Visual art as a catalyst for composing
Researcher: Philip Cashian
In 2007 I wrote a piece for solo violin and small ensemble for the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group called Wynter Music. It took the striking patterns, layering techniques and sense of flow found in the work of Bryan Wynter (one of the lesser-known St Ives artists) as a starting point. The piece has a sense of motion and slowly evolving layers of sound that were initially very carefully mapped out, but then arbitrarily altered and changed at a later stage in the writing process. I found this parallel with the work of Wynter, particularly in paintings from the early 1970s such as Green Confluence, stimulating as it presented to me an almost visual representation of what I’d been trying to achieve in my music for a long time.
The flow of minimalist pieces (i.e. Reich’s Music for Large Ensemble) and the slow rate of change and of being caught up in something has long fascinated me, although the general tonal harmony of a lot of minimalist music is something I find less interesting. This creates a problem for me of how to create a sense of the music unfolding with a clear sense of direction but no clear tonal harmonic underpinning. Another attempt at capturing the imagery of Wynter’s late work came in 2014 with Firewheel (after a painting of the same name) for small ensemble.
The fantastical worlds contained within the paintings of the surrealist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) has had a strong influence on my work since writing a short one movement string quartet, Samain, in 2011 for the Benyounes String Quartet. The dream-like nature of her paintings inhabited by bizarre characters often playing out some kind of secret narrative with an underlying sense of ritual creates strong musical imagery for me, suggesting the atmosphere or mood of a piece. This approach of using the tone of a painting as a springboard for a freely unfolding musical narrative manifests itself most strongly in the 22-minute piece Leonora Pictures (2017) for eight instruments. I’m currently devising a one-hour music theatre work with Jessica Walker and Frederic Wake-Walker based on the life of Leonora Carrington that takes six of her paintings as the basis for six scenes from her life, having received research funding from the Academy to write and film the 10-minute opening scene.
Two recent piano trios, Physichromie (2021) and Kink (2023) again draw on art (Carlos Cruz-Diez and Bridget Riley respectively) from the early 1960s. Both take the sense of motion, play and illusion within seemingly simple geometric forms as a catalyst for me to think about musical possibilities in a limited but abstracted manner. They offer an alternative ‘layer’ for me to draw on in addition to the musical material that can take a piece in directions I couldn’t imagine without the visual stimuli. This approach continues in the first and second movements of my Chamber Concerto No.2 (2023) and a Violin Concerto I’m currently writing, drawing on the work of Wilhemina Barns-Graham (1926-2014).
Over the past five years I’ve devised and led four projects with postgraduate composition students taking visual art as a catalyst. Two projects were jointly led with art historian Michael Bird at the Hepworth Gallery, Wakefield (2019) and Pallant House Gallery in Chichester (2024), as well as projects in collaboration with the Roberts Institute of Art (2024) and Van Gogh House (2023).
