Portrait in Seven Shades: Picasso
When Wynton Marsalis, the Music Director at Jazz at Lincoln Center, asked me to compose a long-form piece that could take any direction as long as it had a theme, it didn’t take me long to come up with a truly inspiring concept: music based on art. In Portrait in Seven Shades, each movement is dedicated to a different painter, and while it was hard to narrow my selection down to only seven artists, there were a few choices that were obvious to me—one of them being Picasso. Read more
0 Comments | Tags: cubism, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Miles Davis, Pablo Picasso, Portrait in Seven Shades, Wynton Marsalis
Rising Currents: Public Space Redefined
This morning I got on the Staten Island ferry to tour parks on the island with Parks Department officials and the leadership of a major environmental foundation. For several of them, it was the first trip to Staten island where they actually got off the ferry and went onto the island. Along the way, we talked about the harbor and the upcoming Rising Currents exhibition at MoMA.
I was fortunate to be able to attend the final weekend of open studio at P.S.1, where the five teams shared the ongoing process of their work, and I joined a few other city officials, including City Planning Chair Amanda Burden and Leslie Koch, who is directing the development of Governors Island. The whole place was wonderfully crowded, and the final session where each team gave presentations was held in a room crammed to the gills with people, including many sitting or lying on the floor.
From the Parks point of view, the proposals represent some innovative ways to create new realms of public space, places that are not traditional parks, but rather are flexible zones of water and land and plants and animals. We currently tend to look at parks as distinct from other urban forms, with fences, walls, planted buffers— different vocabularies of building materials. While each team has proposed concepts very different from the others, they all redefine the interaction of streets, parks, seawalls, canals, piers, and even the harbor itself. From a purely selfish point of view, many of the proposals offer a major expansion of flexible green space. Read more
0 Comments | Tags: landscape design, parks, PlaNYC, public space, Rising Currents
F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh
The Last Laugh. 1924. Germany. Directed by F. W. Murnau. Acquired from Universum-Film (UFA)
These notes accompany the screening of Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh), which screens on February 10, 11, and 12 in Theater 3.
Friedrich Wilhelm (F. W.) Murnau (1888–1931) had already made over a dozen films before The Last Laugh, but only Nosferatu (1922) can be said to have raised any blip on the international scene—and Nosferatu didn’t open in America until 1929 (after The Last Laugh, Tartuffe, Faust, and Sunrise), receiving a dismissively condescending review in The New York Times. So, few were prepared for what may be the best film ever made by a German in Germany.
The style of The Last Laugh is derived from the Kammerspiele, introduced by the great stage impresario Max Reinhardt, of whom Murnau (along with almost everyone else of note) was a disciple. Reinhardt proposed an intimate theater with dim lighting in which the audience was close enough to the stage for the actors to perform with greater subtlety. Lotte Eisner, the doyenne of film scholarship of the Weimar era, makes the point that the Expressionist technique that had come to predominance in German cinema by 1924 is only peripheral to Murnau’s achievement. She contends that Murnau’s moving camera “is never used decoratively or symbolically…every movement…has a precise, clearly-defined aim.” (Whatever its rationale, Murnau’s camera mobility and long takes set a standard for such future masters as Kenji Mizoguchi and Max Ophuls, and was developed into the counter-theory to the montage postulated by Sergei Eisenstein and the Soviets. One of the great achievements of Orson Welles was to synthesize these two approaches.) According to Eisner, the director’s use of “opalescent surfaces streaming with reflections, rain, or light…is an almost Impressionistic way of evoking atmosphere.” She also suggests that the supposed ponderousness of the film is a way of lending gravitas and significance to what is, after all, a trivial event: the demotion of a doorman to mens-room attendant. Read more
0 Comments | Tags: auteurist, F. W. Murnau, film, German Expressionism, Kammerspiele, The Last Laugh
Portrait in Seven Shades: Matisse
For the Portrait in Seven Shades piece—which we performed last week at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater—my goal was to select seven recognizable artists whose different styles would help create a contrast between each of the seven movements in the piece.
I’ve already talked about the “Monet” and “Dalí” movements, and today am moving on to “Matisse,” which very much expresses the reaction I have when I see Henri Matisse’s paintings such as Dance (I): joy. Read more
0 Comments | Tags: Dance, Henri Matisse, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Portrait in Seven Shades, Ted Nash, Thelonious Monk
Biography of a Whale
Gabriel Orozco. Installation view of Mobile Matrix (2006) at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Graphite on gray whale skeleton. Biblioteca Vasconcelos, Mexico City. Photo: Charles Watlington. © 2010 Gabriel Orozco
Every work at a museum may compel a viewer to wonder how it was made or where it came from. However, there are some works whose genesis provokes a special degree of collective fascination. Gabriel Orozco’s Mobile Matrix, currently on view in MoMA’s Gabriel Orozco exhibition, is one such work. Read more
0 Comments | Tags: Biblioteca José Vasconcelos, Escrhichtius Robustus, Gabriel Orozco, Marco Barrera Bassols, Mexico, Mobile Matrix, Molly Nesbit, whale
Portrait in Seven Shades: Dalí
In my first post I talked about how seven master painters in MoMA’s collection inspired me to write Portrait in Seven Shades, an hour-long piece of music being performed by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra over the next several nights. The piece has seven movements, each dedicated to a different painter. Yesterday, I wrote about how I was inspired by Monet’s treatment of light and surface in his triptych Water Lilies. Today I’d like to talk about another movement in the suite, this one inspired by Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory.
Dalí’s work incorporates familiar images and objects in unfamiliar settings and combinations, creating a sense of discomfort or insecurity in the viewer. His paintings allude to violence, sexuality, and secrets living in one’s subconscious. The Persistence of Memory depicts a barren landscape populated by melting clocks; I was inspired by this surreal scene to develop an unusual time signature, 13/8. Embracing the effect of this painting I have found sounds and approaches to harmony that are familiar on their own, but take on an unsettling effect with the particular way they are combined.
In “Dalí,” which is basically a disguised blues, the persistent drum groove exposes a little of the aggressive quality of this painting, and the melody, played in thirds by trumpet and alto, exists in a different tonal center from the bass, like a lost creature searching. A flamenco-like clave—supporting a drum solo and emphasized by the orchestra’s hand clapping—references Dalí’s Spanish heritage.
0 Comments | Tags: Jazz at Lincoln Center, music, Portrait in Seven Shades, Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory
