Interesting extracts from Nicholas Cook's 'Analysing Musical Multimedia'

[Eisenstein] complained that people like Kandinski 'propose an aimless, vague, "absolutely free" inner tonaility (der innere Klang), neither as a direction nor as a means, but as an end in itself, as the summit of achievement." (pp50)

"Eisenstein's concept of montage ... that different media relate to one another through shared qualities, and in particular through shared emotional qualities; to this extent Eisenstein's theory of cross media relationships is very like Kandinski's. But for Eisenstein these abstract relationships articulate the essentially distinct contents of individual media." (eg a crowd of people on screen and emotional music may be linked through rhythm, perception but each retains its own specificity. (pp50)

"Eisenstein: 'Modern esthetics [sic] is built upon the disunion of elements,' he says, quaoting from Réne Guilleré; accordingly, 'Matching of picture and sound ... may be built upon a combination of unlike elements, without attempting to conceal the resulting dissonance between the aurals and the visuals'. ... [T]his is not to suggest that the two media should simply go their own way ([as in Cage/ Cunningham]) however; the media may correspond with one another or they may not, Eisenstein says, but 'in either circumstance the relationship music be compositionally controlled'." (pp54) >>> CV - there is a third way, inbetween Cage/ Cunningham's free relationship and the compositionally controlled and that is free journeys of the material within constrained horizons encircling fixed material.

"Picture and music are related not directly, but by virtue of something that they embody" (pp 57)

"Brecht: 'So long as the expression 'Gesamtkunstwerk' (or integrated work of art') means that the integration os a muddle, so long as the arts are supposed to be 'fused' together, the various elements will all be equally degraded, and each will act as a mere 'feed' for the rest. The process of fusion extends to the spectator, who gets thrown into the melting pot too and becomes a passive (suffering) part of the total work of art. Witchcraft of this sort must of course be fought against. Whatever is intended to produce hypnosis, is likely to induce sordid intoxication, or creates fog, must be given up." (pp126)
>>> CV - Amen. This witchcraft - of layered phenomonolgies - coinciding and colliding and confusing the audient is the type of artform I understand opera to be ... and not what I am attempting to create. However, this fusion of visual and aural works well in cinema; but the exception is that the audient becomes a spectator to the visual image immersed in sound (with the eye and ear working well to convince the legitimacy of the other - see Murch in Chion, Chion and Altman) but in live theatre the audience and the performer (sound, dancer, actor) are both participants; the experience of which is another phenomenological element added to the quiche.

"Kershaw condemning the 'fawning dependency of visual image of sound' [King visual and Queen sound] 'that results from too tight a co-ordination of the two; any such 'simplistic one-to-one relationship'. he says, results in 'the one becoming a mere embellishment, a condiment to the other' (pp126)
>>> CV - The message within each medium should be allowed to be unadulterated - phenomenologically speaking the whole experience elicited in an audient from smelling the scent of a flower does not need the image of that flower to enhance the experience. Going back to Don Idhe: each living experience is registered and stored as a totality of all sense modalities, and the phenomenological response to each sense conjures up a whole memory ... the question here then is what image, or sound, or other sensorial 'message'/ 'metaphor' would be appropriate to accompany and enhance the audient experience of smelling the scent of a flower?

"Kershaw: "It is vital that each medium be permitted to develop according to its own "inner necessity" (pp127)