The ‘Part 1’ unit starter exposes students to a wide variety of musical and visual arts painting examples. All of the paintings have a connection to music. Some artworks were inspired by a style of music, and some were inspired by a specific piece. Students may draw specific parallels between music and art examples. They will respond to music and art examples and identify concepts and elements in music and art.

The best tool to listen to the musical examples on the website is Spotify. It is free to sign up for an account. When you open Spotify (it will run discretely in the background on your computer) all of the music files can play directly from the website. There are YouTube links for every musical example as well.

The goal of this lesson is to get the students to start thinking about how music can inspire art and how art can sound like music. Read the background information prior to commencing the unit and look at the paintings while listening to the music and form your own impressions first.

Remember that there is no right or wrong when reacting to music and art. We each bring our own unique experience to the table. Encourage the students to be critical thinkers, particularly when listening to the musical examples. It is not necessary to listen to each work to its completion (some of the examples are lengthy), but listen to as much as you can to get a good sense of the piece.

Formative assessment tasks can be taken from examples such as those included in each part.

Music and art examples

Play each musical example for approximately 30-60 seconds while simultaneously displaying its corresponding visual art example.

Discuss the following questions:

• Does the music ‘look’ like the art? How?

• Does the art ‘sound’ like the music? How?

• How does each art example convey the mood, style and tempo (speed) of the music and the sound of the instruments?

Example 1 – Kandinsky and Schoenberg

• In 1911 painter Wassily Kandinsky heard a concert that featured composer Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘Three Piano Pieces’. That night he went home and immediately sketched ‘Impressions III’.

• Kandinsky and Schoenberg were each exploring parallel concepts in their respective genres - moving away from traditional forms of harmony and painting into more abstract sound and colour worlds.

• In this painting the large black blob looks like a piano and one can roughly make out the shapes of the audience.

• Schoenberg’s early compositions are very romantic and easy to listen to. The three piano pieces are on the cusp of a new style, but they still have much of the warmth and expression of the old style, albeit with a different, more modern combination of notes.

• Similarly the early paintings by Kandinsky were realistic depictions of nature and later ones are completely abstract. In Impressions III there is a piano lid and the silhouettes of people. This shows Kandinsky’s gradual deconstructing by colour and shape.

• Both the music and the painting are transitioning from traditional to abstract.

Example 2 – Davis and Hines

• American painter Stuart Davis considered jazz to be the musical counterpart to abstract art and was inspired by the jazz pianists Earl Hines and Fats Waller. ‘Swing Landscape’ reflects jazz style with its bright colours and shapes, which suggest city buildings and instruments.

• The colour and shapes are overlapping, much like instruments in the jazz band, which rarely play in complete unison but are constantly playing off of one another. Jazz also uses a lot of syncopation (notes that don’t fall on the beat but in direct opposition to the beat).

• The diagonal lines in the painting have the same effect visually as jazzy syncopated rhythms do. The bold colours evoke the sound world of an upbeat, brassy jazz band.

Example 3 – Christie and Ligeti

• English painter John Christie was inspired by a composition for orchestra called ‘San Francisco Polyphony’ by Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti. Polyphony is a style of musical composition with two or more simultaneous but independent melodic lines.

• Ligeti described this piece as “the interplay between chaos and organization” and likened it to throwing a lot of things into a drawer.

• In an interview Ligeti said, “You know my flat in Hamburg: it appears to be tidy, but there is chaos in the drawers”.

• This painting is made up of seemingly random squiggly lines and shapes, looking at it from a distance, it is the most basic shape of all – a square.

• Notice how different instruments will stand out in the piece of music and suddenly catch the ear, much like in the painting a line or dot in the painting will suddenly catch the eye.

Example 4 – Leighton and Mendelssohn

• German composer Felix Mendelssohn wrote eight volumes of what he called ‘Songs Without Words’. Each volume contained six songs.

• It is not clear whether Lord Leighton painted this work in response to the Mendelssohn works or whether he just agreed to title his painting ‘Song without words’ afterwards in a nod to a common sensibility between the two works.

• Look at the painting while listening to the songs and observe how the character of each song changes the interpretation of what the girl is thinking and feeling.

• As there are two songs linked here, explore whether each song changes the way you view the painting. Play an excerpt from each song with the painting on the screen and ask the students to imagine (and share) the girl’s thoughts and feelings. Listen for the differences in mood.

Example 5 – Mondrian and Dorsey

• Piet Mondrian’s ‘Broadway Boogie Woogie’ evokes the grid pattern of New York City streets, blinking lights, traffic, the city hustle and so on.

• The title of the artwork alludes to the jazz style known as boogie woogie. Characteristics of boogie woogie are a consistent shuffling rhythm with frequent exuberant interjections from brass instruments.

• This painting feels like it is in motion and the larger squares of colour are like brass interjections or car horns.

Example 6 – Braque and J. S. Bach

• In addition to being a painter, Georges Braque was a trained classical musician and Johann Sebastian (J.S.) Bach was his favourite composer.

• J.S. Bach is famous for his fugues. A fugue is a musical form, similar to a round but more complex. When the melody is introduced in a round, it is repeated exactly in the same way in the other voices. In a fugue however, once the melody is introduced, it will be then presented in different ways by the other voices such as higher, lower, upside down, in fragments, and accompanied by other notes.

• A fugue is musical architecture, a layering of melodies on top of one another, side by side, in pieces much like this cubist painting.

Example 7 – Roffman

Artist and composer: Sharon Roffman

C Major Scale

Visit Sharon Roffman's website.

Example 8 – Malinowski and J. S. Bach

• This artwork is a computer animation of a piece by Johann Sebastian (J.S.) Bach, the ‘Concerto for Oboe and Violin’

• The artist visualizes the passage of time from left to right. The notes of short durations are represented with diamonds. Lines show notes that have longer durations and are more lyrical. Vertically, higher notes are higher on the screen and lower notes are lower). Each instrument has its own line and colour.

• Rests (no sound on the beat) are represented with a faint red line when the violin is not playing at the beginning.

Example 8 – Sisman