Finding Balance with Art and Music
The two arts music and visual arts have many points of contact that offer interesting design options for primary school lessons and make hearing and seeing an intense experience. In addition to the children’s own creative expression, it promotes their concentration, auditory and visual perception, and motor skills.
When we look at a picture, our attention is focused on the whole as an appearance.
A picture is present in the room, we can wander through the picture with our eyes, linger longer or shorter at individual moments, or jump back and forth between individual picture elements. The visual art is visible, it is spatial art. Music, on the other hand, is fleeting. It runs in time and is subject to transience – a “perfumed handkerchief”, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant once disrespectfully called it. He was often annoyed that music bothered him at work and that he couldn’t just close his ears. Only their skeleton can be recorded in the musical text. “Your place is your passing,” says the composer Wolfgang Rihm. If I talk about music, then it has already died away. Conversations about music are always memories, which is what makes it so difficult sometimes.
Pictures are threads of memory
Because music is a fleeting art, it is so difficult to talk about music. Visualization in the form of a graphic score intensifies listening and at the same time facilitates communication about it. The image produced is memorable in terms of what it is heard. Music that has passed us by can be put into the picture in this way and seen in peace. This makes it easier to communicate about your own worlds of experience and empathize with the experience of others.
Paint according to music
Painting to music can be infinitely profitable if the teacher and his students are aware of the objective, what the selected music could trigger, and where the painting should lead to music: You can paint objectively and associatively, you can paint rhythmically or try to visualize the formal course of a piece of music in the picture. You can paint while listening to music or use the music as a short impulse for a longer development phase or even use applications ‘paint by numbers custom‘. Conversations about painting are always also conversations about the music you’ve heard: the music always resonates in the exchange of your own experiences and design intentions. And if you want to counter the danger of talking the intense impressions to death and thus devaluing the images produced, you should stick to the philosopher Plato, who already knew
Music, art, and movement
All of this can be transferred to the field of music and movement: Even the creation of a picture for music is shaped by physicality, by movement. Musical figures and structures can be drawn into the picture unchecked and without cognitive barriers, maybe even with your eyes closed. On the other hand, pictures can also come to life through movement: Shapes dance “out of the picture” and develop their own life on stage. The formal structure of the picture is only the starting point from which to experiment with the representation of individual elements and their interaction
