Contemporary Art Flashcards
Contemporary Art
Cross 1998
Engages in an extended comparison between Cubism as represented by Picasso’s drawing Nude (1910) and the Symphonies for Wind Instruments (1920) in exploring Stravinsky’s block forms.
• Visual rhythm produced by large-scale repetition and the “local interplay of angles”, similar to the Symphonies, which differentiates between the durational groupings of blocks and the smaller-scale organisation of repeating units within blocks
o Simple basic elements that intersect and repeat, though never without variation; comparable with the three tempi of the Symphonies that intersect in the ratio 2:3:4 to create a pattern of repeating shapes
o Extreme choices of texture paralleling extreme contrasts of light and shade
o Picasso as moving between individually characterised planes as Stravinsky moves between musical blocks
o Functionally bold oppositions underpinned by large-scale continuity
• Idea of the Symphonies having a “rough” character deriving from its collage-like composition process which resulted in blocks of music being interrupted and fractured, a character shared with Picasso’s charcoal drawing
o “Roughness” as found also in extremes of instrument register e.g. the high solo bassoon at the beginning of the Rite, the introduction of ‘low’ influences from jazz and folk music in the form of “squeaky upper partials in high clarinets” etc., in the handling of melodic and harmonic construction, a kind of “plain-speaking”
• Just as writers on Picasso’s Cubism stressed its continuity with realism in its dialogue between the subject matter and its abstract representation, the Symphonies presents “images” such as folk-like melodies, chorale fragments, a fanfare etc. that are ultimately reabsorbed into the abstraction
Contemporary Art
Watkins 1994
Stravinsky met Picasso later but apparently it was clear that Stravinsky was aware of Cubism as early as 1912-14 through encounters with leading artists and association with Cocteau and Diaghilev; attempts to relate Stravinsky’s music to Cubism date from the premières of his works
o E.g. Maurice Touchard (1913) describing the Rite’s “harmonic excesses… a kind of musical Cubism”
o More common to connect the two via primitivism esp. the strong colours and “rawness” of Fauvism, a precursor of Cubism e.g. Cocteau (1926): “When all is said and done, the “Sacre” is still a “Fauvist” work, an organised “Fauvist work”
