As I said at the time …
I largely distrust art about art. It’s not that I haven’t written poems about poetry, much less music or paintings. I think we all do, sometimes as a matter of reflecting on the practice we pursue as artists. Why do I write what I do, in this voice or style? Where do I fall in the stream’s current?
The danger is that such work can become incestuous. Artists of all stripes can easily perceive themselves as high priests of the mysterious or marvelous. We are inspired, or so we think. Or at least super-sexy. We have special visions and heightened awareness. We speak our own jargon. So what if the masses cannot understand if it heightens our niche? What sells is commercial, and we point to its cheap tricks, unless it’s feeding our wallets.
What happens, of course, is we speak more and more to each other, rather than the world we inhabit. We celebrate ourselves, rather than searching outward. We become artistes, caricatures who flock to cafés and late-night bars, rather than hard-working creators. Paris wasn’t Paris when it was the expats’ hot stomping ground. Their old photos look more than funky.
Consider, for a second, the opera. Let me argue that Butterfly, free of the artist halo, is a more fascinating and touching character than Tosca, the opera singer. Parsifal or Lohengrin, than Meistersinger. Orpheus moves me as a widower, rather than for the power of his music. The magic flute, fortunately, becomes a mere footnote in Mozart’s cosmic comedy.
That’s before we even get to the application of “poetry” to describe another art. A pianist whose playing is “poetic,” for example, or the “poetry” of a piece of architecture. Again, it becomes incestuous or self-celebratory and essentially meaningless. Do we mean pianism that’s introspective and not flashy? Then what about humorous poetry? Do we mean architecture that instills a sense of awe or one that’s lean and understated? And so on. Should we even ask which poet the critic had in mind?
This might also have something to do with the fact that I’ve spent most of my adult life as a journalist, rather than in a full-time literary profession. I don’t teach writing or literature. Even in religion, where I am actively engaged, it’s not in paid ministry – which can seem somehow tainted by the fact it’s a job or employment. They overlap, of course.
Despite that, I have written collections that remain homage. My unfinished Corridors arises in the experiences of visiting art museums over a lifetime, as well as making art: while individual pieces are named after various artists, I should point out there is rarely a direct connection between the two, other than the spirit of life. Likewise, the Partitas and Fugues cannot employ a direct correspondence between musical form and language – if anything, in acknowledging the wonder and joy such works stir within a listener, my poems only admit the chasm between pure music and an aspiration for a pure language, apart from literal meaning.
Now, out into the field beyond the field across the stream below the house, as it were.
Jnana's Red Barn 
great post.
As I’m reading this, I have playing in my mind Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.”
I am not an artist, but it seems to me that it’s when art becomes closed in on itself that the problem you describe arises. Which is interesting when you think about Luther’s definition of sin as “homo incurvatus in se”!
I’m tempted to take you to task about the idea that paid ministry is tainted – do not labourers deserve their food? – but perhaps that is a whole other discussion. 😉
That matter of money likely taints anyone, not just ministers, especially when its done as a “job” more than a calling. We can, indeed, get into a long discussion on that issue, especially when it inhibits the message. For the record, the majority of Quakers around the world today have paid pastors, although many of them must work another job to make ends meet. (It’s the “tent-making” phenomenon common to many Protestant congregations these days.) Among Friends, I see the money they receive as support for being “released” to do the work on the Meeting’s behalf — certainly the Friends who traveled in ministry in the old days were supported with food and housing as they went.
The Mussorgsky running in your mind is an interesting exception (in both the piano and orchestrated versions), set more in the composer’s experiences of the visual works and the memories of his friends rather than in trying to actually depict them. Could it be that this music is really more about mortality than the sketches and visual studies that inspired them?
There’s other visual-arts inspired music, of course — I’m thinking of Gunther Schuller’s studies of Paul Klee, for starters.
As you suggest, Luther just might hold the reply for us here, along the lines of our necessity of letting let Light in. As Luther often inscribed at the head of his scores, To the glory of God.