The forms of sound

José Jiménez

What is the root, the starting point, for creating visual art works...? It is the process of configuring forms. Either statically or dynamically, and taking into account that the possibilities of dynamism have been intensely accentuated through new, electronic and later digital, means of representation.

But there is a dynamism that springs from the dialogue with the forms of sound, of music, which has been around since the time of the cultural invention of art, in Classical Greece, in a period that can be dated between the 8th and 5th century BC. And it is also in this context where the relationship between musical sounds and the movements of the stars is first perceived, with what Pythagoras called “harmony of the cosmos” or “music of the spheres”.

The music of the spheres brings us to the music of this world: from up above to down below, and from down below to up above. And this is something that is felt intensely in Cuba. Seeing and hearing the works of Glenda León always leads me to the literary work of Alejo Carpentier, who said about himself: “The music I have within me.” His musical training led him to write numerous texts on music, and it is important to note that, unlike European music, he characterised Latin American music by its intense fusion.

Music also flows directly in his novels, in his narrative texts. It is something that we can especially appreciate in his short novel Concert Baroque, written between Havana and Paris in 1974. It is a musical journey set in 1733, travelling from Coyoacán (Mexico) to Cuba, Spain, Venice (during Carnival) and Paris. The narration includes the meeting, in Venice, between Vivaldi, Scarlatti and Handel, where a long-lost Vivaldi opera is performed, and also describes how, in contrast to European Baroque music, the music of a black slave (Filomeno) emerges, taking us to Louis Armstrong’s trumpet. The text flows, at all times, with the movements of the words as if they were sounds, and with movement in time, through the journey.

These are central issues that help us place the career and artistic work of Glenda León, who studied classical ballet, philology and art history in Havana, and began to exhibit in 1999. This is what she herself pointed out in 2013, in an interview: “Music has been a source of inspiration for me since I was a child. That is why I wanted to be a choreographer for many years. Then I realised that the main component of the choreographic ideas of that era was the visual”.

That is the core: the synthesis between sounds and the visual. And, from this, both the visual and sonorous correspondence between the stars and the Earth where we humans live: a call to attention to the importance of nature, which is increasingly threatened. These themes are articulated in this exhibition of works by Glenda León: Música de las formas (Music of forms), organised into three sections: I. Tierra y cielos (Earth and heavens), II. La espiral del tiempo (The spiral of time), and III. Ver la música (Seeing music).

A contemporary creator, Glenda León is fully a multimedia artist. She uses the most diverse media and expression techniques: objects, sculptures, installations, drawings, photographs, artist books and videos.

Now, in this wide array of expressive modalities there is a common thread that unifies her proposals: the articulation of her pieces flows through the musical registers with which the works are structured. In these works we can observe melodic imprints, or contrasts and variations, with which the visual forms acquire an inner sound, rhythm and projection.

What is a “form”...? If we go back to the origins of our cultural tradition we have to refer to Plato, who elaborated the philosophical concept of form [εἶδος, eídos], going from what would be the aspect of something that we see to the substantive nucleus that gives unity to multiple dimensions.

In the specific field of music theory, Leonard B. Meyer (1956, 74) points out: “forms are essential aspects of style, alternative probability groups, each of which displays its own special probability relations within the overall stylistic context. And like the perception of the more generally constant aspects of style and the response to them, the understanding of form is learned, not innate.” He concludes: “The concept of form implies abstraction and generalisation”.

And on “the nature of the form” he indicates: “The understanding of a series of physically differentiated stimuli that make up a model or a form is the result of the human mind’s ability to relate, in an intelligible and meaningful way, the constituent parts of the stimulus or the series of stimuli to each other. For the impression of form to emerge, an order must be perceived in which individual stimuli are transformed into parts of a larger structure and perform distinguishable functions within that structure.” (Meyer, 1956, 169).

What Glenda León gives us in her works is a set of open forms that play with the correspondence between different ways of feeling and knowing: words, sounds, scores with drawings and visual registers, correspondence between heaven and earth, the passage of time... It is we, who are looking, who have to display a capacity for internalisation, to bring the plurality of formal registers to a specific area of significance. You have to go from simply looking to seeing, to perceiving the unity of form. Thus, the senses lead us to knowledge.

In Glenda León’s plastic forms, always in dialogue with sounds and texts, the features of another great Cuban writer also shine: José Lezama Lima (1980, 59), positioned as the nucleus of poetic knowledge: “Poetic knowledge is separated from dialectical knowledge, which only seeks to mirror its identity.” To know poetically is to see the reverse, the reverse of things. For Lezama (1981, 129), poetry is a transcendent dimension: “The essences expressed by the imaginary ages”, an articulation of “the impossible” over “the possible image”. But its itinerary is not simple, but rather labyrinthine. Its beginning is in the dissolution of the body itself to convert it into form: “Dissolve our body so that it becomes form.” (Lezama Lima, 1980, 68).

Eye and body venture like this in the image: “The eye creates the figure; the night expresses itself, falls on us by image. The eye feels a passive pride when it extends into the figure. Our body feels possessive pride when it penetrates the image of the night.” (Lezama Lima, 1980, 57). And poetic knowledge does not come freely, it is a difficult act of conquest. The poem is “a resistant space between the progression of the metaphor and the curfew of the image.” (Lezama Lima, 1981, 129).

The imaginary ages, the image as a secret channel of historical time, are only interviews in that double sphere of resistance in which bodies have to bear the nothingness that surrounds them and the products of culture: forms or figures, the retractable flow of images: “Just as the body supports the surrounding nothingness, the figures are forced to counteract the flow of images.” (Lezama Lima, 1980, 53).

Latin America, including Cuba, gives us the vision of difference, a result of the intense fusion that characterizes the best of human life. And in that context, Glenda León’s sound forms visually lead us to the deepest point of poetic knowledge: sky, flower, time, mirror, stars, clouds, political world, passing and forms of time, tears of transit, moments, power chair, music of the revolution, metamorphosis, consciousness and music of the spheres. The universe, here and in the heavens, as the music of forms.

Bibliographic references

Alejo CARPENTIER (1974): Concierto barroco; Siglo XXI, México. 8th edition: Siglo XXI, Madrid, 1979.
José LEZAMA LIMA (1980): La dignidad de la poesía; Versal, Barcelona.
José LEZAMA LIMA (1981): Imagen y posibilidad; Editorial Letras Cubanas, Havana.
Leonard B. MEYER (1956): Emotion and Meaning in Music; University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Trans. Es. and foreword by José Luis Turina: Emoción y significado en la música; Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 2001.