Music and visual arts

Music and visual arts… So different at first glance. Can there be anything in common between them?

Music is invisible, painting, sculpture, and architecture are inaudible. The formation of musical images takes place in time, and visual images – in space. However, when we perceive art, we feel that music often evokes visual images, and painting, for example, a landscape, begins to “sound” with bright colors. The color of a painting can be compared to the timbre colors in music, and melodies can be compared to the expressiveness of graphic lines or the outlines of architectural structures that form certain shapes.

The thinkers of the past called architecture “frozen music” or “music in stone”. Indeed, we can feel the harmony of combining the parts of a work into a complete composition, the symmetry or asymmetry of the structure of an architectural structure, as well as the pictorial image of a painting or the form of a musical play. Various alternations of musical sounds, as well as alternations of elements in visual arts (for example, in ornaments), form a certain rhythm.

Music can fulfill a special humanistic mission in a movie. An example is the movie Titanic (directed by James Cameron), about a great disaster. In the climactic episode, when everyone on the liner, which hit an iceberg and split in two, panicked, musicians picked up their bows and played beautiful melodies of high classical music. The calm, sublime chamber music kept the spirit of the doomed people alive, who were gripped by horror and despair. The musicians played until the last minute, until the ocean swallowed them up along with the other victims. The leitmotif of eternal love was the song from this movie, an outstanding soundtrack by James Harper. The movie Titanic was crowned with a number of Oscars, including for its music.