Homage to
Federico Mompou
and his Sacred Music of Silence
Musica Callada
We have fallen into
the place
where everything
is music.
Rumi
Introduction
This project is my heartfelt homage to the Spanish born composer and pianist Federico Mompou (1893-1987). The focus of the project is Mompou's late and final work entitled Musica Callada, a sacred work of art which consists of 28 hauntingly beautiful and perfectly sequenced miniature solo piano compositions which he published in four separate folios: the first dated 1959, the second, 1962, the third, 1965, and the last in 1967 when he was 74 years of age.
The number "74" is quite auspicious to me in regard to this project, for not only did Mompou complete Musica Callada when he was 74 years of age, coincidently I turned 74 years of age in September, 2019 while I was working on this project. Also, Mompou recorded Musica Callada--along with all of his other piano solo miniatures--in 1974 (at the age of 81).
Perhaps age explains to some extent why I feel such a strong identification with Mompou and his music which touches me deeply and opens my heart. In the past several years I have become interested mostly in quieter more contemplative music. In the mid to late 1990's I had purchased several CD's of Mompou's music, and though I enjoyed his music then it did not impact my life with the force and depth that Musica Callada does for me now, 20 years later after rediscovering his music around the time of my 74th birthday.
This project has been blessed with multiple synchronistic coincidences, including an event which occurred in June, 2019 that was instrumental in returning me to Mompou's music. After the presentation of my photographs, below, I will share that story and elaborate upon the phenomena known as synchronicity which I have considered central to my Creative Process since I wrote about it in 1971-72 to satisfy an MFA written thesis requirement at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
The photographs I have presented in this project are not exactly a visual response to Mompou's music, for the process by which they came into being was significantly different compared to most of my other homage projects. Nonetheless, there is no question in my mind that the images are inseparably interconnected with the same radiant energy that I experience in Mompou's Musica Callada.
The black and white symmetrical photographs in this project were constructed in August and early September of 2019. There are two collections of images: the Landscapes were constructed with digitally scanned copies of the silver gelatin photographs I had made in 1971-72 when I was a graduate student in New Mexico; the second set of images were made with images I had made in the city of Atlanta during my first year of teaching at Georgia State University. (See: the two blog projects: New Mexico Landscapes 1971-72 and Emergence 1973, Atlanta)
As I was preparing these two projects for my blog in June and July, I was listening constantly to Mompou's music, and particularly Musica Callada--with which I feel a very close and deep affinity. After I published the two projects I continued listening to Musica Callada as I constructed the symmetrical photographs you will be seeing here below. At the time I was making the symmetrical images I had practically no real conscious awareness of the relationship between the music I was listening to and the symmetrical images I was making. What I did know at the time was that I was hungry to hear Mompou's music. I was listening non-stop to mostly Musica Callada from late June through the completion date of this project in late September, 2019. I particularly enjoyed listening to that sublime music late at night as I was preparing to go to sleep.
I consider Musica Callada to be a sacred work of art, and there are several ways in which I have become certain of this fact. First of all, when I listen to Mompou's music I become entranced by its sweet melodies, its constant other-worldly ringing of bells, its palpable and sensitive use of silent spaces, and its elegant dissonances which are pervaded with transcendent charm. All this is to say that the music absorbs my attention, opens my heart and transports me to beautiful unknown worlds.
Secondly, the title of the work establishes a direct connection between the music and the Divine Word as manifested through the sacred poetry of the Spanish poet, Saint John of the Cross. On the frontispiece of Mompou's first of the four published folios for Musica Callada he invoke's the saint's name and teachings in a statement which the Spanish composer had himself written in French:
It is rather difficult to translate and to express the real meaning of "Musica Callada" in any language other than Spanish. The great mystic poet, San Juan de la Cruz, in one of his fine poems, sings of "La musica Callada, la Soledad Sonora" in an endeavor to express the idea of music that was the very sound of silence. Music keeps its voice silent, that is, does not speak, while solitude has its own music. (published in this English translation in the booklet for the 4 CD package Mompou: Complete Piano Works on the Brilliant Classics label.)
Musica Callada is often translated into English as 'Silent Music,' and sometimes as "The Sound of Silence"; however it could also be appropriately translated "The Music of Solitude." When Mompou was once asked by an interviewer: What are your preferred places? he responded: "The solitude of all large towns. Barcelona and Paris, where my dearest memories are preserved."
In response to another question by the interviewer, Mompou said his favorite "pastimes" were "Contemplation" and "Meditation." Musica Callada is indeed a meditation on many things, and especially the sound of bells which as a child he loved to hear ringing in a distant bell foundry which his family owned. As a child I too was blessed with an experience of bells which makes Mompou's music especially meaningful for me and makes me feel kindred in spirit with him personally. I will share my story of the bells with you after the presentation of the photographs.
Mompou was born in Barcelona in 1893. His mother was French and his father was Catalan. His music reflects both of these cultures, for he lived in Barcelona and Paris for substantial periods of time.
The writer, Vladimir Jankelevitch, author of a fascinating book, Music and the Ineffable, wrote an important essay entitled "Mompou's Message." He states in the essay:
In the depth of Mompou's music there are . . . "landscapes"; the lake and the fountain, the village bell, the walk along the banks of the stream, the great Catalan night with its sideral flickering, a pond, the evening that shivers softly in the breeze. The perfume of the cypresses and the fig trees . . . pervades his music, and the shouts from the street and the guitarist's refrain in the alleys of Barcelona can also be heard. Mompou never intended to recuperate folklore, but he loved and used popular Catalan songs and sometimes reinvented them: Mompou is the soul who sings Catalonia.
Equally true is the obvious fact that Mompou's later music reflects the influences of the most modern music being created in Paris, where he spent the years 1911-14 and 1921-41 studying and writing music. Jankelevitch briefly addresses this in his essay: Like Satie and like Debussy, Mompou does not bother to develop [his musical themes]. His theme could be . . . perhaps nothing more, nothing less than "quintessence." See the two excerpts from Vladimir Jankelevith's essay "Mompou's Message," translated in English, published in the booklet for the 4 CD package Mompou: Complete Piano Works on the Brilliant Classics label.
Mompou's Musica Callada is of course about much more than cultural influences, childhood memories, and new musical languages. At its quintessential depths, this sacred work of art is about immersion in the transcendent, divine, interior nature of sound and silence. In his later compositions, and particularly in several pieces in the concluding fourth published folio of Musica Callada, Mompou used the new musical languages he had become aware of in Paris as a means of transforming the traditional influences which had preoccupied him in his earlier periods of composing.
This tendency toward transformation in Mompou's later compositions is yet another way that I feel kindred in spirit to him and his music. As a visual artist, I have felt the constant need within my Creative Process--the inner necessity--to transform the representational image produced by the camera. This is clearly evident even in the work that dates back to my years in graduate school. In fulfillment of my MFA Visual Thesis requirement, I presented an exhibition of two projects, both of which are dominated by images which have been subjected to various and often radical degrees of visual transformation (see my 1971-72 New Mexico projects). The symmetrical versions of those early images from New Mexico included in this project extends even further their initial state of transformation.
Though Mompou's compositions seem on the surface simple, magical, and radiant with their own interior light, they were achieved--according to what I have read--with Mompou's persistent hard work. But the self effort he put forth in his music was not particularly an option, and in the yogic tradition that I practice it is said that self-effort attracts grace. In Mompou's music I sense a very strong presence of grace, which again, in the yoga I practice, is said to be the creative power of the universe. I will have more to say about this later.
There is also, for me, a deep feeling of longing in Mompou's music; a longing for "something more." I have lived with this feeling within myself since I was ten years old, when my dad died. In 1987, when I met Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, the living head of the Siddha Yoga lineage, that feeling of longing became even more intensified as I began to understand that the inner feeling of longing is an integral aspect of a fully committed yogic practice.
I have sustained my practice of Siddha Yoga for over 32 years, along with my wife Gloria, and it has been for me amongst the few most important things in my life. I now consider my photographic practice an integral part of my meditation practice. In this regard, too, I feel kindred in spirit to Mompou, for we share and express the same feeling of longing in our art. Out need to create music or visual art serves as a means of establishing a close relationship to the sacred nature of Being. And, we share the same need for solitude, silence, meditation and contemplation.
Though the symmetrical photographs you will be seeing here were not made with the conscious intention of paying homage to Mompou and his music, I was quite aware of how his music, and in particular Musica Callada supported me in bringing the symmetrical images into being. The palpable spiritual feeling I experience in the music, its sacred living presence, seems to have awakened something in the deepest parts of my Being, for this same presence has become a palpable living force within the symmetrical photographs your will be seeing in this project.
I have made many projects which, like this one, consist only (or mostly) of symmetrical images and I have collected them together under the overarching thematic title: The Sacred Art Photography Projects. For a photographic image to quality as a work of sacred art it must function for me as a symbol. After the presentation of the photographs I will write more about the the symbol and the symbolic photograph. ~ Now, here are the symmetrical photographs, which I've presented in two collections.
The PhotographsThis project is my heartfelt homage to the Spanish born composer and pianist Federico Mompou (1893-1987). The focus of the project is Mompou's late and final work entitled Musica Callada, a sacred work of art which consists of 28 hauntingly beautiful and perfectly sequenced miniature solo piano compositions which he published in four separate folios: the first dated 1959, the second, 1962, the third, 1965, and the last in 1967 when he was 74 years of age.
The number "74" is quite auspicious to me in regard to this project, for not only did Mompou complete Musica Callada when he was 74 years of age, coincidently I turned 74 years of age in September, 2019 while I was working on this project. Also, Mompou recorded Musica Callada--along with all of his other piano solo miniatures--in 1974 (at the age of 81).
Perhaps age explains to some extent why I feel such a strong identification with Mompou and his music which touches me deeply and opens my heart. In the past several years I have become interested mostly in quieter more contemplative music. In the mid to late 1990's I had purchased several CD's of Mompou's music, and though I enjoyed his music then it did not impact my life with the force and depth that Musica Callada does for me now, 20 years later after rediscovering his music around the time of my 74th birthday.
This project has been blessed with multiple synchronistic coincidences, including an event which occurred in June, 2019 that was instrumental in returning me to Mompou's music. After the presentation of my photographs, below, I will share that story and elaborate upon the phenomena known as synchronicity which I have considered central to my Creative Process since I wrote about it in 1971-72 to satisfy an MFA written thesis requirement at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
*
The photographs I have presented in this project are not exactly a visual response to Mompou's music, for the process by which they came into being was significantly different compared to most of my other homage projects. Nonetheless, there is no question in my mind that the images are inseparably interconnected with the same radiant energy that I experience in Mompou's Musica Callada.
The black and white symmetrical photographs in this project were constructed in August and early September of 2019. There are two collections of images: the Landscapes were constructed with digitally scanned copies of the silver gelatin photographs I had made in 1971-72 when I was a graduate student in New Mexico; the second set of images were made with images I had made in the city of Atlanta during my first year of teaching at Georgia State University. (See: the two blog projects: New Mexico Landscapes 1971-72 and Emergence 1973, Atlanta)
As I was preparing these two projects for my blog in June and July, I was listening constantly to Mompou's music, and particularly Musica Callada--with which I feel a very close and deep affinity. After I published the two projects I continued listening to Musica Callada as I constructed the symmetrical photographs you will be seeing here below. At the time I was making the symmetrical images I had practically no real conscious awareness of the relationship between the music I was listening to and the symmetrical images I was making. What I did know at the time was that I was hungry to hear Mompou's music. I was listening non-stop to mostly Musica Callada from late June through the completion date of this project in late September, 2019. I particularly enjoyed listening to that sublime music late at night as I was preparing to go to sleep.
*
Secondly, the title of the work establishes a direct connection between the music and the Divine Word as manifested through the sacred poetry of the Spanish poet, Saint John of the Cross. On the frontispiece of Mompou's first of the four published folios for Musica Callada he invoke's the saint's name and teachings in a statement which the Spanish composer had himself written in French:
It is rather difficult to translate and to express the real meaning of "Musica Callada" in any language other than Spanish. The great mystic poet, San Juan de la Cruz, in one of his fine poems, sings of "La musica Callada, la Soledad Sonora" in an endeavor to express the idea of music that was the very sound of silence. Music keeps its voice silent, that is, does not speak, while solitude has its own music. (published in this English translation in the booklet for the 4 CD package Mompou: Complete Piano Works on the Brilliant Classics label.)
Musica Callada is often translated into English as 'Silent Music,' and sometimes as "The Sound of Silence"; however it could also be appropriately translated "The Music of Solitude." When Mompou was once asked by an interviewer: What are your preferred places? he responded: "The solitude of all large towns. Barcelona and Paris, where my dearest memories are preserved."
In response to another question by the interviewer, Mompou said his favorite "pastimes" were "Contemplation" and "Meditation." Musica Callada is indeed a meditation on many things, and especially the sound of bells which as a child he loved to hear ringing in a distant bell foundry which his family owned. As a child I too was blessed with an experience of bells which makes Mompou's music especially meaningful for me and makes me feel kindred in spirit with him personally. I will share my story of the bells with you after the presentation of the photographs.
Mompou was born in Barcelona in 1893. His mother was French and his father was Catalan. His music reflects both of these cultures, for he lived in Barcelona and Paris for substantial periods of time.
The writer, Vladimir Jankelevitch, author of a fascinating book, Music and the Ineffable, wrote an important essay entitled "Mompou's Message." He states in the essay:
In the depth of Mompou's music there are . . . "landscapes"; the lake and the fountain, the village bell, the walk along the banks of the stream, the great Catalan night with its sideral flickering, a pond, the evening that shivers softly in the breeze. The perfume of the cypresses and the fig trees . . . pervades his music, and the shouts from the street and the guitarist's refrain in the alleys of Barcelona can also be heard. Mompou never intended to recuperate folklore, but he loved and used popular Catalan songs and sometimes reinvented them: Mompou is the soul who sings Catalonia.
Equally true is the obvious fact that Mompou's later music reflects the influences of the most modern music being created in Paris, where he spent the years 1911-14 and 1921-41 studying and writing music. Jankelevitch briefly addresses this in his essay: Like Satie and like Debussy, Mompou does not bother to develop [his musical themes]. His theme could be . . . perhaps nothing more, nothing less than "quintessence." See the two excerpts from Vladimir Jankelevith's essay "Mompou's Message," translated in English, published in the booklet for the 4 CD package Mompou: Complete Piano Works on the Brilliant Classics label.
This tendency toward transformation in Mompou's later compositions is yet another way that I feel kindred in spirit to him and his music. As a visual artist, I have felt the constant need within my Creative Process--the inner necessity--to transform the representational image produced by the camera. This is clearly evident even in the work that dates back to my years in graduate school. In fulfillment of my MFA Visual Thesis requirement, I presented an exhibition of two projects, both of which are dominated by images which have been subjected to various and often radical degrees of visual transformation (see my 1971-72 New Mexico projects). The symmetrical versions of those early images from New Mexico included in this project extends even further their initial state of transformation.
Though Mompou's compositions seem on the surface simple, magical, and radiant with their own interior light, they were achieved--according to what I have read--with Mompou's persistent hard work. But the self effort he put forth in his music was not particularly an option, and in the yogic tradition that I practice it is said that self-effort attracts grace. In Mompou's music I sense a very strong presence of grace, which again, in the yoga I practice, is said to be the creative power of the universe. I will have more to say about this later.
There is also, for me, a deep feeling of longing in Mompou's music; a longing for "something more." I have lived with this feeling within myself since I was ten years old, when my dad died. In 1987, when I met Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, the living head of the Siddha Yoga lineage, that feeling of longing became even more intensified as I began to understand that the inner feeling of longing is an integral aspect of a fully committed yogic practice.
I have sustained my practice of Siddha Yoga for over 32 years, along with my wife Gloria, and it has been for me amongst the few most important things in my life. I now consider my photographic practice an integral part of my meditation practice. In this regard, too, I feel kindred in spirit to Mompou, for we share and express the same feeling of longing in our art. Out need to create music or visual art serves as a means of establishing a close relationship to the sacred nature of Being. And, we share the same need for solitude, silence, meditation and contemplation.
*
Though the symmetrical photographs you will be seeing here were not made with the conscious intention of paying homage to Mompou and his music, I was quite aware of how his music, and in particular Musica Callada supported me in bringing the symmetrical images into being. The palpable spiritual feeling I experience in the music, its sacred living presence, seems to have awakened something in the deepest parts of my Being, for this same presence has become a palpable living force within the symmetrical photographs your will be seeing in this project.
I have made many projects which, like this one, consist only (or mostly) of symmetrical images and I have collected them together under the overarching thematic title: The Sacred Art Photography Projects. For a photographic image to quality as a work of sacred art it must function for me as a symbol. After the presentation of the photographs I will write more about the the symbol and the symbolic photograph. ~ Now, here are the symmetrical photographs, which I've presented in two collections.
___________________________________________________
Part I
Paisajes (Landscapes)
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
#6
#7
#8
#9
Part II
Urban Places
____________________________
#10
#11
#12
#13
#14
#15
#16
#17
Bells, the Unstruck Sound & Silence
The third chapter of Wilfred Mellers' book Le Jardin Retrouve, The Music of Frederic Mompou is devoted to bells. He begins the chapter with some interesting history:The musical synonym for 'pre-consciousness" is the bell. Both real bells (inverted cups, usually of metal, hit with an attached clapper or externally activated hammer) and crotals (hollowed gourd-like objects with a free body, such as pea or pebble, inserted) may be said to belong to God in that they reveal the acoustical properties of Nature. Some 26,000 years before Christ the Chinese Emperor Chuan Hao 'struck the bell and called the attention of the people, so that he could teach them righteousness'; the teaching came after the submission to Nature. Chinese bells were decorated with dragons and other fabulous creatures least demons should threaten the transcendental power whereby bells sustained the Universal Harmony; without truly resonating bells the universe might collapse. Most ancient oriental cultures regarded bells as agents and activators of magic. Hindus found in them the circle, hemisphere and lotus basic to their cosmology . . .
Vladimir Jankelevitch writes about the resounding bells in Mompou's Musica Callada in an essay "Mompou's Message" which can be found--in English translation!--in the booklet that comes with the 4CD set entitled Mompou : Complete Piano Works on the Brilliant Classics label. It is an important essay; here are some excerpts taken from it:
Mompou's piano pieces constantly allude to bronze . . . the bronze of bells vibrates and resounds in the musical space where Mompou's compositions are heard . . . especially in Musica Callada (Silent Music): here one hears seraphic bells which chime softly between heaven and earth.
It is hard to decide what to admire most in these wonderful piano pieces where the pressure of each finger has been subtly considered. "Profundo" (deeply): this indication for performance enamels all Mompou's works, as if wanting to penetrate in the deepest part of the soul; the sonorities are sedative, calming, serious, vehement, or sometimes mysteriously hammered out, and often, they are soft and captivating. The sweet melodies create a sonorous light in the depth. Between the airy notes and the deep ones, an intermediate voice stands out, which sketches the internal song of harmony . . .
In the whole work the musician lets another voice, originating in the "resonating" strings, sing . . . and this second voice, this secret voice, this "internal voice" addresses us as if it were the voice of the soul. This unspoken music gives the music we hear its vibrant fullness. From all this comes a sonority which is at the same time hidden and delicately articulated, a fleeting sonority, and yet, luminous, evasive but unattached . . . [for] distance and space underlie all the impressions and images in Mompou . . .
It seems right to me that, over the years, the mystic silence represented more and more for Federico Mompou the intimacy of the internal state towards which he always moved. The serenity he always searched for is even more static than withdrawn. The existence of his aestheticism was confirmed . . . above all in the four books of Musica Callada. . . . What Mompou wants is the search for "sonorous solitude"; to reach the intangible point where music becomes the very voice of silence, where silence itself becomes music. . . . Mompou aspired to let the voice of the pure soul sing, the soul alone, the soul itself in itself . . . Vladimir Jankelevitch, "Mompou's Message" published in the Brilliant Classics booklet. (my underlines)
*
Look out toward the last glow
of sunlight, and look in
toward the endless sky.
Drink the nectar of the petals of your heart
and let wave upon wave
sweep through your body.
What glory is in the ocean!
Listen--
The sound of conches!
The sound of bells!
Kabir says,
"O brother, listen!
The Lord of all
plays his song within you."
Kabir
*
Rumi
Let us be silent
So that the Giver of Speech may speak.
Let us be silent
So we can hear Him calling us
secretly in the night.
So that the Giver of Speech may speak.
Let us be silent
So we can hear Him calling us
secretly in the night.
Rumi
*
All Worlds come out of the sound OM.
Gurumayi Chidvilasananda
*
When I learned that Mompou, as a child, loved listening to the distant sounds of bells ringing from within his family's bell foundry, I was reminded of my own childhood experience of ringing bells. It occurred in the late hours of the night, some time between Christmas Eve and Christmas morning:
I simply could not get to sleep because I was so excited about Christmas. The longer I lay in bed trying to get to sleep the more the energy vibrating within and throughout my body seemed to intensify. Then . . . I began to hear bells ringing quietly in the distance. The sound was so faint, so beautiful, so calming at first, as if from another world . . . but, as I began to listen more carefully to the sounds, they began to grow louder and louder, as if they were coming closer and closer toward me.
I became frightened. I jumped out of bed and ran to my parents' bedroom and woke them up. I pleaded with them: "Make the bells stop ringing!" They told me they couldn't hear the bells; I must have been dreaming. Then they sent me back to bed; I should try to get some sleep, they said--tomorrow was a big day.
*
The sounds I heard were real, but they were coming from within me--not outside. In the Siddha Yoga Meditation I have been studying and practicing for over thirty years, such spontaneous inner sounds are referred to as nada, or the "unstruck sounds." The sounds are considered supremely sacred, for their origin is said to be the Primal Sound -- OM from which everything in this universe was born. According to many other religious and spiritual traditions the Primal Word is said to be source of All That Is.
Swami Muktananda (1908-1982), founder of the Siddha Yoga Path, wrote an entire chapter about his own direct experiences of nada, the inner sounds, in his spiritual autobiography The Play of Consciousness. The sounds he heard--including those of bells, the flute, the kettledrum and thunder--not only held for him a spiritual attraction that supported him in his maha yogic practices; the sounds also served him as an indicator of the progress he was making on his inner journey toward the ultimate goal of yoga: union with the divine Self, or God.
When Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, the present living head of the Siddha Lineage, gave a talk in 1985 entitled In the Beginning, the Word she drew from the teachings of many religious and spiritual traditions to show how Sound is associated with Creation, and how this idea is widely shared. Her talk, from which I am offering a brief excerpt below, was published in the Siddha Yoga publication Darshan, issue #73 entitled The Unstruck Sound:
"In the beginning was the Word." The Vedas say, "In the beginning was Brahman, with whom was Vak, or the Word; and the Word is Brahman." Saint John says, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." The Word is Brahman; the Word is the Absolute. What is this word the Vedas talk about? They say that the primordial word is OM. In the beginning was the sound OM . . . All Worlds come out of the sound OM . . .
The concept of Vak (Word) is elaborated upon by Swami Shantananda, one of the great teaching swamis of Siddha Yoga, in his excellent book The Splendor of Recognition. The book contains his own contemplations on the twenty sutras of the Pratyabhijna-hrdayam, an ancient yogic text associated with the philosophy of Kashmir Shavism, a philosophy which was highly regarded by Baba Muktananda. Pratyabhijna-hrdayam is usually translated, according to Swami Shantananda, as The Heart of Recognition, "the recognition of one's own deepest nature, the heart of one's innermost being." The text affirms "not only our own divine nature . . . but the divinity of everything else, as well, in this world and in any other world that we can explore, hear of, or even just imagine."
Swamiji then quotes Gurumayi who said: Entering the heart is like coming into the center of the sun. . . there is nothing except the iridescent force of that light.
For me, Mompou's Musica Calllada is a journey into the very heart of the human spirit, the heart of the soul. At the center of his music is the sound OM which rings out constantly throughout the work in the form of bell sounds; in the form of Mompou's longing for God; in the form of auspicious spaces of silence - filled with divine presence.
Swami Shantanda's writes extensively in his book about Para-vac, which can be translated as "divine speech" or "the voice of God." He states: Para-vac is "Consciousness--Self-awareness--spontaneously arisen." It is said to be the "heart of the Supreme Lord." Para-vac contains "all letters, all words, all objects, all beings--everything that composes the Created Universe." And Swamiji tells us that all of Creation, and "all of the vibrational sounds associated with each created thing" exists in the vast silence of Mahasunya, the Great Void. It is from this ineffable "place" of perfect Silence and perfect Stillness that everything emerges. Swami Shantanada, Sutra 12, his book The Splendor of Recognition.
*
Visual art and music--at its very best--is pervaded by Para-vac, "Consciousness . . . spontaneously arisen," the same divine Creative Energy of the Universe that emerged from within the primal sound OM which spontaneously emerged from within the Great Silence. This creative energy is often referred to in Siddha Yoga as Chitishakti, or more simply, Shakti, or grace. It has been my own personal experience that Mompou's Musica Callada is radiantly alive with grace. In his 28 miniature compositions the sounds often quite literally emerge from silence and dissolve back into silence.
When Jankelevitch writes about an "internal voice" in Mompou's music which "addresses us as if it were the voice of the soul . . ." there is a direct correspondence in this statement to Swami Shantananda's explication on the Pratyabhijna-hrdayam in which he speaks of Para-vac, "the recognition of one's own deepest nature, the heart of one's being."
The Symbol, the Stilled Mind & Silence
Anyone truly interested in Mompou's music must hear Mompou himself play his piano works, and most especially Musica Callada. (His 1974 recording is available on the Brilliant Classics label.) Mompou was a highly accomplished pianist who, early in his career turned instead to composing (reportedly because of his shyness and need of solitude). His 1974 performance of Musica Callada proceeds at a very slow and tender pace. The sounds emerge from silence and dissolve into silence in an overarching atmosphere of stillness--timelessness. Indeed, his performance gives voice to the longing of his soul, and this realm of being is necessarily beyond space and time.
When a piece of music I am listening to--or any work of art I am experiencing--stops my mind . . . I enter a space of silence and stillness, a space outside of time. I am transported into another realm of being, another world. Henry Corbin has written beautifully about this kind of experience in his book Alone with the Alone. The experience of Aloneness he is referring to here is an experience of "All-One-ness."
The experience of the Oneness of Being exists is an intermediary Imaginal World, a state of being that, Corbin says, exists between the physical and the spiritual worlds. This in-between "world" (which is not be confused with imagination) exists beyond time and space. And Corbin says the Imaginal World is the "place" where symbols originate; it is a "place" of transformation, where "the spiritual becomes material, and where the material becomes spiritual." I believe there is a drect correspondence between what he has written and what in the philosophy of Kashmir Shaivism is known as the Heart of Being, the dwelling place of the divine, innermost Self.
Wilfred Mellers writes in his book Le Jardin Retrouve : The Music of Frederic Mompou about "magical moments" and the sense of timelessness in Mompou's music:
Without the artistic heritage of Europe, it is improbable that Mompou could have reached the ultimate stage [Book 4] of his Musica Callada, in which the the small pieces are magical moments that no longer need to be retrospective or nostalgic, since the spiritual verities they discover are timeless and solitary, within the heart of silence.
*
There have been writers who have perceived in Mompou's late music a pervading sense of melancholy and sadness, as if the music gives voice to Mompou's personal suffering. I would argue that the feeling which some interpret as melancholy is really Mompou's deep soulful expression of longing for that which the saints know through their own direct experiences of the Oneness of Being. Saint John of the Cross, Rumi and Kabir (to cite but a few examples) have written profusely about their heartfelt longing to be reunited with the Source of all Being. In Rumi's own words:
Let us be silent
So we can hear Him calling us
secretly in the night.
It was this feeling of longing that moved me to make my first symmetrical photographs in 2011 following a trip I had taken with my wife Gloria through Turkey. I had several surprising, profoundly moving encounters with the sacred art of that ancient place. The experiences initiated a two year contemplation on the true nature of sacred art. Two of the experiences that occurred in Turkey are directly related to this project:
--While in a museum enjoying an exhibition of illuminated Qur'ans, the Holy Words and the stunningly beautiful graphic designs on the page of one of the Holy Books began to glow with their own inner light, a light that was alive with divine presence.
--While looking out over a huge vista of mountains, and the cities below it, I heard the haunting sounds of the Islamic Call to Prayer wafting upward toward me through the vastness of space; I became totally transfixed by the sounds of the voice chanting the Holy Words with heartfelt devotion. It was these experiences and several others which inspired me to create my first "Sacred Art Photography Project, "An Imaginary Book" and many other related projects followed, including this homage to Mompou. To see the complete collection of projects visit: The Sacred Art Photography Projects.
The symmetrical photographs are quite literally images of the Oneness of Being, and at their very best they function for me as symbols. Only symbols are self-luminous and alive with the power of grace, that sacred creative energy which can stop and still and purify my mind. A stilled mind allows the heart to open, providing access to the the deep inner Silence of the divine Self.
The symmetrical photographs embrace and unite two opposing worlds: photography's ability to describe, mechanically record the apparent world; and photography's ability to transform and transcend visual appearances--even to the extent in which the imagery approaches or becomes completely visually abstract. When I contemplate symmetrical images I often reach a point of resolution within myself regarding these two contradictory modes of visual representation. In this state of resolution the two merge into each other and become undifferentiated. With that inward, contemplative Imaginal resolution, another "world" becomes accessible to me: a world of infinite space and timelessness; a world which, in the words of Saint John of the Cross "transcends all knowledge."
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At the very Heart of my symmetrical photographs there is an intangible invisible center-point where all four repeated and mirroring images merge into each other. This Imaginal space is the place of origin of the image. In the ritual-like process of constructing the symmetrical photographs, the image becomes absorbed by the transforming creative power of the universe, known as Chitishakti. And it is this energy, this grace that has the ability to transform those who contemplate the image and allow themselves to be absorbed by the image and its grace. This is my experience when I listen to Musica Callada, which is a complete musical experience, one that functions for me as a Symbol.
CG Jung defined the word "symbol" as the best possible expression of something unknown. And that is a useful place to start for explaining the Symbolic Photograph. My ideas about the symbol and the symbolic photograph have been inspired by the research and writings of C.G. Jung, and especially his research into Medieval Alchemy and his theory of synchronicity.
The alchemical process consisted of projecting spiritual-psychic energy into physical matter such that the two became a single, unitary substance which was called The Philosopher's Stone--the perfect, pure substance: Gold. The photographic parallel to this alchemical process is an image that conjoins a projected interior psychic image with its exterior physical corresponding or equivalent counterpart. The photograph that succeeds in accomplishing this alchemical "miracle of the One Thing" is a photograph that functions for a viewer as a symbol.
Synchronicity is a spontaneous-intuitive-acausal "falling together" in a fleeting moment of interior and outer corresponding realities. The experience of synchronicity is usually accompanied by a surprising sense of recognition for in this moment their is a revelation or unveiling of the Oneness of Being, a moment in which inner and outer realities are perceived to be equivalent or mirroring aspects of each other; it is the moment in which the perceiver and the perceived are experienced to be identical, one and the same.
The experience of synchronicity and the experience of a true living symbol are essentially the same: the mind stops--it becomes stilled; and the experience is often associated with a feeling of wonder, mystery, a feeling of the numinous. The experience is beyond reason, beyond intellect, beyond understanding, beyond saying . . . because the experience is based in acausal juxtapositions of opposites which only grace can manifest.
Symbolic images are of unknown and ineffable meaning because human language is based in duality and thus has no way of approaching the level of meaning or understanding that is inherent in true symbols. In other words, the language of symbols is the secret "divine voice" of Para Vac. And, again, this is my experience of Mompou's Musica Callada when I am able to give myself fully to the music--become fully absorbed in the music. When I open myself in the music it then can fully absorb itself in me:
"O brother, listen!
The Lord of all
plays his song within you."
The experience of a true living Symbol is one of being embraced by Unitary Reality, the conscious Self of all. The teachings of the Pratyabhijna-hrdayam says it quite simply and directly:
There is only one Self, the conscious Self,
Lord Shiva; nothing else exists.
I invite you to visit my multi-chaptered project The Photograph As Icon : Window Onto the Invisible World which I believe will help shed some additional light upon what I have been trying to explain here.
I have made several photography projects inspired by music. See my collection of Music Inspired Photography Projects. In 1994 I began a project entitled Studies which consists of miniature photographs (3.5" square) inspired by miniature piano pieces composed by a long list of influential composers, including Mompou. The project continued for six years, into the year 2000. After completion of the project my interests moved on to other things and I stopped listening to Mompou's music and most of the other composers on the list as well. In fact, for the eleven or so years that followed, I worked on a series of multi-chaptered projects based on the music and ideas of American composer Morton Feldman, who wrote extraordinarily long compositions for solo piano. (It was Feldman's music, which had been inspired by his collection of Turkish rugs, that motivated me to visit Turkey in 2011.)
In June, 2019, while I was in Milwaukee visiting with family and friends, John Sobczak, Director of the Alice Wilds gallery, arranged a meeting for me to meet Tyler Friedman, curator of the Museum of Wisconsin Art. Tyler was interested in music and its relation to visual art, and as we looked at my photographs and began talking about some of my music inspired projects, I was greatly surprised to discover that he actually knew Steve Lacy's music, a jazz artist I had loved so much in the late 1970's that I made a project in homage to him! When I told Tyler about my Studies project, inspired by miniature piano pieces, he immediately asked if I had heard the music of Federico Mompou?! And Tyler recommended a book to me by Vladimir Jankelevitch entitled Music and the Ineffable. The book includes several references to Mompou's music.
I immediately ordered Music and the Ineffable, and when I got back home to Canandaigua, NY I began listening to my collection of CDs of Mompu's music, all of which I had purchased in the mid-to-late 1990's while I was working on the Studies project.
Hearing Mompou's music again--after twenty years--was a revelation for me; and Jankelevitch's fascinating book Music and the Ineffable made the experience even more meaningful. I spent every moment I could listening to Mompou's magical music: I went to sleep listening to it at night, and I listened to it whenever I was working on the blog versions of my New Mexico Landscapes and the Atlanta Emergence projects.
As I worked on those projects, transforming the silver gelatin images into digital images and listening to Mompou's music, I remember thinking to myself how difficult it would be to create a series of photographs in homage to Mompou. I wondered what those photographs might possibly look like. But my imagination simply refused to come up with anything. It did flash through my mind, however, that the images would have to be in black and white tonalities.
After the New Mexico and Emergence projects were published (together, on August 2, 2019) I felt a strong desire to make some symmetrical photographs. It had been a long time since I made any--over the past year most of the work I had been publishing on my blog consisted of straight photographs. It had become a regular practice of mine--after my trip to Turkey and the completion of "An Imaginary Book" (2011-13)--to subject any straight photographs that had been recently published on my blog to the transforming four-fold symmetrical process just to see what the exercise would yield.
It is very difficult for me to predict the outcome of the four-fold transformational process, and yet the surprising fruits of this ritual have often been wonderfully rewarding precisely because of the hidden secretes which the process is empowered to unveil. As articulate meaningful symmetrical images emerge from my ritual-like process I place them in a digital folder for my continued contemplation, and for consideration of their possible use in future projects.
The pleasure I take in the unpredictable and yet often revelatory nature of the four-fold symmetrical process is similar to the pleasure I take in the way jazz musicians often begin their performances with a simple melodic statement then proceed to subject the themes to various spontaneous improvisational transformations, transformations which can take the performer and an engaged listener into entirely new and surprisingly refreshing musical worlds. (See my Steve Lacy and Thelonious Monk projects.)
Many writers have discussed Mompou's music in terms of it's apparent relationship to improvisational jazz, and I can certainly hear that myself, even in Musica Callada. Wilfrid Mellers wrote: "Mompou's piano pieces end with a fadeout which negates Time. Jazz pianists do the same, for similar reasons."
Recommended Recordings
The 4CD set of Mompou's 1974 recordings entitled Mompou : Complete Piano Works on the Brilliant Classics label is a must. I purchased the set only just recently because I wanted to hear how Mompou played his own compositions (at the age of 81!) and in hopes that the enclosed booklet would shed some new light upon Mompou and his music. The price of the package is extremely reasonable, and I was surprised to discover in the booklet the essay by Vladimir Jankelevitch, "Mompou's Message" translated in English. What a special gift this entire package is. Thank you Brilliant Classics!
I also highly recommend Herbert Henck's 1995 recording of Musica Collada on the ECM label, and Stephen Hough's 1997 compilation of Mompou's earlier compositions on the Hyperion label.
I love Henck's recording! It seems perfectly nuanced and in complete alignment with Mompou's great work. It is fascinating to compare Henck's recording of Musica Callada to Mompou's much slower version--both are equally rewarding experiences, and different in several obvious ways. I find certain parts of Henck's recording a bit too fast, especially after I'd been hearing Mompou's recording; and then I find parts of Mompou's recording too slow, especially after I'd been hearing Henck's recording.
If I had to live with just one of these two recordings, I would choose Henck's. I have heard several other recordings of Musica Callada, but the problem I have had with most of them is that the performer--faced with the very difficult task of playing Mompou's slow, quiet, and often nearly inaudible musical passages--must be careful not to suffocate the "Music's voice" with his or her personal interpretations, and their unbridled impulses to add uncalled for drama or assumed sentiments. In this regard especially, I feel Henck's version of Musica Callada is excellent; he plays the music with a certain appropriate degree of detachment. In this way he succeeds at serving the music and staying out of its way.
Henck is especially respectful of the spaces of silence that pervade the 28 compositions of Mompou's late masterpiece, and he sensitively uses the silent spaces between each of the compositions to powerful, meaningful affect. He has found the most appropriate duration of silence for each of those spaces which "separate" the 28 compositions--spaces of silence that are in perfect empathetic alignment with the essential needs of the music that precedes and follows them. In Henck's recording the silent spaces between the pieces are not at all arbitrary or separating; indeed they are charged with an auspicious presence that serves to sustain the music's flow of unfolding into its holistic continuum of grace-filled musical experience.
In Henck's booklet notes he writes about how Mompou would omit the traditional double bar at the end of several of the miniature pieces: "Ties on the final notes led symbolically into emptiness, meaning that the pedaled sounds should be left to their own devises from this point, following their own laws, and so fading and losing themselves in the instrument and the surrounding space." Henck associates this fading of sound to the bells so familiar to Mompou in his childhood, and Henck says the fading of the sound "transformed the music for him personally, from being material to spiritual." The way Henck performs the last seven pieces of Musica Callada (which comprise the last of the four books) is simply magical and stunningly beautiful.
*
Stephen Hough's excellent compilation album on Hyperion includes many fine selections from Mompou's Preludes and the Dances, and he plays the complete sets of the Magical Chants, Charmes, and Paisajes (Landscapes) and other less known sets. Hough's interpretations are quite sensitive, but also impressively virtuosic and energetic where necessary. His selections of pieces and their sequential organization on the disk reflect his deep understanding and love of the music. And I like his booklet notes, which focus on the child-like nature of Mompou's music, its sense of "wonder" and "enchantment." Hough writes:
"It is precisely in the mist beyond the boundary of perception
that we begin to see the invisible, to hear the inaudible.
With the gentle guidance of the composer
we can touch this enchanted world,
but we cannot grasp it."
Hough refers to Wilfred Mellers' book in which Mellers writes about the quality of the innocence of childhood in Mompou's musical world. Mellers compares Mompou's music to a "return to Paradise after the Fall." Then Hough writes: "The composer himself called his style Primitivista, referring to its lack of bar lines and key signatures. 'Its all so free' exclaimed Mompou when he was asked how to play his music." Hough then adds: "Indeed it is [free], but not just free from rhythmic constraints and structural rules; it is free from affectation, posing, fashions and fads, and has the esthetic liberty of childhood."
Though Hough does not include pieces from Musica Callada on his album, he ends his booklet notes with a quotation from Saint John of the Cross, a quote which--it seems to me-- also address the profound and transcendent mystery of the living symbol:
The higher he ascends
The less he understands
Because the cloud is dark
Which lit up the night;
Whoever knows this
Remains always in unknowing
Transcending all knowledge.
Epilogue
_________________________________
Mompou aspired to let the voice of
the pure soul sing, the soul alone,
the soul itself in itself . . .
This project, which has essentially created itself, is indeed a gift which has helped me come to a fuller and more conscious understanding of the many interconnected things that were happening in my life and in my family in June, 2019 when Gloria and I went to Milwaukee for a visit. This project, which celebrates my return to the music that twenty years earlier I was not yet prepared to fully embrace, also returns me to the beginning point of my career as a teacher and an emerging artist.
In June, 2019, after my meeting with Tyler Friedman, I also met with my friend and past graduate student, Jon Horvath, who asked if I would accept an honorary teaching award at the forthcoming Midwest regional conference of the Society for Photographic Education, which this year was to be held in Milwaukee? Jon and John Sobczak were the driving forces behind my first exhibition in Milwaukee following my 2007 retirement from teaching. (See my project: The Rising Sun ~Prelude To An Exhibition.)
My teaching career began in 1969 when I was a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. I had been offered a full teaching fellowship which paid my way for the three years of my pursuit of an MFA degree which would allow me to teach at the university level. The fellowship stipulated that I would teach two courses of Intro to Photography each semester.
The landscape photographs I made for my MFA thesis exhibition were used as the source images with which I constructed the symmetrical photographs in this project. After I graduated in 1972 my first teaching job was in Atlanta, at Georgia State University. The Emergence photographs I made in my first year of teaching there were used as the source images for the Urban Places symmetrical photographs published in this project.
When I initiated this blog in 2010, my immediate intension was to create an online archive of all my important photography projects. The archive would start with the projects I exhibited for my MFA thesis exhibition and then all those that followed. But I kept putting off creating the blog versions of the New Mexico and Emergence projects in favor of the explosion of new projects that began to appear after I created the blog.
I accepted the invitation to return to Milwaukee in October to receive the honorary teaching award, it then it occurred to me that I must --at last-- get those two early projects into my blog's archive. Immediately after I returned home in Canandaigua, NY in June I started listening to Mompou's music, reading Vladimir Jankelevitch's book Music and the Ineffable, scanning my New Mexico and Emergence photographs. Then, soon after publishing those two projects constructing the blog projects. The images in the New Mexico and Emergence projects I started constructing the symmetrical images for what would become this homage to Federico Mompou project.
The constellation of meaningful events which began to fall together in June of 2019, and which helped initiate the creation of this project has the essential characteristics of the phenomenon I have already defined earlier above as synchronicity.
*
The sacred nature of Mompou's Musica Callada has supported the unfolding of this project. The music's "secret" "internal" "voice of the soul" has taken on an extended life of its own within this project's symmetrical photographs. The writings of Vladimir Jankelevitch have supported this project; and Tyler Friedman's invocation of Mompou's and Jankelevitch's names has supported this project. And there is so much more that lies within the "silent center" of the Heart of the entire crystallization of synchronistic events which has given form to this project, a project that is, after all, the play of the creative Shakti, the play of the divine consciousness, which I refer to often as "my" Creative Process. My role in this particular play has been largely trying to stay out of the way and serve the process as best as I could.
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Just as Silence is at the very heart of Musica Callada, Silence is also at the heart of my meditation practice, my Creative Process and the at the center-point of the symmetrical photographs in this project. It is because of the Silence pervading Mompou's great work that I have especially been enjoying--throughout the last few months--listening to Musica Callada late at night, with headphones, as I lay in bed preparing for sleep.
The music's contemplative sounds and spaces induce within me a heightened state of awareness even as I progressively approach the point of falling into a deep sleep state. I have often witnessed myself dissolving into the spaces between the 28 compositions -- those wonderful spaces which in Henck's recording become an integral part of a continuum of the complete and radiant sound world of Mompou's Musica Callada.
In the very last of the 28 miniature compositions, as the music is slowing, and fading, and nearly arriving at the point of silence which will give the whole experience of Musica Callada its sense of closure--but also its sense of an unending continuum--I sometimes experience myself in a state of suspension . . . in a vast, timeless luminous space . . . a space alive and full with sacred presence . . . Then sounds softly emerge from the center of my Being . . . music from another world . . .
This project was announced on my blog's
Welcome Page on September 26, 2019.
Welcome Page on September 26, 2019.
Related Projects:
Visit the Welcome Page to my Departing Landscape photography blog which includes the complete listing of my online photography projects dating back to the 1960's, my resume, contact information, and much much more.