Kandinsky was a guy that I think was painting away, working enthusiastically in the early stages of the rise of film, in the hopes to “capture” sound, or music into his painting. The way he describes it, makes it sound as if he “literally” wanted to accomplish this. I am surprised he didn’t move to film automatically in his later years as film was becoming more popular..The insane ambition of such an attempt as to capture music, visually, into one still image always struck me as madness. Gotta love him for it though.

Had he moved to films, I wonder if his films would have looked something like the films of Oskar Fischinger, whose abstract and geometric animations were meticulously synced to popular classical music. In many of his films, for example, a line would appear, then the strings would jump. At every movement of a geometric shape or abstract form, the notes from the track would sound. The result being an orchestra of shapes moving to each instrument in the orchestra. Personally, I’ve always found there to be something incredibly wrong or unfitting of these results. For some reason it all seems too literal. Its not the fact that the visuals were in sync with the audio that seemed weird to me, but rather, the attempt to extract a world of chaos ,abstracted forms, and nonlinearity, from the linear world of a classical composition(oohh the audacity!). One might argue(maybe Kandinsky himself) that that wouldn’t matter so much because all music, even the most linear of all pop songs, is in fact abstract by the nature of it being a sound alone(ie:, what the hell is a sound anyway?).

But experienced as a still image, a painting, devoid of a time based evolution with motion(literally), it seems like we’re hearing the entire song at once, as if 100 instruments were being set off like an alarm. The result being a shmorgasbord of noisy visuals, exploding everywhere. I never heard classical music looking at Kandinsky’s work though. Maybe 100 loud horns though. But this was pretty new stuff at the time, and his associations with the Bauhaus movement made it clear that these were purely formal exercises in a time when artists were spiritualizing color wheels and probably orgasming to blue void interiors. Precursor of times to come.

I personally think animatiors like Robert Breer, or Harry Smith utilized sound with visuals in a more exciting, and interesting way. Of course they used film, even though they started off as painters..and came around later on in the fifties and sixties. In a more linear sense, Jan Svankmajers(the Czech Filmaker animator) made some amazing works that were ingeniously realized through sound by a composer named Zdenek Liska. Jan always made the visuals first but stressed to Liska that he try to focus, if he could, not on particular sounds, but on the rhythm of the visuals. The result is music that is always evolving, switching tempo, and melody, abruptly. I think the less linear both visual and audio elements, or the more they switch in and out of linear to nonlinear together, meet up, move apart..the more of a nice dance it all seems.

The inclusion of the human body into abstracted territories is also an exciting idea/ element but maybe difficult to achieve as well for the same reasons dancing circles or personifed squares seems to me kinda similar to the idea of those battery powered dancing Santa Clauses you might see at 99 cent stores everywhere. It seems like music personifed in a very cutesy manner. I like what Chris Elam(http://www.misnomer.org/) is doing with dance and how he uses body forms to sound. He meets the sound halfway, or becomes the sounds.

MTV might have some influence on wanting to shake your butt a certain way, but I think
sound and music speaks to the very core of our beings. I think our first languages were songs, hums, and hymns, along with the grunts. Its all very primal. I’m always amazed at how babies never seem to need dancing lessons either. I think most 2 year olds do that rock back forth dance whenever a good tune comes on or maybe a bad one..They know the rhythm somehow or from somewhere.

There’s a pretty good book called That Devine Order by Peter Vergo..has some info on relationship between art in history with music..It doesn’t get to the core so much, by way of what sound does to the brain, etc.. but still interesting..