Merging of Painting and Music

The first explorative study on Spectrotone published in Malayalam language

SYMPHONY OF COLOURS
K. P. Ramesh


Every one has in himself another self, inured by the environment in which he lives. In responding to it, his five senses become creative. Their taste has then no single phase-polyphony of sensory perception. Experiences of color and tone evoke different responses at dissimilar levels, in different people .They get affected by the topography. Remember the bull- fight in Spain. Its arena is not a battle field, but a play ground. Here, red color is not an indicative of danger but is a sign of harmonization. The bull is not an animal but a being tender to merge with the same colour. In the oriental perspective the bull is a symbol of the mind.
Experiencing artistic pleasure, transforms a person. In other words, delight of art stands as mid-nature. Enjoyment or aesthetic experience happens on the shores of unconsciousness. Though music and painting seem to be two different genres of art, they tend to merge in aesthetic sense. The notion that colour and tone merging in each other is the enlightenment in the journey to cross over. It is the heartiest blending of the known and the unknown. Take case of painting. Lines and colours are its media of expression. Both the colours and tones also aim at sensual experience. It causes to its parity. Impulsive recital of the lines are encouraged by the gamakas of colours and they enter into the unknown from the known .
Though there is no verbal meaning to “ swara” in music, it conveys different phases at the moment of hearing itself. Such an enlightenment occurs at the time of ‘raga visthara ‘ ( broadening the raga).In Bilahari there is an awakening of sunshine, in Madhyamavati the golden dance of sunshine, and in Begada the vanishing of the sunshine .These can be perceived with the atmosphere by the time- concept of raga. It is also the moment when the rise and fall of light, related to the soul of musique occur.
There is beauty or synaesthesia , in viewing music as colour and in hearing colour as vocal chord. It is a journey beyond the universe, a spiritual quest. Painting and music, the two inner segments of art, are complementary in aesthetic sphere in “ Delhi” by M.Mukundan and “Gibralter” by N.S.Madhavan.

Harmony is important both in music and painting. Music in painting means the same. We conceive it by intuition. Mogul miniature ,Pahadi-Madhubani paintings and frescoes are nothing but music. Haunting music by yellow adorns Vincent Vangogh. In Paul Gauguin there is music of Tahiti island. Shadows make tone in Claude Monet and Rembrandt. Says Herbert Read :” Tone is a word which does service for more than one art. Presumably its first use was musical, but from the beginnings of art criticism in the sixteenth century it was used of painting”. Remember Kandinsky’s impression of a concert that shows the heads of the audience and a grand piano like a black triangle.

Here, some extracts translated from Malayalam :
“ I have to paint Beethoven’s symphony in canvas. Now I think of Beethovian symphony. Dreaming the symphony. I am not a man but a song- a music, blended by colour’.
(M.Mukandan : Delhi )

“Music conceive colors… the colours of Sonata 29 by Beethoven are brown, rose and red. A music, associated with Gibralter. Green (of verdigris) for Thodi- for Pantuvarali for Boopalam?
‘ In silence all sounds are merged- hence the white colour”.
(N.S.Madhavan : Gibralter )

A lot of discussions have taken place the physio-psychological relations between sound and colour. Levels of musical notes and the spectrum are specific frequencies. They lie within the layers of synaesthesia . It is a roseate experience, created by music hearing as color vision. It is the same what Terence McLaughlin meant by color hearing. Rismsy Korsakov has interpreted the keys of C,D,A,F and F#(all Major) as white, yellow, rose, green and grayish green respectively. Colour combination is common in oriental music. Tantric art accepts each colour as Rasa. Thus, brown indicated karuna or pathos, red as raudra or fury, green shringhara or eros and light yellow veerya or valour. Musicians have proved that the same moods can be perceived if we recite ragas like Neelambari, Bilahari, Bihag and Hamsadhwani respectively. It means, there is an aura in tonal sphere.
Vangogh’s yellow is a highly praised color. In Malayalam literature, Sethu fulfills his commitment to colors by Pandavapuram, and there is a blue zone over P. Surendran’s writings. Take the lines ,mentioned above ,there we can meet with Beethoven and colour alliance in Madhavan’s writing. Sure, the logic behind the use of knowledge to give expression to ignorance, of colour to signify the colourless and of voice to sound the voiceless, depends on the elements of conflicting effects. That is why abstraction though it expresses infinity, needs the back-ground of the concrete. There is something absent when we say that the sky is blue for we can’t think of anything abstract like the sky. When different seasons arrive, the colour of the sky changes.
Rain is not always the same rain. ”Rain is rain itself” means it is related to season. Summer rain is different from autumn rain. In the Himalayas spring and rain come together. Ragas in music can also be attached to it. Though there are many ragas may be sung at anytime, some shall be sung on particular parts of the day-Boopalam at early dawn, Malayamarutham in the daybreak, Shriraga at noon, Mughari in the after-noon,Poorvikalyani in the evening and Neelambari at night. These are temporal in accordance with their natural rhythm. The ragas, mentiond above, point to the colours of the nature as well. Music accepts the spirit of colours where it can express both the time and taste.
Some writers have perceived that there is a visual zone between music and literature. Mathuramgayati by Vijayan commences thus : “On earth there was music. It became alphabet and word to perceive itself”. It ends : “ Then, in the strata of the sky which cover the earth, there appeared as plethora of flute …music flew out from them”. Such a writing takes place on the threshold of absolute thinking.
Roland Barthes divides music into two - the music one plays and the music one hear. In a subtle sense, these are really two, not one. Work and text , the terms widely used in literary criticism are also significant in music. If the work is made by the author, the text is meant the reader. Here the levels of meaning do change, and it is not paradoxical. In music, something rises between cause and effect, though the strings of violin have no mouth, they sing, says Mukundan through his protagonist. The flow of melody from a musical instrument is related to our attachment with the same, a certain raga say, Hamsadhwani, played by Kadri Gopalanath in saxophone is heartiest, which may not be the same when another plays.
Aravindan, the protogonist in Mukundan’s novel, thinks that Beethoven is reborn through the strings of the violin and the fingers moving over the keys of the piano. He also thinks he resurrects Beethoven by the language of colours. Dr. Deepak Chopra


recently wrote on a pianist who plays a Chopin etude. Where is the music you can find it at many levels in the vibrating strings, the trip of the hammers, the fingers striking the keys, the black marks on the paper or the nerve impulses produced in the player’s brain? The reality of music is the shimmering, beautiful and invisible form that haunts our memories without ever being present in the physical world. It is not a mere notion, but a sensory festival . Perception of on piano- music occurs from concrete to abstract, may feel beyond the frontiers of music, there is such a complexity where we are unable to tell on the music and vision in its complementary mode.
“The Scream” by Edvard Munch is a good example for synaesthesia . In fact, we do not see this picture, but we hear it. The booming sound from distance bewilders the listener, which is a fascinating work of art where one mode of art replaces another. It is also noted that the colors have been associated with some composers, e.g. Mozart (blue), Chopin(green) and Beethoven(black). In short, all the works of art tend to dissolve each other and the same is the aesthetic essence of the universe
The words, said hitherto, are on the merging of color and music. But music can also enter into the zone of body language. As we read (no, as we see) Higuita by ;N.S.Madhavan,we know it as such. Here read the motif: “Like Lord Shiva whose matted hair is carefully untied before handover, Chiquita, with long and shrunk hair, black stone-face and small moustache, is an exception to goalies. By facing his two hands in the air like an orchestra conductor, Higuita made trebles of music inaudible to the people in the stadium that had the shape of a crescent. The player, who is ready to kick the ball, has a mere role of the first violinist in his band.”
This is the occasion where Higuita becomes Nataraja and muscian simultaneously. Look,music is the bridge between them. So we don’t read Higuita but we look upon or listen to for some memories have merged in this description. Surely, the dance of Shiva is the mode where dance and music blend spiritually. This is the same occassion in the words of Ananda Koomaraswami, when the actor beats the drum everybody comes to see the show. The splitting of the atom and the dance of Shiva bear equal power which is the vision of Fritijof Capra who perceives physics and metaphysics alike. If we read N.S.Madhavan’s writings, we meet with the same veracity here.
Music is posited in the microcosm of self-determination. I t helps us to distinguish what we are and who we are. Art expresses the rhythm of a nation and it is aimed at music. This is true in the Indian context. We have passed through incredible innovations in painting, literature and architecture. We absorbed more experimented, tempted and even attacked. But music has emphasized what Indianness through centuries of joy, tear and blood. Though our landscapes are cracking by the dispute on languages, music stands as a merging element of culture. (Qawali is the loving path) such a music ought to have been studied within the spheres of painting and literature. It is also the duty of contemporary Indian aesthetics.


k p ramesh,
zorba publications, ayalur p o
palakkad_678510, kerala, India
ph: 0091 94473 15971