IN 1952 the sculptor Barbara Hepworth wrote: “It often happens that one can obtain special revelations through a similar idea in a different medium.”
This could be the theme tune for the Tate St Ives Visual Music Week, a rum title for a fascinating exploration of a sprawling network of interrelated artists, composers, choreographers and film-makers, centred on Hepworth. A series of concerts, talks and exhibitions will excavate patterns of affinity between figures as diverse as Beethoven and David Nash, and show how these artists indeed share a number of similar ideas, but expressed in myriad different ways.
Hepworth was looking back on what she had drawn from her former husband Ben Nicholson’s painting but she would also have been inspired by her newer friendship with the South African composer Priaulx Rainier to launch the first St Ives Festival, on June 6, 1953 with a fanfare specially composed by Michael Tippett.
A financial disaster, it was a courageous attempt to draw music, drama and the visual arts together, to defy the strict separation of the different media that was a curse of modernism. Now, a year after Rainier and Hepworth’s joint centenary revived interest in their relationship, another group of brave “New Elizabethans” — the composer, writer and film-maker Douglas Young, violinist Peter Sheppard Skaerved and academic Simon Shaw-Miller — are again mounting a festival to explore these shared ideas in a new context.
Radiating out from the Hepworth-Rainier connection, which inspired a number of pieces of sculpture by Hepworth and compositions by Rainier, there will be concerts devoted to Bartók (a favourite of Hepworth and Rainier) and Jeremy Dale Roberts (a pupil of Rainier whose new piano composition Oggetti is a homage to the Italian artist Giorgio Morandi); to Klee, Stravinsky, and Douglas Young (his Mr Klee Visits the Botanical Gardens); to what the French composer Maurice Ravel called sites auriculaires, musical evocations of particular landscapes, by Debussy, Ravel, Messiaen, Tippett and Rainier, and to four groups of European composers and artists, from Beethoven, Caspar David Friedrich and Goethe through to Jeune France (Messiaen, Jolivet and Surrealism).
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The festival embraces the main Tate St Ives temporary exhibitions — an exhibition of the sculptor/film-maker Mariele Neudecker’s haunting responses to the German Romantic sublime (her enigmatic film Winterreise will be shown accompanied by a performance of Liszt’s transcriptions of Schubert’s famous song-cycle) and David Nash’s geometric abstract wooden pieces.
The emphasis is partly on showing the audience how profoundly music and the visual arts have inspired each other since the Romantic period. But it is also an ingenious way of helping those of us educated to look at modern and contemporary visual art rather than listen to the notorious plink plonk of contemporary music to find a new purchase on what this music means. Far from Walt Disney’s Fantasia, this music is to be listened to for its structural and textural beauty rather than for the pictures of pink centaurs it summons to your imagination.
The culmination of the week is a study day, when the wilder reaches of this territory will be broached. The phrase “visual music” was coined by the New Zealand artist Len Lye to describe his own abstract, non-narrative films. Miraculously he too has St Ives connections, as it was Ben Nicholson who first recognised his talent and encouraged him to experiment with film rather than batik. Douglas Young happened upon the work of Lye when exploring experimental film himself, and will introduce this session. Simon Shaw-Miller will take us on a tour of the divergent life and work of the artist/composer Jefim Golyscheff, a member of the Central Dadaist Revolutionary Council and deviser of a musical composition for “a virgin, a postman and a range of kitchen utensils”. Finally Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer, known internationally for their reconstructions of lost ballets, will demonstrate how they do it, using the Stravinsky/Balanchine Chant du Rossignol, designed by Matisse, and a Prokofiev ballet designed by Naum Gabo as examples. Gabo and Stravinsky are the connections here.
As more and more contemporary art crosses media boundaries, it is well to be reminded of these pioneers.
If this seems a lot to digest, at least be assured that the musical performances will be sublime. Peter Sheppard Skaerved, professor of violin at the Royal Academy and preternaturally energetic catalyst for numerous initiatives in both classical and contemporary music, has assembled an internationally distinguished group of classical musicians, equally at home with Beethoven or Dale Roberts and including the extraordinarily gifted young German cellist Beate Altenburg. This is their chance — and yours — to explore a repertoire and range of performance styles and spaces rarely offered on the South Bank.