Connections/Performance

My name is Elizabeth Weinfield and I'm the content editor of the Timeline of Art History here at the Met, and I'm going to be discussing performance.

When I'm not here at the Met, chances are, I'm off doing my other job, which is performing classical music.

I think it would really be impossible to say that performance or playing music doesn't in some way contribute to the way that I look at art.

The Jackson Pollock reminds me of the visual element in a score of around the same time, for example a score by Stravinsky or Prokofiev, in which we see just a vast array of notes and kind of gestural indications that are really abstracted to the point where they almost jump off the page. And that is an idea we can

also see in this Paul Klee. The notes are morphing into music as we look at them. They're turning into the visual equivalent of sound.

As a strings player I'm very struck by the work of Tielke because the instruments are just so exquisite.

The scroll is constructed into a head of a Moorish king, and your eye naturally cascades

down the fingerboard. You see this wonderful tortoise shell and ivory inlay

down to the rosette in the center. I perform Baroque music so I'm

very interested in Baroque painters. And this painting The Musicians by Caravaggio is interesting because it was painted at the time that he lived in a home for castrati, young men who were castrated, usually between the ages of eight and ten, and this allowed them to grow into adulthood, but their childlike, boyish voice would be maintained. It's really a voice type that we don't know today.

I love looking at manuscripts of notation. I always think about the scribe, and I wonder

as they drew each note, if they were singing along.

With this piece, I think about what Hillary Hahn says about working on a concerto, "It's like chipping away slowly at a big block of marble to reveal sculpture."

And we really get the sense in this geometric design if we were to miss one little detail, the whole thing would crumble. The same thing happens to performance.

When I think of the appearance of my instruments I think of this little spot on the edge of my viola that my finger has left from years of shifting up to this one part.

And with the koto, the instruments are actually lacquered underneath the top layer, so that as the instrument

is worn and used, a kind of brightly colored gold lacquer comes forward.

The Degas painting The Dancing Class, we're not looking at a performance, we're seeing these dancers from backstage. And we see a musician in the painting.

The dancers paused, he's paused, and we anticipate the musical reel. We're waiting for this performance to happen.

Time slows down in the music of the Romantic period. In the hands of Brahms and Bruckner, we're given the opportunity as listeners to think. And there's the same kind of infinite quality that's present in Friedrich, we get the sense that these men are looking out into a kind of forever, way beyond the extension of the frame. Many people

think that musicians have to call upon some infinite source of emotion or psychology or memory set when we play, and that's actually not true.

We're sort of trained through our technique to make certain choices that will sound

sad or joyous. On the other hand it is very exhausting to perform because we can't divorce ourselves completely

from this emotional connection.