A Consideration of the Absolute in Visual Music Animation
Aimee Mollaghan
The idea of the absolute film first emerged in the early part of the twentieth century, reinforcing the philosophical or aesthetic connection between a certain body of non-objective moving image productions and non-programmatic music. The term absolute in relation to the absolute film is drawn from the concept of absolute music. In his 1891 treatise On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music, German musicologist Eduard Hanslick uses the phrase ‘absolute music’ to refer to music that is free from extra-musical considerations; music that can be described as abstract in nature; music that does not have an overt programme; music that is not explicitly about anything; music for music’s sake. Therefore, by virtue of drawing on this definition of absolute music, the absolute film might sensibly be defined as a moving image presentation that is abstract and non-figurative in nature without an overt programme or narrative.
Absolute music not only provided the ideal paradigm for a certain body of experimental animation in the twentieth century, but late-nineteenth-century musicological debates over absolute and programme music also established a theoretical precedent for the public discourse on experimental animation after 1900. A number of moving image artists were overtly inspired by the rhetoric, philosophy and metaphor of music. Drawing on the Romantic ideal of absolute music as the supreme universal language, these animators initially looked at the paradigm of absolute music to give a structure to their work and subsequently for spiritual expression. According to animation historian William Moritz, the term absolute was first appropriated from music and applied to the animated work of Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling and Walter Ruttmann by critics in the 1920s.
For the purposes of this chapter I wish to extend this analogy to draw on two distinct but overlapping musicological claims to the absolute, the formal absolutism of musicologist Eduard Hanslick and the spiritual absolutism of philosophers such as FWJ Schelling. The first was a formalist claim in which meaning is created through musical form rather than extra-musical elements. The second was a claim of transcendence from the world of the concrete and particular to that of the spiritual and universal. Philosophers such as Schelling and Arthur Schopenhauer reconciled these claims by contending that pure form in music could elevate it to a spiritual language and still contain purely musical meaning. Reducing the idea of the absolute to two overarching categories, the formal absolute and the spiritual absolute, not only allows for an overview of the changing trends and aesthetics of the absolute film but also provides a methodology for interrogating the moving image work of figures such as Richter, Eggeling, Jordan Belson, James Whitney and John Whitney, in the process illustrating how musical ideas can be applied conceptually to the moving image in order to elucidate both the musical and metaphysical characteristics of the text.
Absolute music
The idea of absolute music as a language that could be universally comprehended began to emerge in the nineteenth century. Influenced by Romanticism, philosophical ideas concerning music underwent a radical re-examination between the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Up until this point, in order for music to be regarded as a worthwhile contribution to society, thinkers and philosophers needed to attribute particular extra-musical meanings to it. Music needed to have a meaning outside of itself, in the form of a programme or narrative content, that influenced and was influenced by religious and moral beliefs. Consequently, purely instrumental music was almost completely rejected as a worthwhile mode of production. Ironically, according to Lydia Goehr, the abstract characteristics that led to this dismissal were those championed by later music critics and practitioners. (Goehr 1992, 148) This is not to say that this type of instrumental music replaced programme music entirely. Clearly, they have continued to coexist. There was, however, a distinct move by composers to legitimise instrumental or absolute music as a valid musical form, emancipating it from the need for an extra-musical programme. Further to this, Goehr asserts that the composers were also endeavouring to validate music as a sovereign art to be assessed on its own terms rather than those of painting and sculpture. They insisted that music was an art form that depended solely on itself and its specificity as a medium for its own significance (ibid.).
One could assert that a similar struggle occurred with the absolute film. A parallel can be drawn between music’s struggle for emancipation as a self-sufficient art form and the absolute film’s struggle for autonomy. Just as musicians felt the need to produce artefacts such as sheet music that allowed music to be reproduced, so too did experimental animators, drawing on the language of music to give form to their work. This, it can be posited, is one of the reasons why the colour organ or light show gave way to film as the medium of choice for artists such as Eggeling, Richter, Ruttmann and Fischinger for a period of time. Eventually, under the influence of the Romantic theorists, music came to be discussed in terms of unique forms such as the sonata and symphony that are peculiar to music itself. Musical form was now considered an independent cogent form, and in time, its formal qualities came to be appropriated by other art forms such as painting, sculpture, ballet and the film on a structural or metaphorical level.
Although it was Richard Wagner who first coined the term ‘absolute music’ in 1846, Hanslick was the first theorist to discuss it as a formal concept in 1891, ostensibly becoming an ideologue for the musical formalists. Theorists such as Nicholas Cook indicate that Hanslick’s theories were in fact misread as a repudiation of music’s ability to carry a transcendent meaning. Cook indicates that what matters in this circumstance is not what Hanslick meant but what he was understood to mean. By the early twentieth century the accepted reading of Hanslick was that music ‘was to be understood in exclusively structural terms while issues of meaning were ruled out of court’. (Cook 2001, 174) Under these terms, it is the tone material of music – the basic notes and rests – that expresses the musical idea. Musical compositions were considered complete and self-subsistent in and of themselves. They were not a medium for the projection of the ideas and feelings of the composer.
The second claim for absolute music was grounded in the notion of transcendence from the world of the concrete and particular to the realm of the spiritual and universal. FWJ von Schelling, similar to Arthur Schopenhauer, reconciled these claims by contending that pure form in music could elevate it to a spiritual language and still contain purely musical meaning. Schelling’s philosophy of music influenced both Schopenhauer and ETA Hoffmann. According to Mark Evan Bond, Hoffmann ‘perceived music as occupying an altogether separate sphere beyond the phenomenal, thereby endowing musical works with the power to provide a glimpse of the infinite’ (Evan Bond 1997, 412). He viewed musical harmony as ‘the image and expression of the communion of souls, of union with the eternal, with the ideal that rules over us and yet includes us’ (ibid.).
As I have argued, attempts to legitimise absolute music during the Romantic period left it in an ambiguous position. In addition to embodying itself as a formal musical structure, devoid of specific content, it could now embody everything. Ultimately, however, music’s emancipation from the extra-musical, its being freed from an obligation to provide a meaningful contribution to society and its subsequent autonomy in the Romantic period, led to it becoming an ideal model for the other arts. It became a particularly pertinent model for the absolute film, as film is a medium with which it shares several distinctive attributes such as temporality, rhythm, movement and the idea of fitting together.
The formal absolute film
The formalist debate over programmatic and non-programmatic music may have created a theoretical framework for the absolute film, but it was the disillusionment with existing artistic structures in the wake of the First World War that made the model of absolute music the ideal structure to underpin a new regime in art, music and film. In his essay ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, American art critic and champion of modernism Clement Greenberg identifies this shift from ideas that were bound up in nationalism and ideology after the Great War to one where there was an emphasis on form (Greenberg 2003, 541). There was a sense that artists were searching for a new way forward, free from the weight of history and what had come before. What better model for moving forward than that of absolute music, which, in the words of music theorist Daniel K. L. Chua, has ‘no history’ and ‘denies that it was ever born’? (Chua 1999, 9).
Artist Piet Mondrian encapsulated the prevailing mood in the post- First World War period when he stated: ‘For let us not forget that we are at a turning point of culture, at the end of everything ancient: the separation between the two is absolute and definite’ (Mondrian 2003, 290). There was a rejection of traditional concepts of beauty and a search for a new paradigm that would better serve the spirit of the age. The avant-garde search for a universal language that could provide a framework for the articulation of this spirit inevitably led avant-garde artists such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky to turn towards what Greenberg refers to as the ‘pure form’ of absolute music (Greenberg 2003, 565). Increasingly, there was a move towards an idea of art pour l’art and an increasing emphasis on form over content. As Guillaume Apollinaire states, ‘The subject no longer counts, or if it counts, it counts for very little’ (Apollinaire 2003, 187).
Greenberg proposes that the avant-garde arrived at this non-objective approach to art as a way of essentially imitating God by creating something original and irreducible in which ‘[c]ontent is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself’ (Greenberg 2003, 541). Due to painting striving for autonomy as an art form, this two-dimensionality was the only characteristic that painting could possess that was not shared with other plastic arts. Sculpture and even painting up until this point had existed in three dimensions, through the use of perspective and reference to external objects. Artist Hans Hofmann echoes this assertion claiming that the ‘essence of the picture is its two-dimensionality’ (Hofmann 2003, 373). Hoffmann, as Maya Deren would later do in relation to film, is making a claim that each art has a defining and unique feature. For Deren, temporality, a characteristic also specific to the medium of music, was film’s distinctive feature.
This emphasis on medium specificity in modernist theories of art and film can be considered analogous to the attempts musicians and philosophers made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to claim legitimacy for instrumental music by suggesting that music was an art form that had distinct qualities. Moreover, it seems to have a counterpart in formalism, which was seemingly advocated by Hanslick in relation to music in the nineteenth century. Chua contends that the ‘elevation of “Art” as some kind of divine utterance’ divorced from content and function appeared to endow modernity with the meaning and legitimisation it needed’ (Chua 1999, 13). He writes, ‘“Art” became a religion of modernity, and absolute music, as the condition to which all art should aspire, was its God’ (ibid., 13).
Filmmakers such as Richter and Eggeling were influenced not only by the formal qualities of absolute music but also by Kandinsky’s ideas on the spiritual in art. Kandinsky considered music to have a direct access to man’s soul due to the capacity of the abstract form to express inner longing. By the time Richter and Eggeling were introduced to each other by Dadaist Tristan Tzara in 1918, they were already separately pursuing the analogy between music and painting. Although Richter specifically wished to paint completely objectively, incorporating the principle of music in this work did not mean that he wished to create forms that imitated specific musical compositions or that either he or Eggeling were attempting to visualise music exactly. They were instead seeking a system or theory that would embody their philosophy. Richter asserts that such a system was to be found in the musical principle of counterpoint, which means ‘point against point’ or, more generally, ‘melody against melody’.
Commensurate with Schopenhauer’s proclamation that music ‘is such a great and exceedingly fine art, its effect on man’s inmost nature is so powerful, and it is so deeply and profoundly understood by him in his inmost being as an entirely universal language whose distinctiveness surpasses even that of the world of perception itself’, (Schopenhauer 1969, 256) Richter and Eggeling, like their contemporaries in the neo-plastic arts, were not merely trying to explore formal relationships but were attempting to create a new universal language of visual art. They produced a pamphlet, since lost, entitled Universelle Sprache, which outlined the grammar for their new universal language of art. Goehr writes that Romantic theorists argued that instrumental music, free of particularised content, is the most conceivable aspirant for being the ‘universal language of art’ (Goehr 1992, 155). Music was a direct route to a truth that transcended time and transitory human feelings to become something more than the product of the time in which it is produced. Musical form was therefore the obvious syntax for Richter and Eggeling to pursue.
In their search for this new universal language, Richter and Eggeling were striving for an art form analogous to formal absolute music, in which it is not the individual forms (the content) that are important (hence the dissolution of representation) but the relationship that these elements have to each other in the wider construction of the film form. At times, however, it would appear that, unlike in a formal absolute music sonata or symphony, it is the primacy of the relationship between the formal elements that takes precedence over the overarching structure. Eggeling’s Symphonie Diagonale (1921–24), for example, unites the formal visual elements of the animation through the standard of counterpoint and internal rhythm. This idea tallies with Hanslick’s ideas about cogency in musical form.
According to Hanslick, the four musical movements that underpin musical form (such as the sonata or symphony) coalesce according to laws of musical aesthetics. This is distinct from ideas on programmatic ‘feeling’ theories, which purported that the movements represented four separate states of the composer’s mind, which must be arranged into a coherent whole. Hanslick thought that if the movements of a composition appear unified, this unity could be considered to have its basis in musical determinants such as rhythm, harmony and melody. This is especially apparent in Richter’s film, Rhythmus 21 (1921–24). The form of the film is held together by the dynamism of the rhythm rather than a structured musical framework.
The first half of the twentieth century saw a progressive breaking down of musical structures that had prevailed in Western musical culture for over two hundred years. Traditional sonata and symphonic structure began to be abandoned in favour of new organisational forms. Just as music enjoyed a move from a purely formal aesthetic of the absolute (as seemingly advocated by formalists such as Hanslick) to one where absolute music could function on a formal and a spiritual level simultaneously, there was also a comparable move in the aesthetic and philosophical paradigm of the absolute film. R. Bruce Elder (2010) suggests that rather than celebrate the absolute film, the 1925 screening, Der Absolute Film, organised by the Novembergruppe in fact marked the end of the absolute film movement in Germany with the next substantial incarnation occurring in America (Elder 2010, 63–64).
Although there were artists such as Mary Ellen Bute engaging with the Absolute film and figures such as Hilla Von Rebay championing non-objective film and art on the East Coast of America, for the purposes of this chapter I am most interested in the more overt spiritual turn that it took on the West Coast of America in the post-war period. While the animations of John Whitney and Larry Cuba can visually be located within a graphic tradition, the strict formalism of Eggeling and Richter was to give way to a cinema of the spiritually absolute in this locale. Visually there was a marked shift from the geometric aesthetic to a more visceral gaseous one.
The spiritual absolute film
Music may have achieved legitimacy on a worldly level in the nineteenth century as an autonomous form that had value and meaning in itself, but it could also function on a spiritual level at the same time. It may have been freed from the obligation to embody the spiritual and infinite but it still retained the possibility of expressing these characteristics. During the 1950s and 1960s there was an evolution in the aesthetic and philosophical paradigm of the absolute film. Certainly, there was a progression from the silent hard-lined formal aesthetic of the German absolute filmmakers Richter and Eggeling to the graphic sound films of figures such as Fischinger, Bute and Norman McLaren, but the absolutism of these filmmakers ceded to a more nebulous, abstruse spiritualism when it made its way to the American West Coast. This was for several reasons: The influx into the United States of the European avant-garde artists and filmmakers (including figures such as Richter and Fischinger) following the impending outbreak of the Second World War; a philosophical shift by the American avant-garde away from what they viewed as a European conservatism; the establishment of the Art in Cinema screenings in San Francisco in the late 1940s; changing viewing contexts; a rise in the practice of Eastern religions; and the use of perception-altering drugs such as LSD, mescaline and peyote by the counterculture in their search for a transcendental experience.
Further to this, Eastern religions such as Buddhism became valuable sources of inspirations for filmmakers on the American West Coast in the 1960s. This is not only because they carried valuable cultural currency in that locale, but, as David E. James points out, the ‘emphasis on vision in meditation’ made it easy to adapt the spiritual function to the screen (James 1989, 128). Heavily influenced by the audiovisual relationship in the formal absolute films of Richter, Eggeling, Ruttmann and Fischinger, the West Coast filmmakers Jordan Belson and John and James Whitney began to adapt their moving image work in order to explore a tension between the mystical and the formal, extending the more graphic and hard-lined animation of Fischinger et al. to encompass a more halitous, gaseous style of animation that embodied more overtly metaphysical concerns.
James Whitney began to collaborate with his brother John on a series of short films entitled Five Film Exercises (1943–44). Composed of simple abstract shapes, these exercises were primarily a formal exploration of the audiovisual relationship. While John continued to pursue a predominantly formal agenda based on theories of harmony in his visual music, James Whitney and Belson began to make films that were influenced by interests in mysticism, Jungian psychology, alchemy, yoga, Taoism, quantum physics, Krishnamurti, Ramana Maharshi and consciousness expansion. William C. Wees refers to James Whitney’s films as ‘films for the inner eye’, a categorisation that can be readily expanded to encompass the work of Belson too (Wees 1992, 136).
Just as contemporaneous composers who wished to embody the spiritual in their music turned East for inspiration, so too did filmmakers like Belson and James Whitney, not merely for visual inspiration but also for musical inspiration. There was a move towards a more minimal aesthetic in music and visual art in the 1960s, which in turn inspired a sparser, more formal appearance in the aesthetic of the absolute films by animators such as Norman McLaren in Canada.1
In addition, Eastern musical traditions had an influence on the work of minimalist composers such as Philip Glass, Lamonte Young, Steve Reich and Terry Riley. With the exception of Lamonte Young, who became a renowned teacher of Indian music, these composers adopt particular characteristics of Eastern music – for example, shunning harmony and using Eastern concepts of arranging rather than composing music – rather than entirely committing to Eastern music and its philosophical underpinnings. They instead assume aspects of it but still reside within the confines of a Western classical condition that continued to place an emphasis on the privileged role of the composer and instruments that are recognisable to the Western ear. In a similar manner, McLaren appropriated many of these characteristics for the structure of his three minimalist Line films (Lines Vertical (1960), Lines Horizontal (1962) and Mosaic (1965)) while aesthetically remaining within the margins of the formally absolute visual music film. However, in consonance with Schelling’s Idealist notions of the cosmos and the arts being one, Whitney and Belson did not just incorporate elements of Indian music and its surrounding philosophy, but embraced it aesthetically as a whole.
Indian classical music, like Western classical music, has its basis in religion and spirituality, yet it enjoys a more explicit function within Hindu theology, equating sound (Nada) with a manifestation of the unifying Absolute (Brahman). This sacred sound, Nada-Brahman is carried through the ragas of Indian music. According to ancient Vedic scriptures there are two types of sound. The first is called Anahata Nada (the unstruck or unmanifested sound). This is what the ancient Pythagoreans referred to as the music of the spheres, the sound that the celestial bodies make as they move through the universe. Ravi Shankar notes that it is the ‘vibration of ether, the upper or purer air near the celestial realm’ (Shankar 2006). It is this sound that is sought by the ‘great enlightened’ yogis during their hours of meditation and contemplation. The second sound is referred to as Ahata Nada (struck sound). This type of sound encompasses any sound heard in general surroundings, whether musical or non-musical, man-made or natural.
Robert Sims writes that Indian music explicitly recognises ‘the relationship existing between music and the spiritual dimension’ (Sims 1992–93, 63). He also posits that almost all facets of Indian culture are founded on principles of the transcendent and are unified by an ‘awareness of the cosmic hierarchy’ (ibid., 65). Finally, he proposes that if cosmology refers to the hierarchical order of reality that is both microcosmic and macrocosmic in nature, then music, which by its very nature is the ordering of sound, is an ‘appropriate’ and natural cosmological symbol (ibid., 70). These are the very reasons why Eastern music is a particularly apt model for the structuring of images in the spiritually absolute films of Belson and Whitney. It both binds together the cycles of images that constitute their moving image work as a constant mantra as well as functioning as another spiritual element in the search for metaphysical transcendence and the Absolute.
There is a marked problem when one tries to articulate the ineffable. James Whitney clearly understood the limitations of existing language to express the inexpressible and asserts that he seeks to ‘go beyond any language’ (Whitney, quoted in Wees 1992, 112). Whitney designed his films as aids to meditation and used rhythmical abstraction in an attempt to induce a trance-like state in the observer. Essentially, the dot patterns on the screen in Yantra (1957) are functioning as an instrument to focus psychic forces by concentrating them on a pattern. By directing the viewer’s eye towards this pattern at the centre of the screen, he is holding both the viewer’s outer and inner eye captive, hypnotising them to carry them on their cosmic journey.
Both Belson and Whitney foreground the circle in their films through their appropriation of circular images derived from cosmology, such as clouds of nebulae, the circular form and movement of the images themselves, the overarching circular structure of the films and their use of cyclical musical forms such as the Indian raga. The raga is a form of music fundamental to Indian music that does not have a direct equivalent within the Western classical tradition. Modal in character, it makes use of microtonal intervals (tones between the 12 tones of the Western keyboard). Indian classical musicians improvise on the form of the raga, assembling melodic sequences through playing rather than composing them in the Western classical music tradition. This central framework is undergirded by tradition and built on by the ability of musicians to improvise following years of dedicated study. Aesthetically, a raga is the ‘projection of the artist’s inner spirit, a manifestation of his most profound sentiments and sensibilities brought forth through tones and melodies. The musician must breathe life into each raga as he unfolds and expands it’ (Shankar, 2006). As much as 90 per cent of Indian music may be improvised and depends on the musician’s understanding of the nuances and subtleties of the raga on which he is extemporising.
A parallel can be made between this idea of an Indian musician and the manner in which Jordan Belson and James Whitney slowly assembled rather than composed their films over long periods of time. Belson dedicated himself to the study of Eastern religion, philosophy and practice before choosing a visual raga and improvising on it in real time. Temporally, Yantra loosely draws its structure from an Indian raga. The flicker in Yantra establishes a pulse to draw the audience into the rhythm of the film, working like a drone over which the melody of dot images is played. Yantra is arranged in a series of cycles in the same manner as a traditional Indian raga. As the film progresses the initial cycle of dot formations is repeated in subsequent cycles with subtle variations, just like a sitar player improvising around the central theme of a raga until it reaches the final cycle. The dot is the basic compositional form for all images in the film and recurs throughout. These clusters of dots continue to fluctuate and dance around the screen surface like subatomic particles racing around the nucleus of an atom. Whitney’s dots, due to the simplicity of their structure, have an ambiguity to them, and it is this ambiguity that allows Whitney to make connections at microcosmic and macrocosmic levels. This idea harks back to the Neo-Platonic theory of microcosm and macrocosm in which identical patterns can be identified at all levels of the cosmos. It is also found in Eastern religions such as Taoism. Whitney’s dots can embody the most minute atomic particles and cells while simultaneously exemplifying all of the celestial bodies in the universe.
Although the absolute film adopts music as its paragon, rather paradoxically, many of the early absolute films either eschewed the inclusion of a music soundtrack, appropriated pre-existing music or music composed on completion of the images of the film. The American West Coast animators (John Whitney specifically), however, were adamant that their films should be original audiovisual compositions in which the sound and image shared an equal partnership. This, as John Whitney’s films Permutations (1968) and Arabesque (1975) and James Whitney’s films Yantra and Lapis (1966) demonstrate, was not always borne out. Belson however, looked on music as an integral part of his work, assembling his own soundtracks in relation to the images. He adopted an approach to sound and image that was predicated on intersensory correspondence in a more evident manner than that of the Whitney brothers, determined that the audience would not know if they were ‘seeing it or hearing it’ (Youngblood 1970, 155). Belson firmly believed the two media ‘to be connected in their strong relevance to the subconscious mind and to basic psychological and physiological phenomena’ (Belson quoted in Polta and Sandal 1961). He claimed that electronic music makes use of reverberations of sound present in human perceptions when the brain does not repress them. This is reflective of the Indian spiritual belief that the vibrations in music correspond to the vibrations of the cosmos.
There are many reasons why Indian music is a particularly apt model for the ‘cosmic cinema’ (Youngblood 1970) of Jordan Belson and James Whitney. It is fundamentally impersonal. According to Ananda Coomaraswamy it ‘reflects an emotion and an experience which are deeper and wider and older than the emotion or wisdom of any single individual’. (Coomaraswamy 1917, 164–65). On a surface level, however, Belson’s films may seem personal. He is after all presenting his own personal experience of intense meditation, as in Samadhi (1967). He also confesses that he does not make up the images in his films but has already seen them either externally or internally (Youngblood 1970, 159). However, although Belson may have seen the images with his inner or outer eyes, these images are impersonal archetypal images associated with deep meditation, hallucination or drug use. He is also employing traditional Eastern imagery, representations of space and images from closed-eye vision that the viewer is most likely also familiar with and, like a classical Indian musician playing a raga on a sitar, he is creating an improvisation around a theme. Belson is not composing his film but is assembling it in order to reflect Coomaraswamy’s idea of reflecting universal emotions and experiences that are greater than any single individual.
A synthesis between the formal and spiritual
Even though John Whitney’s initial moving image offerings were composed in collaboration with his brother James, aesthetically his digital animations reside within the lineage of the German incarnation of the absolute film, featuring graphic geometric patterns against black space that are subject to defined mathematical parameters. He modified this earlier incarnation, however, to allow for more metaphysical concerns, while still functioning on a formal level. Echoing the clarion call of partisans for the avant-garde such as Richter and Eggeling in Germany, Greenberg, Barnett Newman and indeed Belson in America, John Whitney called for a new language for his expression of the absolute. In Digital Harmony, his treatise on this new language, he lauded music ‘as most worthy of study among prior arts’ (Whitney 1980, 44–45), asserting that the foundation for his new art was based on musical – and by extension mathematical – principles. These principles reflected a broader context wherein Pythagorean laws of harmony operate. He strove to produce a body of absolute animations in service to this.
The Pythagorean conception of harmony predicated on mathematics was to exert a profound influence on Whitney’s ideas of digital harmony. The Pythagoreans, who were followers of ancient Greek Ionian philosopher Pythagoras, considered music, the cosmos and numbers to be synonymous. Idealist philosophers like Schelling, acknowledged Pythagorean ideas pertaining to the role of music in relation to the absolute. Schelling draws on Pythagorean ideas of reconciling the soul and number, stating that it is the temporality and arithmetical side of music that constitutes a ‘universal form’ which allows for the reconciliation of the ‘infinite’ into something, which can be comprehended by the human intellect (Schelling 1989, 117). Thus, Schelling postulates that ‘rhythm, harmony, and melody’, the ‘first and purest forms of movement in the universe’, elevate and allow the cosmic bodies to float in space (ibid.). Chua suggests that the absolute music articulated by the Romantics diverges from the ideals of the Pythagorean conception of music; the music of Pythagoras was one in which the world was composed by music whereas the music of the modern world was ‘one manufactured by instrumental reason’ (Chua 1999, 15). In fact, as Chua points out, that ancient world of the Pythagoreans was ‘more rational in its organisation of the cosmos than the modern world, for its music was rationality itself’ (ibid.).
In his call for a new language, Whitney echoed Richter’s and Eggeling’s earlier calls for a new audiovisual language based on the model of music. However, rather than simply appealing to the universal, absolute or temporal nature of music, Whitney was also interested in the movement and patterns associated with music. Furthermore, Whitney made clear the need for a new language and grammar to underpin his art but did not consider the contemporary arts at the time to be moving in a direction sufficient to this realisation. Whitney’s vision for a new art, with a new language, also required a new technology. Whitney considered existing animation processes to be inadequate to the structure of this new language and appropriated the computer graphic with its underlying mathematical foundations as the generative building block and visual equivalent to the musical tone. The visual periodicity and harmonics of the computer graphic made it readily accessible to dynamic manipulation through the fledgling computer. Whitney came to use the Graphic Additions to FORTRAN (GRAF) programming language developed by Jack Citron at IBM.2
As with his earlier films made with his brother James on their self-engineered mechanical pendulum instrument, Whitney was resolute that the relationship of sight and sound would be best served through the utilisation of motion as the common aesthetic that allows the structure of music to be translated into moving images. In order for this concept to function, Whitney had to suppose that musically derived mathematical patterns functioned outside of music and could be applied in alternative contexts, in this case graphic pictorial forms. Whitney speculated that motion could become pattern if the objects are moved differentially, recalling Fischinger’s claim that ‘new motions and rhythms’ which asserted themselves became increasingly important when ‘acoustical laws’ were applied to ‘optical expression’ (Fischinger 1946, 112). This is ostensibly the same as tones in music becoming melody through a movement from one tone to the next. As Whitney states, ‘emotion from music derives from force-fields of musical structuring in tension and motion’ (Whitney 1980, 40). This is also true in the visual world when motion is introduced to pictorial elements.
Although Whitney has stated that the content of music is motion, in actuality it is a series of tones arranged into a pattern that develops over time. Musical tones are the raw material of the structure of music. Whitney uses the computer pixel as his raw material to be sculpted temporally, just as musical tones dance across time to create music. In order for Whitney to create the motion of music he is using a visual equivalent of the musical tone. Just as his brother James adopted the dot, John employs the point to create patterns in animations such as Permutations and Arabesque, which are in a constant state of flux. With these computer-engendered works it is immediately clear that Whitney has borrowed from traditional Persian pattern construction. In Matrix III (1972) he uses simple geometric figures of triangles and hexagons but, more interestingly, he uses a series of points arranged into patterns resembling those found in Islamic art and, in both Arabesque and Permutations, the rose windows of the Gothic period. There is a precise harmonious geometry governing the distribution of constituent elements of Islamic designs and rose patterns, and through the use of these structuring elements in his new digital approach, he is making a visual connection between the origins of mathematics and geometry and the absolute.
Conclusion
In conclusion, drawing on the analogy of the absolute in music, this chapter has demonstrated the philosophical or aesthetic connection between a certain body of non-objective moving image productions and non-programmatic music. It has established that there were two main claims for music under the new Romantic ideals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first, formalist claim, rested on the contention that music gained meaning through its specific form and content rather than extra-musical material. The second, spiritual claim, allowed for a shift from the tangible and concrete in order to facilitate metaphysical, universal considerations. This consideration of the absolute through these two categories, the formal absolute and the spiritual absolute, provided a way in which to examine how musical concepts can be applied as a framework for expounding the musical and ineffable qualities of a moving image text. Furthermore, by using the concept of the formal absolute and the spiritual absolute as a framework, it has allowed for an overview of changing trends and aesthetics of the absolute film.
There is a substantial transformation in aesthetic from the hard-lined minimalist expression of the formal absolute in the films of the modernist visual music filmmakers Eggeling, Ruttmann and Richter to the gaseous, amorphous, spiritually informed visual music practice of the American West Coast filmmakers. Given the intangibility and abstruseness of the absolute film, one must question what the next phase in its evolutionary history might be. To a certain extent, the underlying philosophy of absolute music has been taken up by contemporary figures such as Scott Draves and Bret Battey. Both Draves and Battey appear to be answering John Whitney’s call for a technology and new language as an articulation of the absolute through their software-based audiovisual compositions often grounded in generative computer algorithms. The computer animated work of both artists, is like the canonical absolute films of figures such as Fischinger or John Whitney, undergirded by metaphysical concerns. Battey’s work is influenced by Indian music and contemplative practice, and Draves writes that he is interested in ‘throwing off the reins of the material world and entering into a more abstract or mathematical or even spiritual world, and making the connections’ through his compositions (Draves 2013). However, rather than existing as discrete films, these works often function within expanded contexts or exist within a number of different iterations, with both artists using software as an audiovisual instrument, yet this progression in line with developments in technology and society seems like a natural evolution in absolute moving image practice.
Notes
1 For an example of this see Norman McLaren, Lines Vertical (1960), Lines Horizontal (1962) and Mosaic (1965).
2 GRAF was derived from FORTRAN, the programming language initially developed by IBM in the 1950s for engineering and scientific computing which also came to be used by composers such as Iannis Xenakis for musical composition.
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