I’d like to introduce you to the relationship of music and geometry. As Goethe succinctly put it “geometry is frozen music” and with that in mind let’s examine it’s integration with the plastic, visual arts, the application of it in my sculptures and anecdotal stories in the unfolding of our understanding of music.
It would be hard to imagine life without music, indeed there wouldn’t be life without music. It is , it seems, the structure and mechanics of the physical world, from the dimensions of cell walls to the distances between and movements of planets [ the music of the spheres] to the fundamental nature of matter as waveforms, where scientists can best describe their discoveries as intervals and overtones arising from a fundamental note - the science of musical harmony. Little surprise that music of all artforms can evoke the most immediate of emotional responses.
So why do three large curvilinear stone sculptures represent the musical consonants of the octave , the perfect fourth and the perfect fifth? And why the somewhat obscure title of Pythagoras sings the blues? Why would a mathematician / philosopher declare that he ” woke up this morning, had a mean ol’ theorem on my mind”. Pythagoras didn’t incarnate simply to be the bane of every school student for centuries to come, amongst his great legacy was his treaty on music.
Inevitably he did wake up one morning and took a stroll through town, where he happened past a blacksmith’s workshop and was particularly taken by the sonorous notes made by their hammers striking the anvil. Being of an inquisitive mind he stepped inside the workshop and asked the blacksmiths if he could examine their hammers.
They obliged and Pythagoras determined, by weight, the proportion of one sized hammer to next. He reasoned that the difference, or interval, in their sound would then be in the same proportion and deduced these to be the octave or diapason [ the relationship of the half to the whole ], the fourth note or diatessaron [ the relationship of three quarters to the whole ], and the fifth note or diapente [ the relationship of two thirds to the whole ]. From this serendipitous, prosaic, industrial experience Pythagoras founded the diatonic eight note scale, based on a succession of fifths, giving us the greater part of our comprehension of music.
He extrapolated this to see the universe as a manifestation of mathematically derived musical relationships - ideas that dovetail with that of scientists today, whose technological advances have only given greater currency to this perception.
There are musical qualities in language, Greek being the western language to differentiate between vowels and consonants. It is the consonants, not the vowels that are the harmonic sounds. Vowels are the dynamic sounds that distinguish the consonants.
Pythagoras’ musical treatise quickly found it’s way into the plastic arts of ancient Greece and Rome. What we now regard as classicism was at the time the precept for universally harmonic order - the refinement of area and volume into proportion. The theoretical books of Vitruvius are the only surviving manuscripts of the formulae of these proportions and sixteen hundred years would pass before being implemented again.
The renaissance almost happened in the twelfth century and the Cistercian monks were amongst the main proponents of this event. They rigidly applied musical ratios to their buildings under the edict “there must be no decoration, only proportion”. Hence their churches became acoustic resonators where people constructed from musical ratios chanted certain ratios in buildings of corresponding proportions to the heavenly bodies distributed along these ratios, thus a human choir became a celestial choir.
Two centuries later the renaissance did arrive and the architect, artist, musician and writer Leon. Battista. Alberti, well versed in Vitruvian literature, had written his own “how to do” manuals for the architects and artists of his time. So great was his influence on renaissance thinking that the phenomenon took his namesake - Albertism.
New subject matter and new technology crystallised in an old stable geometry, now new again, was embraced with alacrity by artists emerging from the mystical and superstitious mentality of the middle ages into the humanism of the renaissance. These artists preferred simple ratios in whole numbers with which to articulate clear exact ideas and objectives within a rational and scientific milieu. Musical ratios , rather than the irrational golden mean, so popular with the more transcendental medieval artists, would provide the vehicle to unify painting architecture with the major art of music. Cadence, harmony and rhythm applied as discreet, intimate poetry beneath the colour and form permits an artwork perfect composure and allows the viewer to see and, if you will, hear a single experience and the emotional response is intensified.
The use of musical ratios in painting and architecture lasted into the baroque era, but not with the same purist literal vigour of the renaissance. Romanticism, the Age of Reason and the industrial revolution were a formidable gang with which ratios that smacked of classicism could not compete and they fell from favour. Ironically this happened at a time when they were being used with great panache, they had discovered swing music. Also at this time J.S Bach brought about the next major innovation in music by uniting gypsy and classical music, giving us our modern scale and keys.
Since then the musical ratios have largely lived in exile from the visual arts. Geometry in general, the golden mean in particular, has enjoyed fairly consistent usage, turning up in the most surprising of places.
However in music itself the progression of octave, fourth and fifth did reappear. Oppressed blacks in the deep south of the USA found this progression to their liking and started to compose a new type of folk music to express their despair and sorrow. They named this style of music after an obscure medieval term meaning a misfortune suffered at the hands of devil ; They called it the blues. They gave the world a new kind of music derived from an ancient discovery and curiously, by virtue of geographic location, it to became known by a Greek letter / word, Delta blues and the influence of this music was to be immeasurable.
The forms I designed are not by whim, fancy or intuition, but a didactic adherence to the traditions of harmonic proportion. My enthusiasm for these ratios and the golden mean doesn’t come from a nostalgic yearning for some long past golden age, but the simple fact that I’m a geometry junkie! An addiction that is both fuelled and satiated by fascination of the intrinsic presence of universal harmonics in the creation and composition of all things, their use over many centuries in composition and a desire to bring them into a modern idiom and recent vindicatory discoveries that they are the soul of matter.
It seems therefore appropriate to transpose science into art and appropriate, now more than ever to return to the humanist, rather than the classical, values of the renaissance. In a discordant, dangerous, quasi medieval world three curly, shiny stones bespeak a universality. Sensuous lines take the eye and hand cathartically along given harmonics. The crystalline structure of stone is not really inert, but buzzes with intervals, overtones and fundamentals of concord. A portrayal of geometry as frozen music and sound as solid form.
Duncan Moon is a West Australian based artist/artisan, a painter, draughtsman, drummer, percussionist, stonemason/plasterer and as a sculptor is an exponent of stone carving and stucco sculpture.
http://www.duncanmoon.com
The proportions and designs of his work are often based on Universal, geometric harmonies, such as pi, the golden mean and musical ratios. By this means the composure and consequently the appreciation of the works is endowed with a subliminal quality.