Seeing Combinations: Sol LeWitt and Visual Modes of Expression in the Music of Johann Sebastian Bach
Abstract
Abstract:The article investigates affinities between the serial art of the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) and the contrapuntal music of Johann Sebastian Bach, exploring how LeWitt's artworks can serve as visual modes of expression, or visual metaphors, to observe combinatorial aspects of musical structure in Bach's works. The article uses three artworks by LeWitt to highlight and visualize structural features of Bach's music. LeWitt's Three-Part Variations on Three Different Kinds of Cubes (1967–1969), which involves not only the relative spatial arrangement of objects but also the relative orientation of objects within those arrangements, provides a visual analogue for musical configurations that involve variation in multiple dimensions of musical structure. Using a graphic shorthand derived from LeWitt's Three-Part Variations, the article examines how thematic configurations in Bach's Invention No. 11 in G Minor BWV 782 and Duetto No. 1 in E Minor BWV 802 simultaneously vary key, contour, and inversion of contrapuntal material in distinct thematic statements. LeWitt's iconic motif A Square Divided Horizontally and Vertically into Four Equal Parts, Each with a Different Direction of Alternating Parallel Bands of Lines (1982) serves as a template to explore thematic configurations that manifest all varieties of paired binary structural attributes. Thematic expositions in Bach's Little Prelude in A Minor BWV 942, Duetto No. 2 in F Major BWV 803, Invention No. 11, and Fugue in B-flat Minor, Well-Tempered Clavier Book II, realize the visual template using a variety of harmonic and contrapuntal structural attributes. Finally, the article uses LeWitt's Doubles in Black and Gray (1983), which presents geometric forms in paired prints that exchange the shading of figure and ground, to draw attention to settings of dissonant sonorities in Bach's music that exchange the consonant and dissonant meaning of their tonal components. Passages drawn from Bach's St. John Passion illustrate how an exchange of the consonant/dissonant meaning of the components of two salient semitonal sonorities both create variety and enact aspects of the spiritual drama in the work.