot get this picture out of my head. However, I feel that artists are more robust than many so-called ‘robust’ types, as they pick themselves up again and again, even after purposefully deprived of oxygen (again and again), and then turn the collapse into an art performance and political stance. Which gives hope.
I am reading …
Florian Illies new book ‘Zauber der Stille’ (the Magic of Silence), about Caspar David Friedrich and published to coincide with the artist’s 250th birthday, which is also celebrated with various exhibitions around Germany (check out this curated online portal). It is quite an untamed journey through time to the man who basically invented wistful yearning for us Germans, though Goethe apparently was so enraged by the melancholy of many of Friedrich’s paintings that he wanted to smash them on the edge of a table.
I was intrigued by how Illies links Friedrich’s life and art to past and present artistic developments, and I especially loved reading about the connection (drawn by many art historians) between the Romantic artist and the abstract painter Mark Rothko, and his surprising influence on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
In 1936, Samuel Beckett, on a six-month tour of Germany, saw Two Men gazing at the Moon. Nearly 40 years later, in 1975, the writer returned to Berlin for the rehearsals of his play Waiting for Godot at the Schiller-Theater. Visiting the National Gallery, and standing in front of Friedrich’s Man and Woman contemplating the Moon Beckett revealed to his friend, the American theatre critic Ruby Cohn: “This was the source of ‘Waiting for Godot,’ you know.2
When working on his painting Monk by the Sea, Friedrich had initially dotted the horizon with boats, but later painted them out, leaving the scene empty. The lack of imagery confused many of his contemporaries but the painting in its boundlessness (Heinrich von Kleist) was in many aspects ahead of its time. Though Rothko consistently rejected comparisons between his work and landscapes, his abstract colour skyscapes, with their evocation of emptiness and call to contemplate the boundless, puts them quite convincingly in the same tradition as Friedrich's.
In his large, floating rectangles of colour, which seem to envelop the spectator, Rothko maybe even puts the viewer in the position of the monk, and presents us with only the dazzling void.
I am listening …
to Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel for soprano, alto, mixed choir and instruments, which he wrote for the meditation room of the Menil Foundation in Houston/Texas in 1971.
The room contains 14 large paintings by Rothko in red, black and purple tones To a large degree, my choice of instruments (in terms of forces used, balance and timbre) was affected by the space of the chapel as well as the paintings. I wanted the music … to permeate the whole octagonalshaped room and not be heard from a certain distance. (Feldman)
Listen to it live in London on the 5th May, performed by the fantastic Manchester Collective, who always come up with the most imaginary programming, and the equally brilliant Sansara chamber choir. They will also perform three world premiers by Isobel Waller-Bridge, Edmund Finnis and Katherine Balch, plus music by Pärt, Mazzoli and Saariaho.
Till next time,
Kirsten
As part of an address to the American Physical Society published as “Physicist, Heal Thyself” in the Chicago Tribune Magazine in 1969.
The painting Two men gazing at the Moon is very similar to the later Man and Woman contemplating the Moon (c. 1824) in the Nationalgalerie, that Beckett may have confused the two versions fourty years later in Berlin.