Art and music: McNally Smith lecture series to explore the connections

At the heels of the Art-Inspired Music Project, an art exhibition that pairs McNally Smith music students with visual artists, the college is hosting a new "Distinguished Speaker Series," featuring talks about the interconnection of art and music throughout history.

Billy Franklin, a professor at McNally Smith, said McNally hosted an "Art-Inspired Music" project once before, in 2010. This year's exhibition, which once again features musical pieces created by McNally Smith students that were inspired by works of art, is much larger, co-curated by Franklin and curatorial assistant and artist Elizabeth Black. The show opened on Feb. 24 and runs through April 30.

The Art-Inspired Music project is aimed at having composers "think outside the box," Franklin said. While some of the composers chose to use the traditional song form, most of the new works tend to be instrumental and abstract, which "try to connect with the mood from what you see," Franklin said.

Elizabeth Black, who co-curated the exhibition, said one of her favorites is the Blue T-Rex, by Jan Elftmann, which was borrowed from the Minnesota Museum of American Art. The visual object, a bust of a dinosaur that has been covered in blue objects, inspired a piece of electronic music by Elijah Deaton-Berg. "It really works well because it has this presence that's really similar. It's really unique," she said.

(The piece also serves as a connection between the past life of McNally Smith's St. Paul building as a home to the Science Museum of Minnesota, where Elftmann has taught.)

As a gallery assistant, Black gets to watch people experience the art and music on a daily basis. While in some cases there's an obvious connection between the object and the music, other connections are more unexpected. "This project is meant to challenge the composer as well as help the artist with the interpretation of their work. There's no right answer," she said.

The Distinguished Speaker Series, which begins March 19, will include talks by Franklin as well as other faculty from McNally Smith's Liberal Arts Department. In addition, Philip Blackburn (from the American Composers Forum) and Christina Chang (from the Minnesota Museum of American Art) are part of the series.

Franklin will begin the lecture series on March 19 and provide an introduction to the topic of art and music, starting with a look at resonance and acoustics, from cave paintings to European musicians' fascination with Japanese art. Afterward, Terri Whitman and Kevin Schwandt, from McNally Smith, will discuss Claude Debussy and his links with Impressionist art.

Then on April 2, Bruce Hinrichs, also from McNally Smith, will go into the science of color and sound. "This guy really knows how the brain works," Franklin said. That same day, Philip Blackburn from the American Composers Forum will discuss American musician Harry Partch.

Finally, on April 16, the lecture series will look at atonality and dissonance in music and painting. That day, Christina Chang will give a talk about Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage.

Chang said that her talk, which is the subject of her Ph.D. dissertation, looks at Rauschenberg's "White Paintings," created in 1951, which were canvasses he painted a flat white. Two years later, John Cage, who had become Rauschenberg's friend, retrospectively described them as "airports for light, shadows and particles."

Chang suggests that Rauschenberg's work can be compared to Cage's infamous composition 4'33", where a pianist sits on stage for four minutes and 33 seconds without playing. The piece becomes the sounds of the audience shifting and shuffling. That work became "an early precursor to installation and environmental work that was moving away from a defined object of art to something that is more responsive," Chang said.

While Chang said Rauschenberg's "White Paintings" may not have directly influenced Cage, they were great friends and were "really feeding off each other's creative pursuits," she said, including in their mutual interest with Zen Buddhism. "They were thinking in the same terms about expanding the notion of what a painting is or what a musical composition is."

After Chang's talk on April 16, the evening will end with a structured free improvisation called Conduction, which will be performed by a number of McNally Smith alumni.

All talks are free and open to the public.

Sheila Regan is a Minneapolis-based writer. She writes frequently for the Twin Cities Daily Planet and City Pages, among other publications.

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