As you battle today’s on-the-job psychological confusion do you yearn for another kind of fusion – a sort of total experience with the total arts for your total person?
In the struggle to understand this fusion much comparison must be made of names, places and dates. There are plenty of them in the pages to come, so struggle away – it’s a must. Uninformed people might say music has a moment of beginning and a moment of ending – a painting has top, sides and bottom-a book has a first page and a last page, and that’s as far as they can go. Such nonchalant descriptions, of course, reveal no understanding of the meaning of these things. Informed people listen to music again and again, look at a painting over and over and read and reread a book, all the while studying other aspects of each, in an effort to gain depth of meaning, without ever reaching the limit.
Painters can express the strong contrast between the mysterious unknown and the reality of the known with this effect. Musicians accomplish it through contrasts in texture, timbre, rhythm, tempo, rang and dynamics. The principle is the same for all artists, only the materials are different. In the area of form and composition the musician definitely feels at home with the artist. The following description of the Piero della Francesca painting “Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels and Saints” at the Brera Museum in Milan is typical of art commentators. It is taken from Jane and Theodore Norman’s Travelers Guide to Europe’s’ Art:
“. . . typical is the evidence of his interest in pure form; in this painting the shell and egg are used like themes in a symphony; parts of the body are shown as developments from these simple, beautiful shapes. The figures, arranged to repeat the curve of the apse, create a monumental composition.”
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Stephanie Henry says