'Soundscapes' at the National Gallery: meet the artists

The Turner Prize-winning artist has chosen ‘The Ambassadors’ (1533) by Hans Holbein the Younger.

‘Yes, I knew straight away that I wanted to work with “The Ambassadors”. In Holbein’s painting there are a number of objects arranged between the subjects. The most affecting of these for me is the lute with a broken string. In art, a musical instrument with a missing or broken string is a commonly accepted symbol of discord and that is something that I found fascinating.’

‘I have removed one string from a violin and made a three-channel sound installation called “Air on a Broken String”. I asked a violinist to record herself dragging the bow across each of the remaining strings. Slow string tones emerge from three speakers installed in the room. The sounds merge and come apart again as shifting tones encircle the viewer. The sound creates a subtle tension in the room that is palpable but undefined.’

‘I think Holbein was trying to talk about the tension that existed between the church and state at that time. There is a reference to division and to Rome as well as allusions to mortality. At the time of the painting, the ambassadors are waiting and the sound also appears to be hovering in the space. There is a sense of foreboding, as if we are waiting for something to happen.’

'Yes, when I starting making the work I was focused on the instruments and the sheet music on the lower shelf. But when I heard the work in the space for the first time my attention began to drift to the upper shelf where there are many astronomical instruments and I began to think about the deeper sense of space that those astronomical instruments represent. Another more popular feature of the painting is the anthropomorphic skull, which can only be apprehended from a specific angle. Moving around the painting to see the skull, I was aware of how the sound is also shifting around the space and how they are both stretched and distorted in similar ways.’

‘I hope that my work creates a sense of uneasiness in the space; that there is a tension that is suspended. I hope that the viewer feels that tension and becomes more aware of their own body in the space. I also hope they can relate that tension to the painting and begin to look at it in a different way.’

The classical music composer has chosen ‘The Wilton Diptych’ (1395-99)

‘It is one of my favourite things in the National Gallery, as well as in the world.  I have spent, over the years, many hours in front of it in quiet thought and then in slightly more hysterical tones showing it to friends. When the National Gallery presented the idea of this project to me, I knew instantly that it had to be ‘The Wilton Diptych’ — what else could it be?  I was drawn to this panel painting because of the contrasting energies it presents: the calm white hart just around the corner from the wild whoosh of angels’ wings and the flapping pennant.’

‘My piece is a surround-sound series of long, long drones — infinite in length and iteration. The drones are generated by my friend Liam Byrne, a London-based viola da gamba player.  On top of that, a series of small melodic cells unfold, and other instruments join: a drum, a tuned metal disc, a shimmer of something electronic.  The groups of material then rotate around the diptych very slowly, implying a ritualistic use for the object, which, itself, would have been used for a sort of private devotion.  The music is intimate but loud, which, I hope, reflects the nature of the diptych: personal, political, mythological, and ecstatic all at once.’

‘In every way but also in no way.  It’s not my usual practice to convince people to move fourteenth-century panels into sonically isolated rooms and surround them with violas da gamba, however appealing such a life might sound. However, the ritualistic nature of the piece is something that pops up in my “normal” work, as well as, of course, the pleasure of working with my friend Liam, as well as the symbolic register operating from top-to-bottom: all of these are constant musical concerns of mine.’

‘Talking about it is actually the biggest challenge, because it’s difficult to talk about visual art, it’s difficult to talk about music, and it’s difficult to explain how, in this case, the two are working in tandem – or perhaps in counterpoint to one another. It’s difficult to explain the difference between the decorative and the functional (how true this is in all aspects of one’s life), and it’s particularly tricky to articulate how one thing is “about” another without simply saying: haul yourself to the National Gallery and take a second to see and hear it.’

‘My hope is that people will come away with a sense that the music has highlighted not just the beauty of “The Wilton Diptych” but of the potential to let such long music shine light on the details often overlooked by the quickness of the museum-goer’s passing glance.’

The Oscar-winning film composer has chosen ‘Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses)’ (c1894-1905) by Paul Cézanne.

‘Yes, I have known and admired “The Bathers” paintings for a very long time, so I had a strong desire to write a musical response.’

‘I love the composition of the painting. I like the apparent stillness, but with the movement hidden behind it. I like the shapes of the women’s faces, which have no personality and are anonymous. I love the blue and purple colours and chromaticism in the painting, just like you would find in music. All this made the painting speak to me immediately and musically.’

‘I have written this piece for piano, soprano solo, clarinet and cello. My musical response to this painting combines this apparent stillness with movement. It is light and melodic, and very feminine, but also with a hint of strangeness to it, reflecting the blurred faces and subtle abstract ideas and shapes within the painting. I hope it also gives an element of nostalgia for the listener, taking them back to around the time of Cézanne.’

Usually, I start composing for film by reading scripts, talking with a director or going to the shoot, and this is similar to a still image that has not yet been brought to life. Creating a musical response is not different, but it allows me to be inspired in a different way by the still image, rather than having to relate my music directly to the film to come.’

‘I feel that a painting already has its own musicality, in the same way a piece of music has its own colours and painting inside. This painting is already a complete piece of work, therefore I’m not hoping my music will “add” to it. I think the real excitement will be for the visitor to experience a single composer’s point of view on a painting. Of course, we already have this in many composers’ works: Debussy wrote a lot of music inspired by paintings, and more recently Henri Dutilleux has based two of his major works on Vincent Van Gogh. There is no doubt that music and painting are intrinsically linked.’ 

The sound recordist has chosen ‘Lake Keitele’ (1905) by Akseli Gallen-Kallela.

‘Totally. It’s one of my favourites. I love it. I live in Newcastle, but I usually come and see it when I can.’

‘There’s just something about it. I’m a great fan of everything Nordic and Scandinavian, from television dramas to the wildlife and the landscape, so I feel a real affinity for those landscapes. Where I live in Northumberland is near Kielder Forest and Kielder Water, which is not dissimilar and almost on the same latitude as Lake Keitela, so it has very much the same wildlife that would have been around when the painting was made. I’ve tried to mirror that a lot while I was putting the piece together.’

‘No, if you look at it now it’s a real holiday destination – there’s speedboats, water skiing, handgliding. I bet it would be very disappointing. This is very much what I imagine you would have heard standing at the lakeside, because Gallen-Kallela visited the lake many times.’

‘It’s not really a song. I’ve been recording a lot in Arctic Norway, particularly the Sami. Their ‘Yoiks’ are an attempt to communicate with one’s ancestors who the Sami believe live under the landscape, in the ground. They believe the echo that comes back off the mountainside isn’t an echo as we understand it, it’s the voice of your spirits and ancestors responding. I got the commission from this guy, Ande Somby, who performed this ‘Yoik’ by a mountainside lake, so that’s why I though it appropriate to use it in this piece.’

‘It’s just the echoes that I’ve used in the piece, not his direct voice, so it’s the sound that comes from the mountainside and across the lake in a very similar way to if you look out across the painting. The idea is that it fills the space. But then, of course, you have to be careful to strike a balance where you can hear it but it doesn’t become overwhelming. I’d much rather it be too quiet than too loud. We’ve got such power in these systems to just blast people with sound and it just destroys the work, my work anyway. I’ve learned form experience that you need to experience the sounds exactly as you would hear them in the real world and then, miraculously, our ears and brain make the connection, and everything falls into place.’

‘Yes. That’s the reason I like doing installations so much above, because I can work with spatial sounds, surround sound, and for my work, with wildlife sounds, that’s the way we hear the world. It’s perfect, it transcends any broadcast medium in that sense. It works really well.’

Amazingly, there are around 3,000 paintings here and the average time somebody spends in front of any of them is four seconds. So, you’re looking for ways just to get people to hang around, to look at something for longer and engage with it in different ways.’