26 Oct Orange music
After the grand ball, that evolved into the following piece of music,
we have been given a new exciting assignment: create music for the beautiful painting by Édouard Cortès.
The professor suggested to consider several approaches: one could be to write an “orange” music, another one could be telling a story choosing a character or an object, another one could be to dive into the time and place of the painting, or to be inspired by the feelings that this painting suggests. As you can see there are lots of different ways of writing music inspired by visual art. The real challenge is: how to do so?
For example, if I were to explain how to express the orange colour with music I would suggest to use typical “warm” sounds, like a cello, an oboe, a clarinet or a trombone. In this case the musical timbre is essential to express the sensation, and therefore the “colour”: when I teach singing I use a lot of analogies with colour to make easier to understand the various sound’s qualities performed by the human voice (which is, for instance, one of the few musical instruments that are able to drastically change the timbre).
If you choose the “storytelling approach” you have to somewhat create an event using one or more elements of the painting. Shall I create music for a naive dialogue between mother and child? Or should I tell about the loneliness or the poverty of the florist? Or is it the car the real protagonist of the scene, that’s been followed by criminals and it’s running at full speed in the middle of the street? Or is it a calm afternoon in Paris and we are going to be transported into the Notre Dame Cathedral with a long tracking shot? There is no right answer, you just have to follow your own intuition.
Regarding the immersion in the historical context, you probably want to do some research about the time in which the painting was done: we are in Paris at the beginning of the XX century, during the post-impressionism art movement. Musicians working on that time include Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Francis Poulenc and Erik Satie (I have to admit that those are my favorite composers of all times). All you have to do is find some of their features and make them your own, to be as accurate as possible regarding the painting’s current reality.
The feelings that this painting personally evoke me are kind of swinging. I would say that’s the quiet afternoon walk in the fall, with the shoes on the wet road and the busy crowd quickly going towards the end of the day. A sense of transitioning and changing, in the middle between day and night and in the middle between cold and warm. I would transform this feeling into ever-changing chords, without a fixed tonality, something very subtle and punctuated. But you can see it as a dawn, completely overturning my personal feeling and envision it’s all about a new day.
I still don’t know where this painting is going to take me, I will reach out soon with some news about it!