Art And Music

Kenya Mon 05-12-2005

Art And Music
By Duncan Miriri

Jim Pywell's bassoon: music + colours who would have thought that musical notes could be added to a conventional visual arts exhibition to add not just a new dimension but inspiring experiences as well? Hailed as the first project of its kind in Kenya, the ‘True Colours’ exhibition held at the Alliance Francaise in Nairobi, late this year, 'served' works of visual art spiced with a musical performance.

Creating a link between the visual arts and various musical instrumental notes as well as the human voice is not commonplace, more so in Kenyan. But this rare experience was brought to the fore on Nairobi’s exhibitions scene as art enthusiasts listened attentively to the music composed to accompany the display of art.

And indeed, instrumentalists Jim Pywell, Kagema Gichuhi and guest singer Roseann Kinyua, who performed together, conceded that the addition of music ‘brightened up’ the show.

Show-goers took in the various mixed media pieces, oil-on-canvas among others lined on the walls surrounded by borders of the colour that each of the participating artists had been assigned. "It all boils down to colours", according to the artists exhibiting their paintings and the musicians who composed the music, which is also available on CD.

The exhibition’s curator, Pat Keay, had identified 24 artists based in Nairobi, whom she felt made colour the prime element in their work; and also employed it to heighten the mood or create tension in their paintings. Different colours were selected randomly for each artist to base his or her piece upon. Composers Pywell and Gichuhi who are attached to Kenyatta University’s Department of Music, were invited to work with the artists.

"We set out to determine the relationships between the artist’s work - particularly the colours they work with - and music," says Gichuhi. Asked whether they derived any inspiration from music, one artist replied in the affirmative. Loud music worked for one while another said total silence did the trick.

The musicians also sought the artists’ music for art - Roseann, Gichuhi, Pywell interpretation of various colours. One response was that brown and green evoked thoughts of food, with other colours bringing on different thoughts. The duo then set to work out the structure of the music as well as the lyrics without any knowledge of what the artists themselves were working on.

Their effort translated into picture that was a reaction to colours easily translated into musical notes of different pitches and a bit of the old fashioned, universal association of certain colours with particular feelings or emotions.

For the artists, their paintings represented an individual’s emotional response to the colour, a reaction against it, or simply a creation using tints, shades and variations of the colour. Miriam Kyambi came up with a combination of wall paint, spray paint and wood in a piece that shows a tempestuous silver cloud with various shades of red in her piece Beyond Red.

In Angels Summon, Peter Ngugi brought out a powerful vision of a tranquil world where angels play musical instruments to evoke calm. His colour was a soft shade of cream. Emily Odongo, assigned the colour yellow, sought to send out many messages simultaneously.

Her untitled mixed media shows a pull cart, a mask and other barely discernible shapes including a solitary human eye, predominantly done in yellow, but also in small quantities of orange and black complimented by a patch of white at centre of the piece.

But at end of day, the artists and music composers concurred on fact that the brighter the colour, the higher the corresponding musical note. “The various shades in between bright and dark colours are conversely reflected in varying pitches of musical notes” says Gichuhi. Musicians often describe sounds in terms of brightness.

Metal percussion sounds are usually bright (but less bright if they are farther away). The notes of the bassoon tend to be dark. The voices of humans and birds provide everything across the whole spectrum – especially if you ask the birds to speak very slowly.

‘Elsewhere in the world, these facts have been used to great effects, (for instance) in Disney’s ‘Elsewhere in the world, these facts have been used to great effects, (for instance) in Disney’s Fantasia where animation is accompanied by music to create one whole experience,’ says Pywell. Indeed as the exhibition proved, for contemporary African arts, the painting form in particular, can be enhanced by marrying it with music.

Posted By: African Colours

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