Abstraction is a mystery—a question mark, an opening to the unknown. Butoh, a contemporary avant-garde theatre-dance originated in Japan, is danced from a question mark, from the unexpected. Abstraction seems to me to be something similar when the mind alone is involved. Let’s take music. Music, like painting, can be both abstract and figurative; and it is very gratifying to distinguish the two. Listen, for example, to these two interpretations of the Corrente of Bach‘s Solo for Flute BWV 1013:
by Pierre Hantaï
by Bruno Cavallo
Hantaï’s is abstract: it takes one into indescribable regions of one’s soul. Conversely, apart from being plane (tasteless, graceless, and effortful!), Cavallo’s is illustrative—it is easy to picture a storyline in its case. Figurative music always incites us to imagine a picture. Instead, abstract music is pure music, that is, it does not provoke in us any representation. Some other examples: most of Wagner’s music provokes in us representation, Messiaen’s does not. After Mozart, many musicians tended to compose in narrative form: Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, etc. Of course, one can try to dissociate a narrative piece from any representation and to invent a storyline for an abstract piece. However, it seems to me that some pieces tend to be more narrative and others more abstract on this strange scale. Furthermore, from the aforementioned examples one can deduce that one piece can become abstract or figurative depending on how it is performed.
Enjoy the mystery!