The painter Wassily Kandinsky is credited for his contributions to abstraction in visual art. He often looked to music as the genre par excellence for expression devoid of signification: ‘Music, by its very nature, is ultimately and fully emancipated and needs no outer form for its expression.’Footnote 1 An avid spiritual theorist, he sought personal and emotional fulfilment in the Gesamtkunstwerk – in ‘monumental art’Footnote 2 – which, in today's lingo, might be understood as the High Romanticisation of interdisciplinarity.
Into this context steps composer Rósa Lind with an album of electroacoustic music entitled Kandinsky Kunstwerke. Taking a Kandinsky painting as her point of departure for each of the three works featured, Lind plots an extraterrestrial trajectory through solo instrumental writing. A sense of wonder pervades this album – the culmination of decades of compositional inquiry – as Lind looks to astrology for spiritual fulfilment. In Lind's idiom, I hear Kandinsky's searching rhetoric echoing through time.
The first track is a work for amplified cello, gong and tape, skilfully interpreted by Geoffrey Gartner. In Extrema: A Galilean Sarabande we hear curves traced in air, tension focused by the performer at the point of melodic extremity, where the sound has reached its periphery. The composer furnishes our imagination with the Galilean moons of Jupiter. Callisto, Ganymede, Europa and Io: four indistinguishable movements, each a meditation on the outer reaches of the mind, coerced by physical laws and artistic prerogative into sound.
A recurring, single strike of the gong punctuates the cello's wandering narrative: as the composition moves away, so it must return to its point of origin. The gong serves to focus the music and to situate the listener – a northern star in Lind's wandering idiom. Or, rather, a distant Jupiter, dimly visible in the night sky.
The writing in Extrema oscillates between fevered Romanticism (there is a yearning in the melody, something exploratory and questioning, not least for the wonder of deep space evoked by the title) and stark modernism. At times we hear references to solo Bach, his voice splintering through Lind's telescopic lens. As the work reaches its finale, moments of gritty tremolo follow fragile harmonics, which hang in the air like dust escaping from a profound shadow (low-frequency radio samples from Jupiter). Perhaps this swinging temporal exploration is where we find the sarabande – a dance through history, processing solemnly through the courts of the late Baroque to the angular halls of the early twentieth century.
Next is Courbe Dominante, described by the composer as ‘an abstract series of dance movements for flutes and other sound sources, from a planetary origin, through the resonant arcs of Saturn's rings to multiple vanishing points’.Footnote 3 The flute (Laura Chislett) presents a palette of colour, darting between registers and articulation so that the ear is drawn primarily to contrast. We are aware of these gestures only as a collective, much like how the edges of Kandinsky's brown hues are softened next to the sharp blackness of the shapes in the foreground of his Courbe Dominante.
Ghostly radiation from Saturn interrupts the flute's manic soliloquy, if only for a brief moment, reminding us of the strangeness of it all. Where Kandinsky offers discrete gestures and a language of disconnection, Lind relies on angular intervallic shapes and disrupted melodies. Certainly, this language echoes that of the Second Viennese School, and the severance of the early modern spirit. If there is such a paradox, then this is a familiar vocabulary of exploration and alienation.
The album continues with Trente, a 30-movement work for piano after Kandsinky's segmented painting of the same name. It is here that I finally understand the importance of (Gesamt)kunstwerke, as although each of the movements is named for a single constellation, Trente is a vast intertextual survey of mythologies of the night sky.
The piano navigates between polarities of harmony and register. The direction of the music is sometimes obscure, but perhaps this is what the composer intended for her listeners. As due north is shrouded in the glittering constellations of the piano's upper register, so too is the musical compass, the inner logic of the work. We are afloat in the zero gravity of the piano's sustain pedal and expansive compound intervals.
The prepared techniques in the tenth movement, ‘Lyra’ – a plucking of the strings inside the body of the instrument – is a welcome development in the language of this work. We are introduced here to a distinctive character, a vulture or eagle carrying a lyre, and we hear the bird's sharp talons on the strings of the harp. The character work continues throughout Trente, with diverse prepared techniques returning for the likes of watery ‘Hydra’ and vain ‘Cassiopeia’.
I appreciate the restraint in Lind's writing. Trente might be best understood by its moments of silence, of absence, of the void. In ‘Virgo’, the listener is invited into the quietest moments of the work, and the ear stretches to catch the low resonance of sympathetic vibration in the piano. I found myself intently listening to the silence long after the track had stopped.
Somewhere in the starry character survey of Trente I lost the original reference to Kandinsky's work of the same name. For music so figurative, so explicit in its titular description, Lind's Trente seems light years away from Kandinsky's abstract, black-and-white painting. Indeed, Kandinsky himself wrote scornfully of programme music, the antithesis to his abstract mission: ‘How miserably music fails when attempting to express the exterior form, is shown by narrowly understood program music.’Footnote 4
Insight is offered, perhaps, in Kandinsky's writing on black and white in colour theory: ‘White affects us with the absoluteness of a great silence… It is not a dead silence, but one full of possibilities… [a] silence which has suddenly become comprehensible… [Whereas] like a nothingness after sunset, black sound is like an eternal silence, without future or hope. Represented in music, it is as a final pause, which precedes the beginning of another world.’Footnote 5
Another world, indeed. Many worlds, really, within Lind's interstellar, intertextual album.
