HEARING WITH THE EYE

The eye focuses, pinpoints, abstracts, locating each object in physical space against a background. In contrast, the ear accepts music from all directions simultaneously.

The essential feature of sound is not its location, but that it be. We say, "The night shall be filled with music," just as the air is filled with fragrance. We wrap ourselves in music.

We can also wrap ourselves in art, even two-dimensional art. Visual puns, where two or more images coexist within a single design, are the visual counterpart of jazz with its interweaving rhythms.

Jacket designs for jazz records often use paintings by Klee & Miró. Both painters structured space by all the senses, particularly sound. Both state that they painted under the guidance of the ear. Correspondences between their paintings & jazz are hardly coincidental.

Klee said his works owed more to Bach & Mozart than to any of the masters of art. He wanted art "to sound like a fairy tale," to be a world in which "things fall upward."

"Right now," said Miró, "I'm in a Bach mood. Tomorrow it could be Stockhausen. I'm very fond of the Beatles, too."

I don't regard as accidental the close parallels between Eskimo art & the work of Klee & Miró. In each there is a structuring of space by all the senses. Consider the case of Kuskokwim masks neglected by Western scholars until discovered by the surrealists Ernst, Breton, Matta, and Donati in 1943. The masks are complex mobiles with extensions & moving parts, like dissected Mirós reassembled in three dimensions. No borders freeze, imprison. Instead, each mobile, obedient to an inner impulse, asserts its own identity, unhampered by external restraints.

Acoustic space isn't pictorial, boxed-in, framed: it's resonating, in flux, creating its own dimensions moment by moment. It's a world in which the eye hears, the ear sees, & all the five & country senses join in a concert of interweaving rhythms.