Música de Cámara

Palacio Real Madrid, España, 2025

Every morning, before launching into the work for the day, I would search the internet for a new quote, a brief one given the limited space I had, and write it on the wipe board I had hanging on the door to my office. There were two people working in the office that always made a point of passing by to stop and read the day's quote, then write a brief retort. This provided me with a great excuse to get up from my computer, stretch my legs and walk over to the doorway to read what they had to say. Then we would use our sanctioned breaktime to further discuss the meaning of the quote. I looked forward to these exchanges because they satisfied my need for intellectual (versus business) conversation.

I'm reminded of those times with a quote that I found to go with this image. Leo Ornstein, early 20th century American experimental composer and pianist said "Of all the arts, music is really the most abstract." His performances in the first two decades of the century were avant-garde, innovative and oftentimes shocking. These are adjectives that I would also apply to Salvador Dali.

I recently visited the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida and spent a good amount of time viewing one of the current exhibits of surrealist photography called The Subversive Eye. The exhibit included a room set up for hands-on experimenting with digital or cellphone cameras, and one of the permanent exhibits includes a virtual reality exploration of Dali's best known, and most profound, works. The experience got me wondering whether I could create a Dali-esque image. This image, which I call Chamber Music (Música de Cámara in Spanish), is my first experiment.

The Música de Cámara is an annual event held at the Palacio Real Madrid that honors the Royal Quartet, a set of four stringed instruments created by Antonio Stradivarius, and the Francisco Floréz pianoforte, among the more than 300 musical instruments housed there. This image features two of these instruments, distorted and blended together to show the fluidity--the physical property of a substance, in this case sound, that enables it to flow as music. In the lower center of the image, just below where the cello emerges from the pianoforte keys, is a barely visible set of crystal glassware which, to me, represents the delicacy of the sound emitting from these two instruments. They also represent the royal dinners of the past that often took place in the dining room of the palace while an orchestra accompanied from the next room. Lastly, I superimposed a sheet of music, actually Claude Debussey's "Prélude à l'après midi d'un Faune", a late 19th century work of impressionist music.

Music and art, in my case photography, seem to me to be natural complements. Within the definitions of Abstract Art as something "that does not attempt to represent an accurate depiction of a visual reality but instead uses shapes, colours, forms and gestural marks to achieve its effect", and Surrealism as a "movement that [explores] the workings of the mind, championing the irrational, the poetic and the revolutionary" (See the wonderful Tate Museum Art Terms page at https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms) I see much similarity to music, especially that of Ornstein and Debussy.

Many of the early 20th century experimental artists, among them Picasso, Kandinsky and Matisse, considered music to be a higher form of art, even above their own painting. But Dali seems to have given no more thought to music than the instruments as merely objects even though he made prolific use of instruments throughout his works. What stands out to me is how he painted instruments made in reality of hard materials as soft and flaccid, a dichotomy between the hard and soft realms of the living, a statement on powerlessness. For more on Dali's use of music and instruments in his art, there is an interesting visual essay on this at https://academy.artexplora.org/en/why-was-salvador-dali-against-music/.

While this image of mine is inspired by Dali, I take a completely different perspective than he did. For me this image speaks of movement, something endemic of both music and abstract and surrealist art. It speaks of harmony, and a fragility that exists in the natures of both music and art, while at the same time it speaks of the robustness of something that lives on beyond its creator, something that affixes itself to a time which refuses to be lost.

Nietzsche said that “one listens to music with one’s muscles—that one is, precisely, moved.” (Quoted by Oliver Sacks during a lecture at the New York Public Library on April 26, 1984, as quoted by Lawrence Weather in And How Are You, Dr. Sacks, p273.)