Kandinksy Blue Painting 1924

for flute, vibraphone, viola & double bass

Commissioned by Ensemble Offspring for the Klänge Live Music Program at AGNSW 2024.

In 2005, I revisited New York, the first time since I’d left my hometown of Brooklyn in 1985. I don’t remember visiting the Guggenheim as a child, so it was a wonderous visit there, where I encountered Kandinsky’s “Blue Painting 1924” and promptly bought the poster from the gallery shop and transported it back to Sydney safe it in its cardboard tube to be framed and hung on my wall for the next 16 years.

After moving house, renovating and moving back in – it was hung back up on the wall in 2023 with a renewed interest, at the same time as learning that this painting was arriving in Sydney for the AGNSW exhibition. Serendipitously, at a rehearsal session, Ilearned from Claire Edwardes that she was curating a series of concerts for AGNSW which drew inspiration from Kandinsky!

This commission from Ensemble Offspring has allowed me to delve into the painting again, and explore Kandinsky’s synaesthesia, where the shapes and colours dancing on the canvas evoked particular sound worlds in his mind.

In my exploration of this 100-year-old painting, I have structured the work over a 7-minutetimespan, interpreting the shapes and colours according to Kandinsky’s colour theory, moving around the painting and giving around 20-40seconds to each shape in a guided improvisation for the quartet to perform.

This improvised material is contrasted with a backing track of deep blue sounds, electronically created with a slowly shifting organ-like synth representing “spirituality and infinity”.

Examples of musical gestures included are:

-Green circle –Peace, stillness, quiet strength, somewhat hopeful

-A group of black arched lines –a three-note rhythm repeating randomly

-Red square –Alive, restless, energy, joy (fanfare-like rhythms)

-Yellow triangle –explodes into psychotic shrill and loud music

Improvisation allows for the performers to shape the sounds like sculptors, and bring their own interpretation to the shapes and colours that are presented to them on the score alongside notated pitches and rhythms as a guide. This type of “aleatoric” score is the most suited method of creating artistic expression in the abstract style of the painter. It also allows the artists to be in touch with their “spiritual selves”; something that Kandinsky craved for artists to be authentic in their expression and transcend the reality of this world.