The Fredösphere

James Panero (r.r.) passes on a startling thesis:  painters take their cues from composers:

[Paintings by Aurthur Dove and Willem de Kooning] speak to the unrecognized wisdom of my departed mentor Kermit Champa, who maintained that advanced music brought about the birth of modern painting. Both de Kooning and Dove, who became premier abstractionists in their respective generations, were influenced by sound and recorded music. De Kooning purchased a hi-fi early in his career that cost his savings. Dove noted that “I should like to take wind and water and sand as a motif and work with them, but it has to be simplified in most cases to color and force lines and substances, just as music has done with sound.” The silence surrounding these abstractions amplifies their lapping, aural effects. De Kooning titled one work from 1975: “Screams of Children Come from Seagulls.” Now there’s the anthem of an endless summer—and in music, modern life, and the printed page, the call of aesthetic salvation.

I would like to believe in music's preeminence among the arts, but my natural modesty makes me doubt.  Perhaps what he is talking about is specific to the modernist period.  To believe that all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music is a mistake only a modernist would make.

On the other hand, it brings to my mind a tag line used by Andrew Stiller of Kallisti Music Press.  Maybe I remember the quote with such fondness because it was teasingly juuuuust within reach of my piecemeal knowledge of Latin.  Maybe I like the way it reveals the orderliness of the classical and mediaeval mind.  Or maybe I simply love the majesty of the sentence:

Ut Sol inter planetas, Ita MUSICA inter Artes liberales in medio radiat.
-Heinrich Schütz, 1640

Search the web for it if you must, but you should really figure it out on your own.  Believe me, you can translate it.  Latin lies deeply embedded in your consciousness, in your DNA even.  You might say it is right there in the middle of the double helix, shining forth.