| Robertson is exploring the relationship between art and music in The Colour of Time concert with the Sydney Symphony this month. Music by Debussy will be accompanied by classic artworks by French impressionist painter Monet, which will be projected onto a large screen. Robertson says that Monet in his art is doing something that is inherently musical, ‘trying to grasp a fleeting moment of light and image which is different in two minutes from what it is now, and will never come back. Or will come back and always be subtly different. And this is exactly how music deals with time. Music is both the same and never the same.’ He describes music as always existing with the element of time, a fourth dimension on top of the three dimensions of space; which adds to our experience of music. When Robertson looks at a Monet canvas, he has a feeling of it being ‘painted in a certain place with the light and all of the three dimensions, but there is also a sense that it was painted precisely at a time.’ There is a link between art and music through the fourth dimension of time, which has a colour. ‘And its colour in music is different than its colour in visual arts, but they’re close enough that I think it’s intriguing to set them side by side.’
In setting art and music side by side in The Colour of Time concert, Robertson will conduct music of Debussy and Messiaen. He describes Debussy as almost like a physicist working with pure matter, a composer who ‘manages to illuminate the possibilities of putting notes together in a way that had not been done before’. To make this clearer in the concert, Robertson will relate two Debussy works, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and Jeux (Games), to Monet. The latter transformed the outdoor painting of the 19th century Barbizon school ‘into something where we realise that our experience of light is something that is entirely subjective and based on a momentary quality that is fleeting and never solid,’ says Robertson. In the same way, he explains, Debussy is able to put these same sorts of concepts into music. In exploring the link between art and music, Robertson points out that it is different for each person. ‘There are some people who, when they look at paintings, hear music; and there are some people who, when they listen to music, see pictures.’ Nevertheless he says, it is helpful to look at creators living in the same period. ‘Debussy and Monet really inhabited the same time and were concerned with the same things, and that’s fairly clear in the works of both.’ Thus exploring the connection between these two creators illustrates the link be |