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Edna Stern wrote (August 4, 2009):
A few years ago I had a little discussion with a great musician who plays a lot of Bach and polyphonic music about this picture of Klee “Polyphon geffastes Weiss”. He explained how the white center is what we attempt to achieve and there are different ways of approaching it- through the warm red or through the more cool blue, but both ways somehow aim for the same effect. Last year, when I was working on Bach most of my time, I realized how much Bach’s music is based on the movement of a circle and was at the same time extremely square. It is a circle in the way the voices connect with each other so as never to end all at the same time (as opposed to classical compositions for example). When one voices ends, another one will start and take over the theme which gives this feeling of continuation and spin. At the same time it is build on a strict number of measures, never to be changed and the structure of the material’s presentation is extremely square. Lately, I saw again this painting and thought Klee’s representation of (Bach’s) polyphony brilliant and true. A circle of squares. |
