Painting Music

We are pleased to add to our growing list of client presses by taking over the distribution of Jane Mackay’s astonishing The Turn of the Screw: Visual responses to Britten’s opera, first published by Sounding Art Press in 2007. As James Bowman writes in his Preface to the book, it is ‘a very special tribute to the genius composer whom it seeks to honour’ and a remarkable manifestation of a very unusual artistic gift. Jane Mackay herself explains:

Seeing images as a response to sounds has always been as natural to me as experiencing the touch of silky fur when stroking a cat or smelling the scent of roses in high summer. As a child I saw each day of the week in colours and shapes, and so did my sister. Her colours were quite different from mine though, and many were the arguments we had about why my Wednesdays were lemon yellow when hers were a dusky green. Names, numbers, months of the year all had their hues, direction of flow, patterns and textures, as did voices, poems and music. As far back as I can remember, these visions were part of life and it never occurred to me that most people did not share my experiences. I was given a set of oil paints on my tenth birthday and from that time became seriously interested in art. My paintings were invariably ‘out of my head’ – for some reason I considered it cheating to paint what was already in front of me. Consequently, painting music was frequently part of the scheme of things.

During the 1960s I continued with my art and music whilst studying medicine in London. Then, after thirty years of medical practice I changed my career to that of a full-time artist, marking the moment by ceremoniously throwing my engraved stethoscope into the Thames on the morning of the new millennium. I discovered that my lifetime facility to see sound had a name, and that ‘synaesthesia’ was a well-recognised and vigorously researched area of neuro-physiology.

Approximately one person in 2,000 is a synaesthete. The condition appears to be inherited, many synaesthetes having a family member with the same thing. The commonest manifestation of this cross-sensory perception is seeing letters, numbers or words in colour. However, almost any sensory mix-up is possible. I have myself, on several occasions, experienced coloured temperature (e.g. a creamy whiteness on picking up a hot mug of coffee), coloured pain (deep purple sciatica) and coloured positional sense (a striking shift from banana-yellow to reddish-purple on altering position in bed).

My musical synaesthetic experiences are legion though I often find them hard to describe and explain. How do I convey what it is like to listen to a tenor on the car radio and to be absolutely certain that the voice is coloured green and red at the same time? The sound also looks like the skeletal remains of a decomposed autumn leaf. This image is not located either in the radio or in my head, but somewhere ‘out there’, totally integrated with the sound and yet separate from it and utterly recognisable and memorable. I once described this vision as looking a bit like shot silk but that isn’t right either. It is more like peering at orange fabric under a neon street light. You know that it is orange but it looks grey. It is orange and grey at the same time.

In working on my paintings of Britten’s opera The Turn of the Screw I responded to the whole spectrum of synaesthetic visions that this masterpiece presented to me. Images were evoked by instrumental colours (Prologue; Variation XI); dynamic changes (Theme); cross-rhythms (Variation I); extremes of colour contrast between voice and orchestral sound (Act I, scene 4); chord colours (Act I, scene 5, Variation XI); fugal patterns (Variation V); word colours and shapes (Act II, scene 7) and overall soundworlds depicted as semi-abstract images (Act II, scene 3), to give a few specific examples.

I am sometimes asked whether I would miss my synaesthesia if it were taken away from me. I am sure I would though it can be a disadvantage of course. It is difficult to remember acquaintances whose names and voice colours clash. Loud music in restaurants and shops can lead to visual as well as auditory overload. On the other hand, synaesthesia is mostly unremarkable, constantly operating in the background, always part of things. At best it is a condition in which the music I love gives rise to images charged with a sort of creative energy – images that just have to be painted.

The Turn of the Screw: Visual responses to Britten’s opera by Jane Mackay with a commentary by Andrew Plant and a preface by James Bowman is now available from Boydell & Brewer Ltd.

Britten's New Musical World

There was a palpable sense of excitement at Whitwell House when the final typescript of Letters from a Life arrived. The fourth volume of Britten’s selected letters covers a fascinating period in his life and career. Here, Philip Reed describes one of the many significant letters in this latest collection:

One of the most interesting items of correspondence in the fourth volume of Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten is a letter Britten wrote to the poet Edith Sitwell on 28 April 1955. He had known Sitwell well since the early 1940s; she had given poetry readings at the Aldeburgh Festival, as well as sharing the role of the reciter in Walton’s Façade ‘entertainment’ with Peter Pears at several English Opera Group concerts. In the autumn of 1954, following the success of his opera The Turn of the Screw, Britten made a setting of Sitwell’s powerful poem Still falls the Rain – The Raids, 1940, Night and Dawn as his Canticle III, for tenor, horn and piano.

The subject matter of the opera (which was closely based on Henry James’s novella) and the canticle drew from Britten an economy of musical organization and intensity of emotional expression not hitherto to be found to such a degree in his output. It was in fact something that Britten, rarely given to making portentous pronouncements about his compositional ambitions and aspirations in his correspondence (or, for that matter, anywhere else), articulated in his 1955 letter to Sitwell:

[...] writing this work [Canticle III] has helped me so much in my development as a composer. I feel with this work & the Turn of the Screw [...] that I am on the threshold of a new musical world (for me, I am not pretentious about it!) I am worried by the problems which arise, & that is one reason that I am taking of next winter to do some deep thinking. But your great poem has dragged something from me that was latent there, & shown me what lies before.

We note that even when making this declaration to Sitwell – and it is of no little interest that he makes this disclosure to a non-musician – Britten immediately undercuts his remark with a self-deprecating aside. But having found his way to the ‘threshold of a new musical world’, Britten needed time for proper consideration of the compositional possibilities open to him. In short, what was he to do, faced with a musical language that had distilled to such a degree?

By 1955 Britten was in his early forties; he had already enjoyed a career of more than twenty years’ standing and had emerged in the mid-1940s as the most successful British composer of his generation, with a surprisingly strong international following. But the quantity of works from the decade that began with Peter Grimes and ended with The Turn of the Screw could not realistically be sustained, even for a composer of Britten’s prodigious gifts.

Turning the pages of his catalogue of compositions between 1944 and 1954 leaves one dizzy in admiration not only for the sheer amount of notes composed but also for the range of his compositions. It will surely come to be recognized as one of the most sustained compositional feats of twentieth-century music; the achievement is all the more remarkable when one recalls just how frantically busy Britten was throughout this period as performer, conductor, festival organizer and administrator. No doubt if Britten had not possessed the specific creative personality he did, he might have continued, perhaps at a slightly less frenetic pace, on the path he had already marked out as his own. But his aim for achieving maximum communication articulated through the most concentrated musical material expressed in The Turn of the Screw and Canticle III led the composer to a point in 1955 where he wanted to stand back and take stock of the situation.

The timing of the world trip he and Pears made in 1955–56 (a major section of the new volume of Britten Letters) coincidentally came at the very moment when Britten was contemplating which direction his music should take. Through his first-hand encounter with Far Eastern music at this key juncture, Britten alighted on techniques with which he could identify and assimilate into his own music language. The effects of his identification with the techniques of the music he heard in Indonesia, Japan and India in 1956 would permeate his music thereafter.

Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten will be published by the Boydell Press in May.