Mussorgsky inspires a string of art showcase
by Mandi Rice
After the last notes of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” faded, the audience stood up and cheered. They stayed standing for several minutes as each section of Earlham’s orchestra took a bow, the first standing ovation that seniors could remember. Then they gathered in the lobby, tossing around words like “magnificent” and “transcendent.”
The performance ended with “The great gate of Kiev,” a vibrant and booming movement that is among Mussorgsky’s best known.
“We gave it our all, but especially in the last movement,” said violist David Goldenberg, freshman. “The adrenaline was pumping and it felt so good.”
“I felt like I was passing through the gates of Kiev with every hit from the orchestra,” said senior Janel Torkington, who attended the performance. “It was absolutely incredible. It just wouldn’t stop.”
But the audience’s dramatic response may have had as much to do with the way the show began as with its ending. The evening featured two elements atypical of orchestral performances: a 25-minute lecture about “Pictures at an Exhibition” and a gallery showing of art inspired by the piece.
Forrest Tobey, who directs the orchestra, said he wanted the audience to feel as intimate with the music as the performers onstage. He informed the audience about the work and about Mussorgsky himself, whom he described as “one of the first great film composers … about 60 years before the invention of films.”
“Pictures at an Exhibition” tells the story of a trip to an art gallery and the experience with the works there. Mussorgsky composed the piece after the death of his close friend Viktor Hartmann, creating each movement based on a work of Hartmann’s.
Tobey helped the audience identify Mussorgsky’s presence in the promenade, the part that shows Mussorgsky entering the gallery and marks his path between the different works of art. The promenade doesn’t demonstrate just anyone’s walk, Tobey said, but the stumbling steps of the Russian composer.
To get beyond the harmonic conventions of the day, Mussorgsky used stories and images as inspiration.
“He was a rebel,” Tobey said. “I think most of us here can relate to rebels, which is why we like Mussorgsky.”
Tobey described the sounds of arguing, chattering and bargaining that Mussorgsky worked into “The Marketplace at Limoges.”
“We know for a fact that Mussorgsky wrote into his score an entire little dialogue — character’s names, things that they were arguing about,” he said.
Just as Mussorgsky was inspired by images, “Pictures at an Exhibition” also inspired Earlham artists. After Tobey proposed the idea to the art department, two dozen students in photography, painting and metals created visualizations of the Mussorgsky piece.
Mark Van Buskirk, associate professor of art, required his introductory painting students to create something inspired by the Mussorgsky piece or by Hartmann’s works.
“The trick for a lot of people was how to work from the music back to something visual,” he said. “The struggle was, ‘How do you visualize those things?’ ”
Senior Wesley Nutter based his interpretation on the movement “The Hut on Hen’s Legs (Baba Yaga).” For his independent study in metals, he assembled a functioning, chicken-shaped, rotating weathervane out of salvaged steel.
“I was worried that it wasn’t going to express what the piece expressed, this ominous, mystical feeling,” he said. But he was satisfied with the finished product, which he said expressed those emotions as well as something extra — “the awkwardness of chicken anatomy.”
While Nutter acknowledged the challenge of creating a visual interpretation, he stressed the relatively greater difficulties of composing.
“I feel like this project was probably much easier than what Mussorgsky did originally, taking a tangible thing and making it into an audible thing,” he said.
>> Listen to Forrest Tobey’s lecture
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