Vincent Ho’s FOUR PAINTINGS BY LEESTEMAKER will receive its Canadian premiere at WSO’s New Music Festival on February 8, 2010. Performers will be internationally renowned pianist Jenny Lin and the WSO String Quintet. Location will be at Centennial Concert Hall, Winnipeg, Manitoba. Visit www.wso.ca for more info.

VINCENT HO’S FOUR PAINTINGS BY LEESTEMAKER: MUSICAL EKPHRASIS

By Peter Frank

Until recently, the term “Ekphrasis” has appeared infrequently in modern discourse about the arts. But its applicability, especially to art of all kinds since the 19^th century, is astonishingly broad. The ancient Greeks considered “ekphrasis” a rhetorical device – “in which,” the Wikipedia entry reads, “one art tries to relate to another art by defining and describing the essence and form of that original art, and in doing so, ‘speak to you’ through its illuminative liveliness.” The art the Greeks saw trying to relate to another was discursive prose (i.e., rhetoric), and the art to which it was trying to relate was visual. By this measure, art criticism is the ultimate exercise in ekphrasis. But over the last two hundred years artists working in all disciplines have more and more consciously tried to embody in their artworks both the contents (narrative and otherwise) and the sensations of works in other art forms.

Literary critics such as James Heffernan (Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery, 1993) and W.J.T. Mitchell have focused on poetry as a rich potential and actual realm for ekphrasis, noting poems such as Yeats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn and Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts as prominent examples of verse seeking to embody the gestalt – that is, recapitulate the viewer’s comprehension – of pictorial artworks. But in the modern era composers have been no less dedicated than poets to restating artworks in their own medium. Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead are probably the best-known musical examples of ekphrasis, but the repertoire – even beside the myriad song settings of poems about pictures, or the operas that bring artworks to four-dimensional life – is as dense with ekphrastic re-invention as is the repertoire of modern poetry.

Composers were given license to carry through their responsivity to artworks by the increasing trend toward depictive, or program, music throughout the 19^th century, a trend that in our own time has established itself as a tradition. Musical pieces have been telling tales, recording events, describing landscapes, and setting scenes forever, of course, through evocative gestures, striking sonic contrasts, and broadly recognized mannerisms (especially those that ape common sounds). Each of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, for instance, is a precisely described portrait of weather, readily apparent to the 18^th century European listener. But when Beethoven based an entire symphony on a day (actually a composite of numerous days) he spent decompressing in the Vienna Woods, and provided enough written annotation in the score, superfluous to dynamic markings, to signal his intentions almost measure by measure, the urge to pictorialize music welled to the surface of western musical practice as a whole, and has not abated since.

The “tone poem,” as Liszt called it, is a broadly ekphrastic genre. But Siglind Bruhn, probably the leading theorist of musical ekphrasis in America, warns against simply considering tone poems (and their chamber-music equivalents) as ekphrasis. Bruhn insists on a more specific use for the term she admits adopting from literary theory. Noting that “the first examples of the budding new genre, written in the last years of the 19th century, were mostly not distinguished from the broader category of ‘program music,’” Bruhn cautions that “Musical compositions with explicit reference – whether verbal in titles and accompanying notes or onomatopoeic – have existed for much of the history of Western music; yet, I claim, musical ekphrasis has not.” As she avers, “The musical equivalent to ekphrasis… narrates or paints a fictional reality created by an artist other than the composer of the music: a painter or a poet. Also, ekphrastic music usually relates not only to the content of the poetically or pictorially conveyed fictional reality, but also to the form and style of representation in which this content was cast in its primary medium.” (Elsewhere Bruhn has explained that, in writing ekphrastic music, composers “may transpose aspects of both structure and content; they may supplement, interpret, respond with associations, problematize, or play with some of the suggestive elements of the original image.”)

It is clearly in the specific practice of musical ekphrasis advanced by Bruhn, distinct from the evocations of Berlioz or Strauss, Scriabin or Ives, that Vincent Ho worked in limning his Four Paintings by Leestemaker. Like Debussy, Granados, Hindemith, Respighi, and Antheil (among others), Ho derived inspiration from specific works of visual art; and like those referenced by Gunther Schuller (Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee), Morton Feldman (Rothko Chapel), and Louis Andriessen (De Stijl), those works of art are abstract, deliberately open to interpretation. Ho even follows in a certain ekphrastic line of succession: the earliest work in the catalogue of Stephen Hartke, Ho’s teacher at the University of Southern California, is Untitled, a four-movement work based on postcards of paintings by Miro, Klee, and many others. In turn, the best-known composition of Leonardo Balada, the Spanish composer who was Hartke’s teacher in high school, is Guernica, based on Picasso’s antiwar mural.

Four Paintings by Leestemaker is not Ho’s first attempt at musical ekphrasis; an earlier, more prosaic musical equivalent, Nighthawks, “re-tells” the iconic Edward Hopper painting as a rhapsody for cello and orchestra (originally intended as the middle movement of a three-movement concerto). Ironically or not, in Nighthawks the cello again takes up the role Strauss accorded it in Don Quixote as the alienated protagonist; but Hopper’s fedora’d loner occupies a noir-ish world of mean streets and bleak vistas, far from the bright, hopeful delusions Cervantes’ madman acted out under the Iberian sun, so Ho’s music is lyrical, moody, and contemplative. Lyricism pervades Four Paintings by Leestemaker as well; but, then, it pervades most of Ho’s music, distinctive for its linear fluidity and ever-vivid, ever-changing color (and suited thereby for the ekphrastic restatement of artworks themselves rendered in line and color).

Three of the four Leestemaker paintings Ho has “set,” with their distinct horizon lines and atmospheric tones and brushstrokes, unequivocally suggest the natural space of land- or seascape; but they are all abstractions, conjurations of formation and sensation rather than depictions of specific places. The fourth painting, from earlier in Leestemaker’s career, is even less specific in its evocation; although it can read simply as a swirl of bright color, the looming purple form bears a cartoonish resemblance to the head of a baby bird, and as such provided Ho, in his words, “a pervasion of youthful optimism.”

According to Ho, he first came across Leestemaker’s work in 2002, in an art store on the University of Alberta campus in Edmonton. Taken with what he saw, he got Leestemaker’s name from the shop owner, but didn’t look further until three years later, when he was commissioned to write a sextet (effectively a string quartet augmented by contrabass and piano) for the ARC Ensemble’s 2006 tour of China. At that time, Ho thought again about Leestemaker’s work, and was delighted to find the painter living only a few miles away in Los Angeles. Leestemaker gave Ho a great deal of documentation on his paintings, and after poring over this material Ho alit upon four works to which he responded both viscerally and musically, also finding in them enough variation to provide the inter-movement contrast he wanted the piece to feature.

The painting Ho set for the first movement struck him as “colorfully animated, immediately striking, and very enticing. It looked as if it was created in one grand gesture, capturing a sudden moment of inspiration. For the music, I wanted to convey the same sentiment; having it immediately stated and unfolded in one long breath… The musical textures echo the visual textures of the painting (active background with a distinct foreground).” The almost aqueous fluidity of this movement coheres with Leestemaker’s fantasy of a dark cloudbank dissolving to reveal blue sky, but the staccato vivacity of the instrumental lines would seem counter-intuitive to Leesetmaker’s basically somber image. As contrasting details reveal themselves – the streaks of white toward bottom, for instance, or the crystalline granularity into which the black-green cloud melts – Ho’s textural decisions make more sense.

The painting on which Ho based the second movement, black in its lower half and a rusty orange in its upper, impressed him with its somber, almost severe tone. “It has an unsettling quality,” Ho writes, “that seems to come from a deep subconscious realm. It tries to emerge into clearer view but never leaves the heart of its murky origins.” The music manifests a similar mood, and its restrained, rumbling textures correspond quite evidently to the picture. The piano keeps “drifting away with ambiguous harmonies,” according to the composer, over which the strings “coalesce into a more substantial entity, something more unified and defined.” The piano imitates this unified character, and the instruments build towards an almost romantic intensity. At a certain point this intensity proves too great to bear, and the music returns to its hazy, ruminative entropy.

The third painting actually features a higher contrast of colors and even textures than the first two. Over a sub-horizon plane of burnished orange-brown, the horizon itself a strong black streak, Leestemaker floats a looming dark gray-purple mass, more a wall of fog than a cloud, its upper reaches clearly defined against a wetly moonlit sky. (The effect suggests the Pacific coast in winter.) Ho responded acutely to the reflective spirit of the work, identifying in it a “Zen quality” and allowing as it relaxes him and turns him inward. The spareness and simplicity of the musical language here accords with this quality of meditation and transcendence.

The rollicking peasant dance of the fourth movement, insistently rhythmic and jauntily discordant, results from the pleasant jolt Ho admits to getting from his first sight of Leestemaker’s Birdsong No. 9. “The piece is fast and energetic,” Ho wrote to Leestemaker upon finishing it, and is “built on Chinese folk rhythms and sonorities…. It expresses a youthful… quality that harkens an earlier musical period of mine, a period when I still viewed music with a childlike sense of wonder and excitement…” In fact, Chinese melodic and harmonic characteristics flavor all four movements – in twinned acknowledgment of the composer’s ethnic background and of the audience for which the piece was originally written – but they come most strongly to the fore in this rustic conclusion to a sequence of sonic impressions.

Again, these Four Paintings by Leestemaker are impressions not of places or events, but of pictures, or more accurately paintings, paintings that coalesce only partway into pictures. Indeed, in writing these four vignettes, Ho has “completed” Leestemaker’s paintings – per Duchamp’s dictum that “the viewer completes the work of art” – and exteriorized that completion in sound. These are not “accurate” restatements of the paintings; working across the vast practical and experiential distance that separates sight from sound, musical ekphrasis must necessarily be as much about slippage as about reproduction, and must allow, if anything, more for subjective response than it does for point-to-point correspondence. Then, any exercise in ekphrasis, between any two disciplines, must allow for the same thing. The value of ekphrasis is not in the accuracy of the translation, but the intergeneration of complete works of art, works that must stand on their own in the absence of their sources. Ho’s four compositions illumine Leestemaker’s uniquely; but they certainly do not preclude others from approaching the paintings from their own vantages, with their own sensibilities, in their own mediums. Musical ekphrasis and its twin, artistic ekphrasis on music, might be described as an even more stimulating and challenging exercise than its literary and rhetorical antecedents, as the jump between art forms is even greater; but in ekphrasis – even the ekphrasis of criticism – the jump is great enough to manifest significant risk, and thereby engender the dynamic engagement of ekphrast (author of the response), ekphrasted (author of the work responded to), and audience (witness to the response, and ideally to the work responded to as well) alike.

Los Angeles

October 2006