My ‘work-in progress’ seminar for my Fellowship at The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Open to all.

https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/86535202023
Passcode: Vr8f3ew2

Abstract:

This project examines several Anglo-American case studies throughout the 20th century to explore how photography as both practice and idea came to affect compositional activities in the realm of art music. Beginning with the Music (later Equivalents) series of Alfred Stieglitz (1922) and Ernest Bloch’s Five Sketches in Sepia (1923), I will examine the influence and crossover of ‘impressionism’ and abstraction when considering the immediate medial connections between the two artists. Photography, as a mobile, reproducible medium, finds a companion in the work of Joseph Schillinger and Heitor Villa Lobos, who used photographs as a means of directly generating musical material through the graphing of landscape contours. The political situation in which Villa-Lobos’ work emerged, i.e. Pan-Americanism and the 1939 World’s Fair, also gives insights into the cultural view of photography and music with respect to nationalism, diplomacy, and mechanical reproduction. Following the development of photographic philosophy into the 1940s and 50s, particularly the legacy of the f/64 group (e.g. Ansel Adams, Minor White), I will explore how photography began to be firmly established as a metaphor for certain notational and deterministic practices within music through Morton Feldman and John Cage, probing Adams’ view of the photographic negative as ‘score’ and the print as ‘performance’ (1948). At a similar time, the development and commercialisation of photography, subsequently marketed as an educational tool through the Kodak company’s Photo-Discovery Sets (1966) will demonstrate another aspect of this metaphor, that of creative seriality, seen in Cornelius Cardew’s Two Books of Study for Pianists (1958; 1964). This underlines a further argument as to the effect of photography into creating an emergent visual literacy which finds parallels in musical notation and creative practice. Jumping ahead, the development of the first digital camera in 1992, combined with further mass access to photographic technologies (e.g. Fujifilm’s QuickSnap [1986]) has implications for the relationship between photography and music. This ultra-mobile form of photography finds new artistic expressions in the works of Fred Frith (1999) and Christian Marclay (2007), who, I argue, continue the idea of the ‘vernacular gaze’ of Robert Rauschenberg’s work, centring on improvisation, chance, and a more social view of art music.