In designing its Web site, andante considered the relationship between sight and sound, and how best to present these elements on a computer screen. After considering various "musical" paintings from antiquity to the present day, andante ultimately chose the work of Paul Klee. A seminal Swiss artist, Klee was raised in a musical family and possessed a unique ability to bridge the worlds of visual art and musical composition.
In Le Pays Fertile, Paul Klee, Pierre Boulez discusses the parallels between these two worlds:
© Klee Family Estate, deposited at the Paul Klee
Foundation,
Museum of Fine Arts, Berne, Switzerland
Klee emphasized greatly the phenomena of the composition, i.e. the
combination between these two elements. In that, I believe his teaching was in
great part inspired by the Germanic tradition which genius consisted in the
preoccupation of the continuity and the thematic derivation, a preoccupation
which even the minor composers made theirs. It is present in the great masters,
Bach, Mozart, for whom Klee had a particular predilection.
"Polyphony certainly exists in the musical domain. The attempt to transpose this form in
the visual domain would be in itself unremarkable. But, to use the discoveries
that music has revealed in a particular way in certain polyphonic masterpieces,
to penetrate deeply in this cosmic-like sphere, to emerge with a new vision of
art and follow the evolution of these new acquisitions in the field of visual
representation, is already much better. The simultaneity of several independent
themes constitutes a reality which does not exist solely in music — likewise,
the coincidence of all essential aspects of a reality in a single instance — it
has its foundation and its roots in any phenomena everywhere." (Paul
Klee) Thus, Paul Klee does not try to establish a strict parallelism,
which would have strong limitations, between the world of sounds and that of
sight. The lesson to be learned from him is that that the two worlds have their
specificity and that the relation between them can only be structural. No
transcription could be literal without being absurd. In his way of approaching
another medium than his and of generating an original and enriching point of
view, Klee is unique. © 1989 Gallimard
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