Pen, Paper, Steel

Abstract

Graphs drawn on rastered paper and a monumental steel sculpture display how visual artists Paul Klee and Henrik Neugeboren conceived of Johann Sebastian Bach’s polyphonic style in 1920s Germany. Focusing on the representational decisions behind these artistic translations of music, this article explores the ways in which such artifacts manifest a specific analytical lens. It highlights congruencies with and deviations from the theoretical framework of “linear counterpoint,” as epitomized in Ernst Kurth’s influential treatise from 1917, and thereby positions the artworks within the controversial reception history of Bach’s music and a endant theoretical frameworks in the early twentieth century. More generally, the article proposes that graphical and sculptural renderings of music can offer the opportunity to investigate music theory’s intangible methods and conceptual metaphors through different sensory experiences. DOI: 10.30535/mto.26.4.6 Volume 26, Number 4, December 2020 Copyright © 2020 Society for Music Theory [1.1] In the German town of Leverkusen, just outside of Cologne, one can visit a fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach. A steel sculpture in the park abu ing the local hospital represents an excerpt of the Fugue in E-flat minor (BWV 853) from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, specifically the stre o maestrale at mm. 52–55 (Example 1).(1) Based on a sketch by the Transylvanian visual artist, pianist, and composer Henrik (Heinrich) Neugeboren (1901–1959), the sculpture allows passers-by to physically move through Bach’s stre o, as they wander in the space between the walls representing the voices of the contrapuntal texture. Titled “Hommage à J. S. Bach” in the few wri en documents referring to it, the sculpture lacks any manner of inscription or sign to identify its artist or subject on site (perhaps so as not to distract from the signage pointing to various hospital units). Neugeboren had devised the Hommage during a visit to the Bauhaus school in Dessau in 1928, but its realization in Leverkusen came only in 1970, over a decade after the artist’s death.(2) [1.2] Certainly, it is no ordinary plastic tribute to Bach. Neugeboren shunned the idea of memorializing the composer’s physiognomy through yet another supersized bust—a trope he snidely dismissed as “a tawdry figure with sheet music on a pedestal” (1929, 19).(3) Rather, as Neugeboren discussed in an article published in the Bauhaus journal in 1929, Bach’s craft itself, and especially his polyphonic style, was the intended object of commemoration. As Neugeboren put it, he aspired to render visible “Bach’s combinatorial mastery” (19).(4) [1.3] Already this sophisticated claim suggests an intricate conceptual underpinning to the sculpture, one that entailed careful artistic and theoretical consideration on different levels. In general, such processes are integral to the ambition of “visualizing the musical object,” as Judy Lochhead reminds us: “To visualize implies more than simply seeing, it implies ‘making’ something that can be seen. . . As such, it implies a certain kind of comprehension through conceptualization.” This, in turn, “affords a kind of ‘sharability’” (2006, 68). In her own analyses, Lochhead focuses on what is shared about the music in question, essentially treating visual renderings of music—which, in her study, comprise both prescriptive and descriptive formats—as analyses that “can influence what is hearable” (68).(5) But, as I would like to add, the proclaimed “sharability” applies equally to the underlying conceptual framework itself. Indeed, the act of concretizing music, of translating it into physical manifestations on paper, in metal, or other materials, is always indebted to a theoretical framework. This ensues from the inherent partialness and partiality of any visual translation of a sonic phenomenon. Capturing music in a different medium and material constitution involves various decisions: What is highlighted, or shown at all, at the expense of what else, and how might these qualities be represented? These choices, in turn, reveal insights into the “conceptualization” that Lochhead observes—a level of engagement that might be manifested equally in the features that are foregrounded in a given display and in those that are (conspicuously) neglected. By examining Neugeboren’s work from this perspective, I propose that his sculpture reifies both the specific musical composition and the music-theoretical framework that the artist chose as his analytical lens. [1.4] This reading, and, indeed, the artwork itself, relies on a variety of cultural-historical premises. First, the very idea of rigorously translating music into different artistic media has roots in the aesthetic and ideological interventions of early twentieth-century Modernism. I will start by reviewing how the Bauhaus school, as the site where Neugeboren not only published the plans for his monument but where he also elaborated them in the first place, offered a particularly fertile ground for such a project. In that context, another example of an artist visualizing Bach’s polyphony at the Bauhaus will help to illustrate the artistic ambitions behind such endeavors and the specific a raction of that musical heritage. As one of the school’s influential teachers from 1921, Paul Klee worked with his students on translating two measures from a Sonata for violin and harpsichord into a graphical system. In a next step, the immediate comparability of the two artistic renditions—one by Neugeboren, the other by Klee—catapults them both into cultural contexts well beyond the visual arts, including the contentious landscape of Bach reception in 1920s Germany. As we shall see, the two artists shared specific music-analytical assumptions on that repertoire, but enacted them in manifestly different ways. Through this juxtaposition, some of the controversial issues fervently debated by music theorists at the time come to life in readily graspable ways. As material artefacts, these visual translations of music thus not only complement the wri en documentation of music theory, they also offer the possibility of experiencing the affordances and constraints of music-analytical perspectives through different sense modalities. Examining these artistic objects from a music-theoretical vantage point, in short, can sharpen our perception of the ways in which art and music can be mutually illuminating, not only on a creative level, but also on a conceptual one.(6) At the Bauhaus, between the Arts [2.1] The shared institutional backdrop to the two examples is more than mere coincidence. Around the turn of the twentieth century the seismic shifts that undid conventional artistic forms and genres also shook up long-established divisions between the arts, as Daniel Albright has exemplarily discussed.(7) These trends of Modernism affected all the arts and at once brought them closer together. A particularly vibrant hub of such endeavors was the famous Bauhaus school. Founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919, the Bauhaus moved to its purpose-built complex in Dessau in 1925, where it lasted until the Nazi party forced its relocation to Berlin in 1932, only to close it down definitively ten months later. But these constrains and the political opposition certainly haven’t diminished the lasting impact of the school on developments in art and design across the past century and up until today, as various exhibitions and catalogues in honor of its centennial celebrations document around the world. Though by no means unified by a single aesthetic ideology, the Bauhaus as a whole promoted the idea of bridging the fine and applied arts, their media and materials, allowing dance, music, weaving, design, architecture, painting, sculpting, and carpentry to meet in shared aesthetic and technical principles. These interartistic ambitions manifest in different ways in the extant sources. In his Bauhaus-treatise Point and Line to Plane (1926), for instance, painter Wassily Kandinsky studied forms and structures in music and dance in order to derive general principles behind the essential graphical parameters of point, line, and plane. Klee (1922, 1925) explored the pictorial potentialities of these elements in somewhat more experimental ways, but ultimately to the same end: to liberate the foundational graphical means from their conventional ties and thereby to profoundly enrich the visual arts. [2.2] Notwithstanding this innovative zeal, old models from across all forms of artistic expression remained vital sources of inspiration and reference. Together with European capitals from Paris to Prague, the Bauhaus emerged as one of the centers of artistic engagement with the musical legacy of J. S. Bach.(8) Among the numerous influential teachers that the school a racted, Klee, Johannes I en, and Lyonel Feininger were particularly prolific in this regard.(9) Feininger even took to composing fugues for piano and for organ in a Bachian style, and professed a general spiritual alliance with the composer that animated his pictorial work.(10) Klee, meanwhile, explored affinities with Bach’s music from artistic, theoretical, pedagogical, and performative vantage points. Graphing Bach 1: Klee [3.1] Like many of his fellow teachers at the Bauhaus, painter Paul Klee (1879–1940) was also an avid musician.(11) Professionally trained as a violinist and married to the pianist Lily (née Stumpf), Klee integrated his passion for music into the curriculum of his graphical workshop. In January 1922, he dedicated two sessions of his introductory course to exploring modes for capturing music through graphical means, as documented in his lecture notes, which are collated under the title Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre (1922, BF/44–57, esp. BF/55). After some general remarks about the division of musical time into rhythmic and metrical structures, Klee and his students devised a schematic layout for the graphical translation of