Comments on: French Impressionist painting and English planting design

By: Shannon

Shannon — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 08:46:31 +0000

i like this painting x

By: Christine

Christine — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 03:12:13 +0000

Some interesting musings on the dilemma of creating automatic and interactive music. Palle Dahlstedt discusses musical space among other aspects of musical composition. [http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/events-conferences/0106nowalls/papers/Dahlstedt_Mutasynth.PDF]
The second link is to a book review of Landscapes in Music: Space, Place and Time in the World’s Great Music. Rather than strictly discussing the internal composition of music in terms of spatial notation etc the book looks at the impact of physical space, place and time (geography) on the creation of musical landscapes; as well as the transposition of physical landscapes into musical form.
[http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/117997192/PDFSTART]

By: Tom Turner

Tom Turner — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:17:35 +0000

I am not a ‘musical person’ but I once read that music is ‘all about space’ and this suggests a conceptual comparison with 3d spatial design. I’d like to know more about this analogy.

By: Christine

Christine — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 02:53:59 +0000

I am not sure about this. My mistake was to read music ‘composition’ when in fact the simile was to music ‘practice’. Another abidding interest of mine is Opera singing which is based on vocal performance. The Coloratura voice expresses particular performance qualities…[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloratura]

Perhaps it was this type of interpretative performance the writer was speaking of? The garden structure was given: but there was much room for interpretation and expressiveness in the plantings themselves? Could it have been this performance element, rather than a fundamental change of garden structure that made the difference? Maybe this creative freedom with the planting lead to what we now recognise as the ‘Impressionist Garden’?

This does not of course discount the liquid music analogy in garden composition. Would be interesting to understand the difference between the frozen compositional state and the liquid compositional state!

By: Tom Turner

Tom Turner — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:22:39 +0000

If architecture is ‘frozen music’, as Goethe remarked, then gardens must be ‘liquid music’.

By: Christine

Christine — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 05:56:09 +0000

ps. Sorry, I should have said the comparison was to music performance rather than music composition!

By: Christine

Christine — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 05:54:15 +0000

I noticed an intriguing book by ‘Impressionist Garden’ by Derek Fell. In it the compositional technique of Monet’s garden is compared to musical composition;

“One visiting French journalist described the garden in 1904 as ‘divided into tidy squares like any market garden…substitute flowers for carrots and lettuce, in rows just as close together, and you can work wonders – if you know how to play the floral keyboard and are a great colourist.
It is this profusion, this teeming aspect that gives the garden a special quality.”