Painting from Music
Esther Williams, Art and Music
In her painting, Mozartiana, Esther Williams has used partial images of a musical instrument and a musical score behind a beautiful arrangement of flowers, all painted in her lyrical style, to suggest to the viewer the beauty of a Mozart composition, which can logically be assumed to be a piano sonata. Williams has used color, shape, juxtaposition, contrast—in other words, the whole vocabulary of her artistic medium—to create a painting that is beautiful to behold, and that also serves as a memorial to Mozart. When viewing the painting, there is no actual music present, but only a suggestion of its existence. And clearly the painter meant to indicate through her painterly medium that such a musical composition would, like the painting itself, also be a beautiful creation to enjoy. One can examine the painting, analyze its structure, colors, images, and the techniques used in its creation. Or one can step back and look at the totality of its composition. In either case, the painting, this particular artistic creation, is the object hanging on the wall for the viewer to see.
A musical composition, such as a Mozart piano sonata, is not at all so tangible. Mozart wrote a score that tells a performer what notes (pitches) should sound at what time (rhythm), in what order (melody), in what combinations (harmony), played by what instrument (timbre), and at what intensity (volume), but these details are not the sonata that Mozart imagined and created. The standardized notation of a score allows the examination of Mozart’s ideas and how he structured the composition, but that alone does not enable the sonata to be experienced: only when a performer or a recording of a performance is being heard—thus recreating the piece—can the listener experience the work. That experience unfolds over time as the listener hears patterns of notes and rhythms, compares the sound being heard at each instant with the previously heard sounds, and predicts what the next sounds will be. Only then does the melody unfold, the harmonies progress, the rhythms excite, the phrases take shape, the whole form become clear, and the artistic vision of the composer and its emotional impact become evident. The composition exists in the mind of the listener just for that fleeting interval of time when it is being recreated in performance. It is totally intangible, and the written score is not the composition—it is only an outline or roadmap that allows a performer to recreate it.
Although visual and musical artists both start with an idea, and they both use physical materials—such as paint, canvas, paper, ink—to create something that shares their artistic vision with others, there are basic, particular differences. In the case of Esther Williams, her creation is the physical object of the painting Mozartiana, a work that causes the viewer to reflect on the beauty of nature and the beauty of human creations like a Mozart sonata. In the case of Mozart, he wrote down a score from the musical ideas in his head that he or another pianist could use to recreate the sonata in performance, so that the listener could hear it and thus apprehend in his or her own mind the musical ideas that originated in Mozart’s.