Philip Lasserx
“MUSIC IS PICTORIAL
IN THE SENSE IN THAT
IT CREATES IMAGES IN THE MIND”
“We felt that time was the unifier. Music is normally more temporal and painting in a way is less associated with time, and yet she had concerns about perception of time, how time can dilate and constrict based on things on the canvas or on her paper, and I felt very much the same as a composer.”
“Fabienne is an immensely musical painter. In her painting, I feel that there is rhythmicity, there is counterpoint, there is harmonic depth. These are perhaps loose terms to relate to music but they do, and her work ends up being very musical.”
Philip Lasser
Composer
Music faculty,
The Juilliard School
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philiplasser.com
“LIFE WITHOUT MUSIC
IS SIMPLY A MISTAKE
A WEARNINESS, AN EXILE”
With Phillip Lasser first, the goal was to experience the phenomenon of simultaneity in creation. It all began with one requirement : to disengage from all that one had known — whether as a painter or as a musician — to strip oneself bare, as though liberating the self from knowledge that might prove stifling. I was quick to note, for my part, that I had to excise, as though they were transgressions, all the aestheticizing notions I had previously acquired, as well as my customary practices as an artist. I felt at odds with these now, given the troubling impact of my “encounter” with sound. I had to dare to change, to practice detachment daily, and arrive at a concomitance of pianistic perception and pictorial perception. This collaboration with two voices, two sets of gestures, did not consist of a simple pictorial illustration of music, nor of a musical interpretation of painting, instead it involved a progressive erasure of the boundaries between music and painting, until a double reciprocal gesture took place, until both painter and composer relinquished their familiar territory. Philip and I attempted to answer the following question : Can music and painting, in their immediate creation, simultaneously conjugate each other ? This necessitated a return to spontaneity, to the nature of sound itself, thatcapacity music has to reach us in a place we seem unable to access without it. This is perhaps the reason for Nietzsche’s declaration :
“Life without music is simply a mistake, a weariness, an exile.”
I would like to invite you musicians to seek out disorientation, constantly, because it brims with the joys of unpredictable and unusual encounters. If you start by discovering a novel terrain for play then there is no longer a need
to think about form ; form follows on its own. The painter plays his brushstrokes as the musician paints his notes, and what emerges are impromptus, in a poetry of an instant. Phillip and I decided to call our work Cross Reactions to underscore the intense receptivity that was its prerequisite. It wasin working as we did with a web of intersecting responses that I came to understand the potential for interpenetration between the acoustic wave and the pictorial wave. I discovered spontaneous forms, interlaced, tangled lines that blended the fluctuating with the fixed, and whose intersections led, abruptly, to larger spaces.
