Meeting the impressionist media
A student last week was wondering how to blog, and I didn't expect the best answer to come behind a piano. But when Russia's Tatiana Aleksandrova played a concert for the Academy class Tuesday night in Salzburg, you only had to watch her hands to understand blogging.
The moment came during Maurice Ravel's impressionistic Ondine. The composer based the piece on a mermaid poem of Aloysious Bertand's, and being no Bertand scholar, this blogger was happy to learn Disney and The Little Mermaid had generally covered the plot.
The plot — for blogging purposes — was beside the point.
What mattered more were the hands.
To play Ondine, the pianist's hands started close together, practically curled over each other in a small, intense focus, then began to push outward as necessary. The hands explored notes around the focus, running occasionally to distant keys, but they always returned together, to the focus, to the apparent kernel of inspiration.
As in the painting style, impressionist music uses tone and color to create portrayal and breaks from earlier romantic approaches that thrived on completeness. What's knowable becomes a question of perspective and perception. What's communicable of this knowledge becomes a matter of focus, impression descriptions and conveyance. The work assumes the only direct knowledge is personal.
Blogging — like a host of new media approaches — fits the style.
Introductory sources serve us well for evidence. Wikipedia notes: "Characteristics … include visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles."
Or take pre-Wiki heavyweight Encarta: "Rejecting these standards, impressionists painted outside, choosing landscapes, street scenes, and figures from everyday life. Impressionists were concerned more with the effects of light on an object than with exact depiction of form. Using short brushstrokes, they juxtaposed primary and complementary colors, which blended in brilliant hues and luminous tones when viewed from a distance."
Even criticisms of blogging and impressionism run close.
Today's lunch at the Academy brought a discussion about the news uses of Twitter and other micro content formats, including blogging. The knock on the formats from some corners of the table was their incompleteness, their exposure, their dependence on perception, and their multidirectional skews from self to audience.
"Wallpaper in its embryonic state," said an 1874 review ripping a Monet work, Impression, Sunrise (unknowingly coining the term "impressionism" mid-review), "is more finished than that seascape."
To the Academy student trying a new medium, take it from the pianist, the composer, the painters, the ancient critics, and the new ones. Nobody ever said blogging was easy.
…
A performance of Ondine, not Aleksandrova's, but you can see hands:
Crossposted with some editing from Salzburg Global E-Media blog.
November 2nd, 2009 at 3:31 PM
[...] The most analogous shift I've found for this change has been the rise of Impressionism. Breaking from classical, "full" styles, Impressionism used tone and color to create portrayal. What was knowable became a question of perspective and perception, and the only direct knowledge was personal. [More from this blog on the stands of this connection.] [...]
August 8th, 2010 at 8:38 AM
[...] Salzburg starting again, keys-as-content has been on my [...]