Knowing the Other Arts

Many academically/classically trained artists and art critics seem to have their ear on a completely different vein of music compared to academically/classically trained musicians and music critics. Why is this so? Are we so specialized in academia that we cannot know, out of sheer practicality, the state of the art in our sister practices?

I recently saw a critic comparing Akira Kosemura to Peter Doig, one of my favorite painters.  Personally, I think Gérard Grisey's music is much more in line with Doig's painting. Take for instance Quatre chants pour franchir le sieul (Four songs for crossing the threshold), compared to Doig's Blotter, or Canoe Lake. 

Grisey (1946-1998) is about a half generation older than Doig, but their treatment of material and their conceptual relationship with death is very similar. In both you have a "figure," a person in the paintings and a soprano voice in the music. Both figures are then enveloped in a lurid world of distorted nostalgia: in the Doig, the "old reel footage" quality is comparable to the microtonal pitch displacements, like the wobbling of an old record, in the instruments that embrace and imitate the soprano in the Grisey. This is the influence of automated technology on manually produced culture: the filmic or photographic quality of the painting is comparable to the influence of recording technology on the music (enhanced by Grisey's use of spectral analysis tools which inform his harmonic choices). Furthermore, the tension between life and impending death created by a boy standing on a frozen pond and a curiously prone woman in a canoe is comparable to the constantly descending lament-like melodic fragments that make up the fabric of the Grisey.

There is a curious relationship between the Doig and the movie Friday the 13th as well. Though this reflection of popular culture is not as present in the Grisey, there is, however, a similarly distorted reflection of a traditional musical trope in the final Berceuse movement of the Grisey, which seems to float beyond the end of the world.

One of my favorite articles written on both music and visual art involves painter Peter Doig's work: Adam Harper's Hauntology: The Past Inside the Present.