One day in the German city of Dessau, a pupil of Painter Paul Klee saw him marching down the center of the sidewalk, absentmindedly keeping time to the music of a passing band. What he was pondering, explained Klee, was the rhythmic relationship between the music and the slabs of concrete passing beneath his feet. To illustrate, he drew a sketch: a stream of smoothly flowing lines set off against a series of thrusting rectangles. Klee, son of a musicologist and himself an accomplished violinist, long wavered between music and painting; throughout his life (he died in 1940) he kept seeing rhythmic parallels between the two arts. "And so I gently slide into the world of tonality," said he at 24, when he began to turn from etching to painting.
Composers, in turn, have heard the musical echoes in Klee's wiry, convoluted paintings, studded with runic signs and symbols. Last week Manhattan audiences lad an unusual introduction to the world of Paul Klee as it appears to two contemporary U.S. composers.
¶ Gunther Schuller's Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee had its premiere with the visiting Minneapolis Symphony under Conductor Antal Dorati. Each of Schuller's studies took its name from a Klee painting, tried to preserve the rhythms of the work and in some cases the colors. Antique Harmonies, for instance, is a canvas of overlapping blocks, ranging from near black through amber, ochre and brown to brighter colors; to Schuller, it suggested a hushed, dense background of woodwinds, interrupted by "the brighter yellow of the trumpets and high strings." Klee's famed Twittering Machine, which looks something like an inverted mobile from which fishing lures have been suspended, inspired Schuller to a snatch of serial music in which the orchestra beeped, squeaked and rasped like a rusty hinge while the muted brasses burped out shreds of sound. Little Blue Devil, a complex of overlapping triangles, rectangles and pentagons, suggested a perky blues mood. Arab Village, an aerial view in yellows and browns, inspired Schuller to write a theme resembling nothing so much as the casbah scene in an early Ronald Colman movie.