Ikigai DailyExhibition 01 / Art, sound and making
The practice of attention
Look behind Hokusai's prints, listen to the sounds around a piece of music, and explore Bach's craft.
About this exhibition
01 / 03How was it made? What can you hear? These cards invite a closer look at familiar art and music.
- Cards
- 6
- Chapters
- 3
- Languages
- EN · TR
Look again
Start with Hokusai's Great Wave, then read what he hoped to learn in a lifetime of drawing.
01.1The Great Wave off Kanagawa by the Japanese artist Hokusai is not a single painting but a woodblock print, published around 1831. Carved blocks were inked and pressed onto paper by hand, and an estimated 8,000 copies were made; just over a hundred early ones survive in museums around the world.
Hokusai was about 71 when he made it as the first print of his series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji; the snow-capped mountain sits small behind the wave and three fishing boats. Japanese prints of this kind, called ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”), were a team effort: the artist drew the design, a carver cut a separate woodblock for each colour, a printer inked the blocks and pressed the paper onto them, and a publisher, here Nishimuraya Yohachi, sold them. The deep blue is Prussian blue, a synthetic pigment newly imported from Europe that fades less than traditional indigo. About 1,000 copies were printed at first; as the blocks wore, later impressions lost detail. When Japan opened to the West in the later 19th century, such prints poured into Europe, and in 1905 Claude Debussy asked for the wave on the cover of his orchestral work La Mer.
Read the full card01.2Katsushika Hokusai, the Japanese artist behind the famous print The Great Wave, wrote at about 75 that nothing he had made before the age of seventy was worth counting. By 110, he hoped, every dot and every line he drew would be alive.
The lines come from the afterword to his picture book One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, published in 1834, when he was 75 by the traditional Japanese count. He writes that he had loved drawing the shapes of things since the age of six, and that only at seventy-three had he begun to grasp the structure of animals, birds, insects and fish and how plants grow. He hoped to go further in his eighties and nineties and to reach something divine at a hundred. He signed it Gakyō Rōjin Manji, 'the old man mad about drawing'. The Great Wave, from around 1831, was already behind him. He kept working until his death in 1849, at 88.
Read the full cardListen closely
Explore the sounds around John Cage's 4′33″ and the studio craft behind sounds in films.
02.1John Cage's 4′33″ (1952) is a piece of music in which the performers play nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds, so the audience hears the sounds of the room instead.
Pianist David Tudor gave the premiere on 29 August 1952 at the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock, New York. He sat at the piano and closed the lid to begin each of the three movements, opening it to end them. Cage recalled that wind stirred the trees outside during the first movement, rain pattered on the roof in the second, and in the third the audience muttered and some walked out. Two things led him to the piece: Robert Rauschenberg's all-white paintings, and a 1951 visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard, a room built to absorb almost all sound. There he still heard two sounds, which he was told were his nervous system and his blood. He concluded that true silence does not exist.
Read the full card02.2Many of the footsteps, rustling clothes and small everyday sounds in a film are recreated after shooting by Foley artists, who perform them in a studio while watching the picture.
The craft is named after Jack Foley, who worked at Universal Pictures. When sound arrived in cinema, Universal's Show Boat (1929), begun as a silent film, needed sound added after filming, and Foley and his team performed effects live in time with the projected picture. He went on doing this work for about 30 years. Today Foley artists walk on trays of gravel, wood or concrete in different shoes, rub fabric close to the microphone and use props: cornstarch squeezed in a leather pouch, for example, sounds like footsteps in snow. The microphone on set mostly records dialogue, so these sounds are added separately, and a separate effects track is also needed when a film is dubbed into another language.
Read the full cardWork within a form
Read about Bach's use of musical rules and the demands of his working life.
03.1Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was a master of counterpoint: writing several independent melodies that sound at the same time and fit together. In a fugue, one short theme enters again and again in different voices, following strict rules. That precision is why his music can sound mathematical, while it still moves listeners.
Bach's rules could be very strict. In his Goldberg Variations, published in 1741, an opening aria is followed by 30 variations, and every third one is a canon, in which a second voice repeats the first a little later. The gap in pitch between the two voices grows by one step each time, from the same note in variation 3 to nine notes apart in variation 27. In The Art of Fugue, left unfinished at his death, the last fugue brings in a theme that spells his own name in German note letters: B flat, A, C and B natural, written B, A, C, H. After he died his style was thought old-fashioned, yet composers kept studying it; Mozart and Beethoven both learned from his Well-Tempered Clavier. In 1829 the young Felix Mendelssohn conducted the St Matthew Passion in Berlin, starting a wider Bach revival.
Read the full card03.2In 1723 Bach became director of music for the main churches of Leipzig. The job meant a cantata, a piece for choir, soloists and orchestra, for nearly 60 Sundays and feast days a year. In his first year he composed most of them new, week after week, alongside some reworked earlier pieces.
Bach's official title was Thomaskantor, music master of St Thomas School, and he held the post from 1723 until his death in 1750. Each cantata had to suit that Sunday's Bible readings and was performed during the service at St Thomas or St Nicholas church. His first annual cycle began on 30 May 1723; alongside the new works he restaged and adapted some cantatas from his earlier post in Weimar. Music paused for most of Advent and Lent, the quiet seasons before Christmas and Easter. Senior pupils of the school sang in the choir and helped rehearse and copy out the parts by hand. His obituary, written by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel and a former pupil, speaks of five complete annual cycles. More than 200 of his cantatas survive; many others are lost.
Read the full cardLook closely. Listen carefully. Notice how the work was made.Next exhibitionWhat the eye cannot see