The Music: A Poetic Chant

Last Updated on November 28, 2017 by Patrick

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.
Frederic Chopin.

One of the most beautiful works of musical art that inspired me and pushed me further into practising photography were The Nocturnes by Frederic Chopin, the famous Polish composer. I did not notice at first when I started photographing, but it drew me closer to this visual art and into understanding what seeing is and, most of all, what seeing musically really is. Now, let me explain this. When I travel, the world is like a song to me. The seasons, the weather, and most important of all, the sky with its clouds and the Sun, they are all singing together atuned to the rhythms and harmonies behind them. And where is this “behind the sky and clouds”? Well, it’s the entire Universe, actually. Did I mean to say “above”? Maybe..

Anyway, I’ve went to shoot in the city again, after a few years of avoiding it. Maybe because the city had become ugly into my eyes, but still, as I remember, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I guess I have to fight with identifying myself with the “outer world”. But nevermind, I’ve shot some into the night. And the night is one of my favourite times to shoot because I find it less distracting, I can concentrate better, the city is quiter, I guess.

And silence was I looking for? I would tell myself, yes. When silence is singing, music is silent, that is to say, silence has a sound that is played between the musical notes. The gap can be huge or it can be small, it depends. Low-key photography and night photography, in general, is quiter than high-key photography, which screams of whiteness. It requires patience and slowing down, instead of fast pacing oneself and quickly getting the “decisive moment” done. You can scream or you can sing loudly. Or you can affirm things you want to say with a high voice. White, for instance, is sang with the highest possible notes. White is similar to ultrasounds.

Chopin’s Nocturnes are easy, meditative and they make me dance gently into the night, into the dim light of the alleys of the crickets, after dusk. Night changes many thoughts, they say, and I’d like to say that night is the best counselor. To me, night is my mother. I was born in the night. I am Her son. I cannot forget Her. She calls me into Her realm of quietness, solitude and contemplation. I regenerate and recreate myself in the night. And I don’t mean sleep, which is physical, but I mean I recreate my conscience, my mind.

It is a peace that is transmitted through the kindness of the Nocturne piano. Chopin knew that gently striking the keys and being easier on the notes, he would speak clearly to the hearts of the listeners. Peace would come only when gentleness, kindness is practiced day in and day out, not through rabid activism in the streets. It is an age-old message coming late from a Polish brother of ours. But better late than never.

Why haven’t we listened, so far, to the great sages of old? Why have we been stuck in concepts, unable to understand them? I wonder these because I see no reason to postpone happiness and prosperous times. I only see the reason to do what it’s right. But I guess I am late too, and so the world is late as well. My history is the history of the world, in this case. If I am late, the world is late.

But better late then never, right? Really? I’d say, what we have lost will immerse itself into the entrails of the night. What happens to those values which we think are lost? They are recycled, so comes to my mind.

Many hundreds of years ago during the Renaissance Era, classical music (which wasn’t named as such, back then, but only music) conveyed rhythms and harmonies, polifonies and rigorous sounds. With Chopin’s Nocturnes, new possibilities and expression were conveyed with music that were loosened from openmindedness. It opened the door to the nightly jazz of the Gershwin brothers in the early twentieth century. And so, night is what these musics tell me of. And when I saw the backlit tree downtown, I knew immediately that this is the right kind of photography, writing with light on a black canvas. I was intrigued by the silhouette of the great tree in the middle of the park. I thought of Michael Kenna, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and others who can be now named the fathers of photography. They also had music in them to sing, to interpret. Their photographs were and still are great sheets of music.

In the twentieth century, after the dividing of classical music with the coming of jazz as a new kind of such music, the contemporaries went home with it as well. They created their own styles. Arvo Part comes to my mind with his minimal piano. Simplicity is what Chopin achieved and yearned for all his life. And simplicity was achieved in the past century by those who reduced their entire opus to easy and simple notes, yet artistically composed, that touched chords within oneself. And so, the minimal style of music expanded, if we can say so, to develop itself on the shoulders of its artists. Where was the inspiration drawn from? I think from life lived simply. Mere and small acts of love and kindness to one another are needed. No grand deeds are to be done anymore, since we shook the world with our huge endeavours. Now, we go back to origins, to the notes themselves.

The thing with musicians nowadays is that they are closing the courtains. There is nothing more that can be done in classical music world wide, but to express the coming of the night to our civilization, to our establishment. We’ve gone too far…