Order, design, tension, balance, and harmony

In “Sunday in the Park with George,” the 1984 broadway musical, Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics) and James Lapine (book) explore the meaning and process of art. They really produced two different plays about art, each exploring different aspects of the creation of art, but with the theme running through both of the problem artists face of connecting to people through their art.

If an artist is focused on making an artistic connection, does it prevent him from making connections on a personal level? Sondheim seems to be saying that is often the case, as both his main characters have been unsuccessful romantically, while making artistic breakthroughs.

Sondheim’s fictional version of Georges Seurat, the impressionist painter of the late 19th century, strives for order, design, tension, balance, and harmony in his work. The real Seurat developed a new technique that became known as “pointillism,” based on the scientific notion that the human eye blends separate pixels of different color into one overall color. For example, many pixels of red and blue next to each other look purple to the eye, as if the colors were directly mixed themselves. (This principle is what allows us to perceive so many different shades of color on televisions and computer monitors, which display all their information in pixels.) The fictional Seurat has broken through to something new in art, but generally his art is not successful; it is perceived as bizarre. Without support from other people, Seurat is left with only his own belief that he is doing something significant. But his obsession with his work sucks him into it, making him oblivious to the few people who care about him.

The artist of the second act is Seurat’s fictional great-grandson, George, who is struggling to do something new with his art. While the Seurat of the first act abandoned human relationships for the sake of his innovative art, George’s world a hundred years later is one in which he must develop those relationships to allow him to produce his own visions, which require substantial funding. More fundamentally though, he is suffering from artists’ block, unable to see his way to produce something new. To simply a rehash previous ideas would not be a way to make true art.

The themes in the show do not apply only to artists. Any of us might understand the importance of order, design, tension, balance, and harmony in our lives:

• Order: We all arrange the pieces of our lives into a narrative, “putting it together.”
• Design: Without design, what coherent accomplishments are possible? An aimless life could be considered a wasted life.
• Tension: We all have tasks we need to accomplish, improvements to make, ways in which we want to improve ourselves and our lives. This is was drives us to accomplish more.
• Balance: How do we reconcile our internal, personal needs and those of others with whom we have relationships? Our internal world, which can never be completely known by another, must balance in someway with our life in the external world in which we interact with others.
• Harmony: It is possible for all of us to be at peace with how these elements function in our lives. This is the willingness to be happy with how it has all meshed.

In his brilliant music for “Sunday in the Park with George,” Sondheim illustrates these concepts. In one example, there is a recurring musical theme that is a succinct representation of both pointillism and the artist’s struggle with the components of his art, particularly expressing tension that needs to be resolved into harmony. Listen to this short theme below:

The last note of the theme is the leading tone (major seventh note of the scale), which uniquely holds tension. This note, more than any other in the scale, aches to resolve to the tonic (first note of the scale). But it does not do so, leaving the tension hanging, the sequence unfinished. This represents the tension for Seurat in always working intently on something that has yet to be finished, that cuts him off from engaging successfully with people apart from through his art. The idea is eloquently expressed in his song “Finishing the Hat.”

There were shades of Sondheim’s Seurat character reflected in Calvin Tomkins’ profile of the artist Bruce Nauman in a recent New Yorker. Like the fictional modern artist George, Nauman says:

…he hoped he’d figure out how to make art without such a struggle, but it never happened. “My dad once said, ‘You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day,’ but I think you do…Maybe not every day, but pretty often.”

And, like Sondheim’s Seurat, Nauman’s relationships suffered because of his art. His first wife could not “…accept the emotional distance that her husband seemed to require. ‘My feelings are in my work,’ he told her…Bruce was a supportive husband and attentive father, she said, but ‘he was an artist first.’”

Sondheim’s Seurat died a lonely man. Nauman, by contrast, seems to have found someone who can balance with the demands of his art: another artist, Susan Rothenberg. Perhaps because she has similar passions she has empathy for his artistic needs, and so they have found harmony:

I’ve finally realized I don’t need to know the stuff Bruce is unable to tell me. I think we love each other very much…I’m very satisfied with hm, and very happy living about ninety-two percent of my life by myself. I don’t think I’ll ever know Bruce, but he is mine…

Tags: music

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 4:44 pm and is filed under art, music, sociality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.