VOTD 1/31/ 2024

 Edvard Lieber: Music to Paintings (White)

Purchased at Jerry's Records

This is a record that made me reconsider my filing system for vinyl. 

Why? Because this is a "new music"/composer-released album. I have many (and undoubtably more on the way) "new music" LPs  with multiple composers, or interesting composer whose name I don't otherwise remember. How do I remember them, particularly in light of the collections on labels such as CRI (Composers Recordings Incorporated)? File the so-called "classical" section on its own, and make a single composer release (such as this) its own thing. How do I remember Edvard Lieber's name? Because he's in the composer section, and not sandwiched between John Lewis (MJQ) and Abbey Lincoln.

The first side of this LP is taken up with Lieber's (who is also the pianist) Twenty-four De Kooning Preludes. How much of it is written down on staff paper? I haven't a clue. Of its 21'24" minutes, no one movement takes up so much as as one and a half minutes. That seems very condensed considered the sometime large size of de Kooning canvases. Some of it has the clustery quality of Cecil Taylor.*

An aside: my wife and I have planned some vacation travels based on art exhibits. We went to Chicago to see a major Monet exhibit, for example. We also went to Washington, DC with our young daughter to see the knock-down, drag out de Kooning exhibit at the National Gallery.

And aside within an aside: we went to the Carnegie Museum here in Pittsburgh years ago. The museum has a small Jackson Pollock painting. We asked our (seven-year-old?), what does it look like to you? She announced in a loud voice, "It looks like CRAP."

When we took her to the de Kooning exhibit in DC, we told her: you're allowed to have your opinion, but do not announce out loud that it looks like crap. She abided, even if she was far less interested in the exhibit than we were.**

The second side of this LP is devoted to works dedicated to Pollock, Franz Kline, Edvin Stautmanis (a name I don't otherwise know), Elaine de Kooning, and Marcelo Bonevardi (another unfamiliar name). The last work is for tape with prepared piano, composed in 1979. 

It's a tricky thing, trying to draw musical inspiration directly from visual artworks. Early in my Water Shed 5tet days, it was something I tried to do. There was "Braque", an attempt to apply Cubism to some elements of the music; also "The Fate of Animals" for Franz Marc (unrecorded, and all the better because of it) and "Excavation" for Willem de Kooning. I could revive the latter. "Braque" was something of the band's signature work. How do you translate imagery into musical actions? There can be suggestions of movement, but there isn't a direct pipeline. 

The opposite can be much simpler: musicians as subject matter for paintings or sculpture. My father is a painter, and musicians are a frequent subject.***

Edvard Lieber. I guess I could do a web search, but: are these published scores? Can anyone with the skill play them? And where are you now?

* Another another aside. There's an argument that if you can improvise something that sounds like a fly-shit-on-paper score, why not just improvise it? Each has its merits, but they're not the same in my opinion. I get the point, though. 

** My daughter has grown into a kind, considerate, and generous person. I don't just love her, but I like her. I love her as her father, but I like her because she's a wonderful person.

*** https://johnopie.com/section/512064.html